lessons learned - silence

The sweetest song is silence...
--- Heart

Be still and know that I am God
--- Psalm 46:10


Trauma has a way of silencing a lot of extraneous noise. But it also has a way of drowning out everything else with it's own harsh voice. In the midst of my treatment, I sat in silence, but at times the discomfort was deafening. Also, there were the times I sought noise to distract me from the discomfort of the immediate moment. During my daily radiation treatments at the hospital, there was an oldies station constantly playing in the background while I was strapped to the table and immobilized. I learned to judge how many minutes I had left by the number of songs I heard...each treatment was roughly four songs (with all the radio commercials in between) worth of time. And during chemotherapy, there was awful daytime TV playing in the room where I and dozens of others were sitting on recliners with IV's hooked up infusing our bodies with poison.

There is a kind of silence, though, that I have learned to appreciate. It is the silence and stillness that I think is implied in the verse from Psalm 46 above. (By also quoting from a Heart song, I do not mean to elevate those lyrics to the level of the Psalms, but rather, they seemed to fit right there; I just happened to hear the song "These Dreams" from which those lyrics were taken, about an hour ago in my car...that, along with Heart's "Dog and Butterfly" always caught my attention.)

The type of silence that I have sought is the silence that allows the awful and wonderful presence of God room to dwell. Awful in the sense of the humbling that I have experienced in silent moments like that, and wonderful in the sense of an appreciation of His majesty and awesome presence. It is a silence that allows me to still my anxieties and regain perspective. It is a silence that fills what has been drained away by the world, it's noise and its demands.

I have been on a few silent retreats at a nearby monastery, and I know that simply observing the absence of sound is not enough. There usually is all sorts of internal dialogue and noise accompanying the "quiet." However, I have found that sometime during the second day of a silent retreat my inner dialogue begins to quiet down along with the outer silence. Then, the "stillness" of Psalm 46 gets some traction...then...I start allowing some room for God. It's not that He wasn't present all along, it's that I was so distracted by the "noise" of my inner and outer world that I didn't notice Him...

So...this cancer expereience in some way has taught me to approach that silence more frequently and more hungrily. Ironically, I think the hit my energy level has taken in some ways has also made room for more stillness...I don't know...maybe I'm wrong about that.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about the verse "pray without ceasing." I do not know for certain what that means...but without regular times of stillness and silence...I know it's impossible.

Be still and know that I am God.

Could anything be more profound?