Spiritual Hiccups - Sounds of Silence

If you become very still and quiet, what happens?  If you try to stop thinking about anything and just become open to the silence, what do you hear?  Today's psalm opens with the line, "For God alone my soul waits in silence," a line repeated again in the middle of the psalm.  But if it requires waiting in silence to hear God, no wonder the divine voice can be a rarity for me.

Waiting in silence is probably the single spiritual discipline that I try hardest to cultivate.  I sometimes think that this is the area of my greatest spiritual growth in recent years, along with the surest sign of my spiritual immaturity.  I have gotten much better at silence and contemplative prayer, but silence and stillness remain difficult for me.

When I try to listen for God, the things I need to get done, my anxieties about this or that, and the problems that need solving, often continue to demand my attention.  Sometimes I seem to spend much of my prayer time shooing these voices away, telling them to be quiet so I can hear if God speaks.

Strange how the voice of these concerns can be so demanding and so easily distract me.  It's as though the problem with the church fire alarm is more important than what God would say.  I've always understood the saying, "The devil is in the details," to mean that it's details that often derail great projects.  And while that is indeed true, my prayer life reveals a different problem with details, an inability to let go of them, to take a sabbath from their demands.

Sabbath is pretty much dead in our culture.  There are signs that this is changing, but our culture doesn't like to stop and be still.  Even our vacations tend to be crammed with things to do.  I've told the story often about a pastor colleague who was at a clergy luncheon where the pastors at her table started discussing what day off each one took.  (Some pastors take Friday off and some Monday to compensate for working on Sunday.)  One pastor at her table insisted that he never took a day off.  "The devil never takes a day off," he said.  To which my friend replied, "But God does."

Think about that.  God, who has the entire universe to worry about, takes a sabbath.  It's right there in the first creation account in Genesis.  God apparently isn't worried that the whole enterprise could spin out of control during that sabbath.  And God later says that we need sabbath, and even farm animals get included in the command to rest.

"For God alone my soul waits in silence."  But there's a smoke detector that is malfunctioning.  "For God alone my soul waits in silence."

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