Sunday Morning Meds--Silence

“. . .search your hearts and be silent.”  Psalm 4:3

The greatest classroom stem-winders, profs who can hold students spellbound for 90-minutes plus, still love students who respond.  After 35 years of teaching, I can predict the success of a class if I know ahead of time whether or not there are a few orally-gifteds tucked somewhere amid the rows (often front-and-center), students who will gleefully break the otherwise deadly silence.  Teachers love good talkers.

But then, our age is adept at yakking.  Years ago already, a veteran kindergarten teacher told me her students had changed immensely over the years.  When she began teaching in the late fifties, she claimed it took her at least two weeks to get the little kids to open up.  Now, she quipped, five-year-old kids walk into class, take a look at the teacher, and say, “Who’s in charge here?”

Television may well be a visual medium, but it doesn’t abide silence much better than radio.  If we pick up TV’s cues—and the research is convincing that we do—maybe we all do more swaggering, more lipping off, more jabbering.

But there’s another rule-of-thumb my years of teaching have taught me.  The big talkers aren’t always the best students.  Flannery O’Connor, I remember reading, was almost totally inconspicuous in her classes at Iowa Writers Workshop.  I believe it.  Every year I’ve got silent types that knock my socks off when they hand in an essay.  A classroom that sounds morgue-ish doesn’t necessarily mean that the minds that inhabit it are laid out cold.

Generalizations are always hazardous, but, historically at least, the annals of the American West are rife with stories about white folks—immigrant farmers, cavalry lieutenants, even French trappers—who were uncomfortable with the silence Native folks felt imperative before a discussion.  Then again, the history of the West wouldn’t be as jaded if white folks had kept their mouths shut even more than they did.

Given our sexually-charged media culture’s incessant yapping, it’s probably understandable why some people would opt out and seek the enforced silence of the monastery.  Thomas Merton and Henry Nouwen have wide and devoted readership; it’s difficult to know whether Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk begat a phenomenon or merely rode the wave.  To many—and to me—silence looks good, probably because it’s hard to come by.

I’ve become familiar with old folks’ homes.  My mother is in one; so s my wife’s father.  Silence pervades those places, no matter how cheerfully decorated.  But their immense silence doesn’t make life there any more moral or high-toned.  And the fact is, I’m not anxious to go.  Aging creates its own hurtful enforcers.

Here in Psalm 4, it’s a command.  In this 12-step therapy regimen David is creating, he raises a finger again and says, simply, just shut up.

Me too.  Be still, he says.  And here I am on this Sunday morning, going on and on.  We love talkers.

 

Be still, David says.  Just, be still. 

Lord, help me.