SILENCE IS GOLDEN, BUT NOT ALWAYS

When I was in seminary, we kept the Grand Silence every night from when the lights went out until after breakfast. I think it was more about discipline than anything else. After all, nothing much could take place after dark way back then holed up as we were almost in the middle of corn fields. And there were meals when we ate in silence. At no time did I ever think these periods of silence were in any way golden.

But over the years as I have grown older and wiser, I have come to value the importance of silence in my life, especially with all the noise that sometimes seems interminable. Silence allows you to pause and reflect about your life, something I think most of us do not do often enough. Why? Maybe we will have to face issues we would rather not deal with at the moment, an uncomfortableness about the way we are living. We can always find reasons to avoid taking time to reflect in silence, Grand or otherwise.

On the other hand, there are times when silence is not only not golden, it is also wrong. How often do we find ourselves in situations where our conscience and our faith, hopefully one and the same, demand that we speak up and yet we do not do so? Someone makes a bigoted remark about another person or persons and we remain silent. Our silence is a consent. To not disagree is to agree.

Keeping silent is keeping still and we keep still when what is going on around us demands that we act, that we do something; do what needs to be done or at least what we can do. It may not be much, but it is something and it is better than keeping still and consenting to what is going on, knowing that what is going on is not right. Not acting signals our consent.

And yet, there are times when we are not sure what to say or what to do. As Kenny Rogers sang and my wife always considered it advice as a manager, “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em; know when to walk away; know when to run”. Knowing what to say or do is not always easy no matter how certain we are that something needs to be said or done.

Sometimes our words or our actions will cause more harm than good and sometimes they will have no effect at all and sometimes silence is truly golden. Can we ever know for certain? Usually, not in the present moment but only after the fact. That is when we truly need a time of Grand Silence honestly asking ourselves if we said or did or not said or not did the right thing.

By then, of course, it’s water over the dam. What is important, I think, and what I have learned over the years, is that we all need times of silence, especially at the end of the day, to reflect upon those moments when we were called upon to speak or act, whether we did or did not do what our faith and our conscience called us to do.