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Commentary
COMMENTARY: Lessons from forced silence Eric Van Meter, May 18, 2010
Eric Van Meter
By Eric Van Meter Special Contributor
Silence for an extrovert is like jogging for a swimmer: Just because you can see the value in it doesn’t mean it’s not unnaturally hard work.
When the spiritual director at the retreat I was attending suggested that we spend six hours incommunicado, I found my fins being stuffed into a pair of Nikes. My more introverted colleagues reveled in silent transcendence; I climbed the walls, counting the seconds until human interaction was once again allowed.
The silence was to end right after the evening meal, which meant all 60 of us had to share a common table without so much as a may-I-please-have-the-salt. I found a sparsely occupied table near a window and brooded over carrots that didn’t talk back.
To make matters worse, a group of young artists were sharing the retreat center with us. Six of them at a table conversed in pleasant, deferential tones that we would have normally drowned out.
I hated them. At least, I hated them for that moment. I was limited to clearing my throat or clinking my fork against the plate, while they were talking freely about the art scene, or news of friends in academia or this great new musician they heard.
I tried to console myself with the knowledge that I was engaged in a spiritual discipline. My silence—miserable though it was—somehow had a holy character to it.
But that was small consolation. My angst all boiled down to one simple truth: They had a voice; I did not.
I think—had we been allowed to talk one with another—some of my colleagues and I might have agreed that these artists were a disruption. We would have been able to determine appropriate Christlike action, such as leaving with a benevolent smile pasted on our faces.
But we couldn’t reinforce each other’s reactions toward this strange invading tribe. We were on our own. I had to process my feelings alone in a crowd.
As I sat there, waiting on the dessert tray to be removed, I tried to push back my irritation. After all, it was my own forced silence that bothered me, not the innocent artists. I talk for a living, and the absence of speech was most unsettling.
In truth, the artists themselves were quite engaging, not to mention entertaining. They had a keen (if at times painful) awareness of both the connectedness and the isolation of human experience.
The more I listened to them, the more I wanted them to talk. And the more they talked, the more I wanted to be one of them.
I am not an artist, at least not in the usual sense. I do not paint or compose music. I am not left-handed. I don’t even own a Mac.
Yet I live with a deep-seated feeling that there are parts of life I simply cannot understand through church council reports or newsletter articles or even sermons. There are dark rooms that contain wonderful secrets, but I can’t reach to pull the blinds with the pastoral tools normally at my disposal.
I need someone with an eye for what’s hidden to hand me a ladder.
The same is true for most Christian churches, I think. We as a group appreciate art with a purpose—well-crafted pipe organs, stained glass or even performance art like drama or handbells. These things are intended to awaken within us awareness of the Divine. For this, we call them sacred.
But if all life is indeed sacred—as most of us believe—then the line between secular and sacred art is not nearly so well-defined. Any honest, life-giving work may be just as God-inspired as Handel’s Messiah. “Secular” art may have a privileged place in opening up the world to Christians, since we have not yet co-opted it into a trendy, marketable, eight-week study that will change your life.
Just when I was ready to say I was truly inspired by the artists in the cafeteria, they stopped talking. I’m certain they had noticed their fellow diners before, but something made them decide to leave us to our wordless contemplation.
Perhaps they recognized some kindred spirits, who needed open interior spaces in order to orient themselves toward the world. Perhaps they were just being polite. Or perhaps we unwittingly made them self-conscious.
We church people have that effect sometimes.
While I waited for the little bell to signal the end of my group’s silence, I thought about how often the roles are reversed—how much talking we do, how much of our effort to understand the souls of artists is actually a tactic to learn how to convert them, or worse, how to get their art to serve our all-too-hollow visions of grandeur.
I noticed a half-eaten roll on my plate. I began to recite the old Communion liturgy in my head: We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done and what we have left undone.
And in that hush, I began to repent for the voices I’ve silenced, in others and in myself.
The Rev. Van Meter is director of the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Ark.
Eric Van Meter
