Silence

“Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion; 

to you our vows will be fulfilled.” Psalm 65:1

An old, country editor friend of mine, who unreservedly loved the small town in which he’d always lived, once described to me how the great joy of his Sabbath began the moment he parked himself inside the church.

“I love my church,” he told me. “I sometimes sit and look over my people there and my heart fills right up.” It’s the silence before the worship that he claimed to enjoy, the peace, the sense of being there with people he’d known for as long as he could remember, all of them quiet before the Lord. He loved those quiet short moments, he told me.

There’s more to the story. You shouldn’t think he sat down and immediately reached for the Kleenex. “But then,” he said, “sometimes I dislike the whole business bad.”

His preferences remind me of that tireless optimist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who felt some related sensation once he once heard a preacher begin to hold forth, someone who “sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.” Around the walls of the place, snow was falling, a gorgeous spectacle Emerson would have called “divine”; the preacher, however, was oblivious. “The snow storm was real, the preacher merely spectral,” Emerson wrote, “and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of snow.”

Exactly what David means with the first verse of Psalm 65 isn’t clear, I guess, “awaits” being as good a choice as any for a Hebrew word whose literal translation, according to commentators, seems otherwise lost. The NIV footnotes the verb and suggests “befits” may be another possible translation. You choose. Either word offers a unique intent, or so it seems to me. What exactly the scripture means exactly here is probably not at all clear.

In The Treasury of David, Spurgeon throws in some possibilities he’s collected over the years, and lists them with their sources: “God is most exalted with fewest words” (Alexander Carmichael), “Thy praise, O Lord, consists in silence” (Abraham Wright), “Praise without any tumult” (Andrew A. Bonar), all of which make the country editor’s blessed perceptions of an assembled, silent fellowship understandable.

People in our church are generously blessed and do wonderful things, often at the drop of a hat. But our story begins in a break from excessive formalism; and sometimes, to my notions, it tossed the baby with the bathwater. There is no old-fashioned pre-worship silence because we’re progressive so we chat, we fellowship. Silence is over-rated, hence banished.

I’d like to think that David knew what Thomas Carlyle did—and lots of Native people: “Under all speech there lies a silence that is better,” he wrote. “Silence is deep as eternity.”

But then, to take that to heart, me and the country editor better stop writing all these words, words, words.

When we do, when all of us do, we may well be camped in the neighborhood of David’s real intent in this beautiful psalm’s rather untranslatable opening line, which I’d like to think, in one way or another, begs us simply to “be still and know that I am God.” Or something like that.

(And now I’ll stop talking.)