Little blog about silence

Things come round again. Like silence. Along with stillness and solitude, silence is a vital ingredient of life in Christian community. (I’d say it’s a vital ingredient to healthy human living of any kind, but that’s quite a claim, so I’ll leave it in parenthesis.)

And silence has been coming up again recently. I keep bumping into it. Is it the influence of The Big Silence, recently screened by the beeb? One of our senior leaders shared about silence at a recent staff meeting; another leader blogged about silence; a young leader told me the other day how his church household spent almost an entire Agape meal in deliberate silence (and some found it transformational).

“When we enter into periods of silence, we start to see things with greater clarity.”

The words of Christopher Jamison, Abbot of Worth Abbey, the monastery featured in The Great Silence. “We come to know ourselves, and come in touch with that deepest part of ourselves. That is our soul.”

Not that it’s all about a mystical version of an hour on the therapist’s couch. “The reality [of silence] is very different,” says Jamison. “We bump into our deepest selves.”

Our community, New Creation Christian Community, is one more marked for its activism than its contemplation, closely tied as it is to the work of the Jesus Army and the Jesus Centres. Our challenge, frankly as much as for the frantic secular society that surrounds us, is to find, make and protect silence and stillness within all that we do and say.

That said, people still say, when they come to our community houses, “Isn’t it peaceful?” (Sometimes the harassed members look at them gone out when they say it – but say it they do.)

I wrote a prayer a couple of years ago and still pray it now:

God, teach us silence, so that our words will not be empty, but carry power. Teach us stillness, so our activity will not be frantic, but fruitful. Teach us solitude, so that we can live in community. Amen.

I believe there are things to explore and dig into here. I believe this could be part of our journey into the future as a community.