“The world of [humanity] has forgotten the joys of silence.”
--Thomas Merton

“In the holy quiet of this hour,” begins a meditation by my colleague Richard Gilbert, minister of the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York:

This sacred time that cannot be taken from us--
These few minutes of calm in an often-hectic week,
This island of serenity in an ocean of events,
This peaceful interlude in the midst of a warring world.

Silence has a long history in the annals of the church. Jesus, whenever he faced a crisis, retired to some quiet spot to pray. Silence has played an especially prominent role within the monastic tradition, in what the 20th century monk and author Thomas Merton called “the silent life.” We all need some wordless silence in our lives. It is this impetus that drove Emerson to say, in one of my favorite lines, “I like the silent church before the service begins.”

Worship without at least some silence is unthinkable. I am possibly guilty, in my role as worship leader, of not creating enough space for silence in our worship. For Quakers, of course, silence is worship: words are secondary, and ideally spring from the spirit speaking out of the silence.

Protestantism, however, is above all else a religion of the word. Its primary impetus was the explication of God’s Word as found in the Holy Bible. And Unitarian Universalists are particularly guilty of a passion for words. But even within our own tradition, as Richard Gilbert’s meditation is proof, there is a deep concern for the necessity of silence. “Blessed are they who catch the meaning of life’s silences,” wrote Percy Hayward,

The silence that follows words, when meanings linger

to haunt the mind,

The stillness of the night that seals and sanctifies the day,

The silence that follows farewells, when the memory of loved

ones calms the troubled heart,

The silence before courageous action, a stillness that is

ennobled by what the will is about to do,

Silence as the final answer to controversy and slander,

stillness in the face of pain,

quietness that is the fitting tribute to joy.

As Thomas Merton pointed out in the morning’s reading [from The Silent Life], silence is necessary “to enable the deep inner voice of [our] own true sel[ves] to be heard at least occasionally.” Those true selves, Merton says, are who we are really meant to be. Silence is also a necessity because, in our time, the world has become such a noisy place. We seek almost in vain to find a place not marred by the distant sound of tires on pavement and of motors running.

We all desperately need periods of silence in our lives. All the more reason why we must learn to be quiet together. In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, author Kathleen Norris writes that “To live communally in silence is to admit a new power into your life. In a sense, you are merely giving silence its due. But this silence is not passive, and soon you realize that it has the power to change you.”

Jacob Trapp, a great liturgist if Unitarian Universalists can be said to be liturgical, wrote of this power in a beautiful meditation titled “In Stillness Renewed”:

Let this house be quiet.
Let our minds be quiet.
Let the quietness of the hills, the quietness of deep waters, be also in us:
So quiet that the noise of passing events and present anxieties, of random recollections and wandering thoughts, is stilled;
So quiet that the marvelous stillness is like music;
So quiet that we feel the very being which is the life of us all;
So quiet that we are renewed, we feel at one with all others, at home in a tabernacle of stillness;
So quiet that we sense the ripples of this pool of quietness and healing pass through us and out to the furthest star.

Without silence, there could be no language and no music. In a way, it is a sacrilege to speak of silence at all! That is probably why, after a period of quiet, we say that we are “breaking” silence. In a telling passage from the Old Testament book of first Kings, we learn that God speaks, if God speaks at all, in the “sheer silence.” This passage had previously been translated in the King James Version of the Bible as a “still small voice.” Both translations are provocative in their way, but it is intriguing to think that God’s voice may in fact be the voice of silence.

This holy silence is not meant to be easy or comfortable, for as Thomas Merton writes in another place [Thoughts in Solitude], “. . .inner silence depends on a continual seeking, a continual crying in the night, a repeated bending over the abyss.” Silence must be attained, if it is to be attained at all, by practice and by struggle.

We must build periods of silence into our lives if we are to become spiritually healthy persons. A walk in nature, a few moments spent in a quiet sanctuary, a time of worship, can help to bring silence into our lives as a positive and life renewing force. It could be a matter of life and death.

