Silence (is not complicity)

I know very few people for whom silence is complicity. Maybe that’s because I hang around with contemplatives a lot. For a lot of us silence speaks volumes. Silence is the inner room within our actual bodies where we meet God and discover the vivid truth that there is a place within where we are not other than God, we are one. Silence is an altar on which we offer our anger to God, sacrificing outrage, so that we can proceed into the trouble before us from a place of love. If shouting, or otherwise raising our voices is the opposite of silence, then by my reading of history and the current state of affairs we need more silence, not less, because loud voices haven’t gotten us to the promised land. Silence is the Bethlehem of curiosity, the place where criticism can take a nap while curiosity stretches its legs for a walk around the battleground. In silence I can wonder wordlessly with God how love might sneak like leaven into the turmoil.

Oh sure, if you tell a racist joke or bully someone right in front of me and I stay silent, ignoring the offense, then that might signal my complicity in your awful worldview and behavior. But I don’t know many people who go through life like that, and what’s more, silence in cases like those is more likely a sign of fear than complicity. Bullies scare me.

Silence is participation in life in a new way. Silence is a protest that forcefully rejects anything that is less than or other than love. Silence is your soul smiling as it consents to the presence and action of God within. Silence is a wedding, a liturgy of the heart in which you and God are committed to each other for eternity, and thus partnered to love difficult people and move through difficult times with buoyant joy.