Interlude: Vulnerability

There’s a kind of silent discomfort you may think I’ve forgotten. Most people feel vulnerable during silence. The seven-minute lull in a conversation, where there’s a blank moment and no one can think of anything to say. The awkward silence. Just feeling the desire to say something to put the silence out of our misery.

But vulnerability is not a misuse of silence. It’s just evidence that we aren’t ready to receive it or to cooperate with it. In that sense, using silence is like using a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to have its strength. Otherwise, it will fail us. Or, perhaps more appropriately, we will fail it.

I remember, 20 years ago, when a woman asked me as we were leaving the movie theater late at night, if I would walk her back to her car. She had just seen a scary movie, and even though she knew it was fiction, she didn’t feel safe in the silence.

There’s sometimes a moment like this for all of us, when the proverbial crickets stop and we get antsy. That can happen with any kind of silence, in any setting, by ourselves or with companions. It’s a sign that our muscle of using silence needs to be strengthened.

I think the vulnerability of silence is captured wonderfully in an experimental French New Wave film called Band of Outsiders. Most of the time, so-called “silence” in film is just the sound of no one talking. There’s still plenty of sound—background noise. But in this film, when three friends decide to stay silent for a minute to test their patience, it’s actual silence they experience, the complete lack of background noise (a spontaneous anechoic chamber) and they can’t make it through the whole minute.

Often, though, our feeling of vulnerability in silence is much more personal, and spiritual. Shusako Endo wrote a novel about this. It’s called Silence, and it’s recently been made into a film by Martin Scorcese. The narrative follows the Jesuit priests who first brought Christianity to a religiously hostile Japan. The silence of God is one of the most unnerving realities to the priests. The main character, Rodrigues, even calls out to God several times, “Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?”

It’s the same question people have asked for thousands of years. If there is a God, and if—as Francis Schaeffer has assured us—that he is not silent, then why does it feel so often that he is? When bad things happen to good people, why does God not say anything? Or do anything? Seemingly. The silence can be deafening.

And yet. Silence is a gift of God, just as sound is. We need to work out our muscle of using silence. Every one of us can get better at using silence, welcoming it when it arrives, collaborating with it so we can enjoy its benefits and what it has to share with us. 

If you think I’m being grandiose, stay tuned.