For me, the approaching holidays are an ideal time for spiritual deepening and for creating opportunities for silence. There is something about the shortening of the days that leads me to turn inward and to seek the silent center of things. The themes of the season, such as peace and generosity, and the familiar old stories, also offer themselves to our quiet meditation. It is important during these hectic days that we take the time to enter the silence and to contemplate the mystery of all our days.

Now, this thinking about silence leads me to a concern that I have about our worship service. This concern has to do with the “problem” of applause in church. It seems that whenever we have music presented from the front of the church, as in last week’s wonderful offering, or when our fabulous children’s choirs sing, some of us feel compelled to applaud their efforts.

Believe me, I love accolades as much as anyone. And from the bottom of my heart I appreciate your kind comments to me as you leave the church on Sunday mornings. But I try to remember that, ultimately, it is not about me. I am merely a representative for something far larger than I, and one of a long line of such representatives at that. On the few occasions in my ministry when someone has applauded something that I said in a sermon, I confess that I have felt profound embarrassment. At the risk of sounding overly grandiose, I like to think that my efforts, however humble, are made for what traditionalists call “the greater glory of God.” And so with the music in our worship service.

Let me make it clear that I am all for spontaneity, and that there are times when applause is spontaneous, and I think that there is room for that spontaneity, and, besides, there is nothing I or anyone else can do about that. But when it begins to feel like applauding is becoming an obligation, I flinch. I don’t think that I am alone in my feeling that it is, or can be, a distraction. It breaks the silence.

The question for all of us to ponder, I guess, is whether music in the context of worship is “performance” in the same way that a concert is. My own conviction is that it is not, any more than what I do is a performance,--at least I hope it is not. Music in worship glorifies not only God, but us and the whole creation. It represents the beauty that is in us, the wonderful potential that lies within all of humankind. It is an expression of the divine in each and every one of us, an auditory representation of what we like to call “the worth and dignity of every person.”

The most appropriate response to that profound gift, it seems to me, is silence. When there is applause I am unable to savor the moment, and it can feel like a violation. I want us to be able to look into the faces of our beautiful children and friends as they offer their gift of song, to see our divinity shining there, and to respond not with applause, but with holy silence. I happen to think that even our children can understand that, if we explain it to them. Personally, I would prefer not to have my tears of appreciation for their contribution to our worship and to life itself interrupted by the noise of applause.

Now, I have had my say. I suppose as “the preacher” that is my prerogative! Some of you will agree with me, and some of you won’t. Some of you would prefer less formality, some of you, no doubt, would prefer more. I’m not sure this is a question of formality or informality, though. I think it is a question of depth. But as I like to remind you on occasion, it’s your church. Ministers come and they go, but you must decide what you think is appropriate in our worship experience. I hope that you will give it some serious thought, and talk to each other about it.

The late Vincent Silliman, another great Unitarian Universalist liturgist, once wrote of the “Creative Silence”:

There is the quiet that is all emptiness; and there is the quiet

that is life.

There is quiet that is rich with appreciations, with gratitude and

with love.

There is quiet that is creative; there is quiet that full of generous

purpose and serene determination.

There is quiet that is the very atmosphere of onward things--of life

and growth that shall be in the days and years to come.

There is quiet within the mind, the heart, the spirit--when outside

there is no quiet at all.

There is quiet wherein there is order, when without there are

contention and disorder.

There is quiet that is wisdom, though the noises of

misunderstanding and dissention are loud.

Let us seek quiet, now and then--an inward quiet, the quiet that

renews and reinvigorates, glorious quiet, the quiet of

serenity, the quiet that confronts with confidence the clamors

of our fear:

Quiet whereto one may retire, not to evade responsibility or

whatever strife may be necessary--quiet that brings increase

of strength;

Not the quiet of inaction;

Not that the sounds and sights, the enthusiasms and the

disappointments of our days are unimportant;

A quiet aspect to living that is full and intense and real, to life

that requires and receives our best.

Let us seek quiet--blessed quiet that is life and that opens out to

more of life.

As always, it is a gift to be here and to spend this quiet time with you. In the busy days and weeks ahead, may you find the time for holy silence. May it allow you to hear your own true, inner voice speaking. And may you find the silence more and more entering into you, and becoming you, bringing you the peace and joy of this special season. God bless.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock