Silence

The realm of silence — do we know anything about it? In these days of push and rush and roar, is it possible to got any appreciation for the calm and unruffled and retired spaces of existence? When one begins to speak of stillness some are afraid. "Everything was so still, I was frightened," said a lady friend to me of her experience in a retired part of Wordsworth's Lake District. Be still — and know. There are some forms of knowledge which necessitate stillness. Self-knowledge, God-knowledge — these can never be had until we have learned to be still. "Stand still and see the salvation of God." "Their strength is to sit still." If God had not divided our life into days, and compelled us to sleep, we should run out our energy in a very few years of perpetual dissipation. In some countries it would not be necessary to insist, on stillness as a condition of knowledge. Where people are temperamentally cairn and reflective we might leave the parts of the Bible which insist on a wise passiveness in life. There is a difference — an immense difference — between the spirit of the old Bible times as represented in the Psalms and our own as represented in the newspapers. "The times explain everything:" fuss, and excursion, and noise, and rattle, and panic, and dissolution, and bank-failure, and bankruptcy, and political crises. It is very significant how all the greatly inspired men were trained in the school of silence. Moses, hidden away forty years in the loneliness of sheep pastures, and again forty days in the depths of Sinai, and when he came down his face shone. That told the story. Ezekiel, sauntering by the way of the river alone. Isaiah saw the King in His beauty when no one was with him. Daniel was accustomed (it was an old habit of his) to go into the quiet of his chamber three times a day. Paul must spend three lonely years in Arabia. John must go to Patmos before he could write the Book of the Revelation and see earth and its history from the height of heaven. Without large spaces of stillness there can be no deep thoughtfulness — Sabbath. And an age which is all rattle, and roar and noise, and self-advertisement, and theatricality needs, if any age ever needed it, to be called back to the fact that there is a kind of knowledge which can never be had except in stillness. But to-day there is no silence, no privacy, and men seldom hear the voice of God speaking in the depths of their own spirit, as did Elijah in his cave. We are full of opinions. They have floated our way and got lodgment, like thistledown in the hair, but they are not ours. They belong to the general community. Nothing is really ours which is not a conviction, something in which we are rooted and grounded. The point I want to make emphatic is this: that every man has his own personal relation to God, positive or negative, as every flower has its own personal relation to the sun; that there are forms of knowledge which are external and common — like bought furniture in a house, these belong to us in communities — but there is a knowledge which is to be had only in the stillness of devout meditation — the soul's personal knowledge of God. "Be still, and know that I am — that I am God." It does not come from effort. It comes from reposefulness. Often it is true of men, "Their strength is to sit still"; to sit still as the painter before a great master, simply receiving, as a child reposing in its mother's arms. The more active, busy and forceful our external life is, the greater the necessity for Sabbath spaces of stillness in the unrevealed centres of our human life. The storm-swept lake reflects no stars, and the perpetually busy, energetic and unquiet life, like "the troubled sea which cannot rest," makes no response to the overarching heavens, gemmed with those Divine promises of immortality which have purified and ennobled the souls of God's elect saints. Let us remember that all depths are silent, depths of space as well as depths of thought. The o'erbrooding heavens are silent, speechless to all but the most meditative souls. Extreme emotions of all kinds are silent.

(R. Thomas.)