The Sound of Silence
This article first appeared in Premier Christianity Magazine, with copyright attributed to Liz Jennings.
My husband’s been working from home while I’ve been writing this. I just took him a cup of tea. “Who’ve you got round?” he asked. “No one,” I said, “I’m writing.” He frowned: “But I’ve been listening to you talking for the last two hours,” he said.
I was born chatty, and my prayer life has naturally flowed out of this tendency. For years I’ve talked to God: I’ve ranted, whispered, laughed and wept. Until, about ten years ago, I shut up. And quite unexpectedly, everything changed.
It began with a simple experiment, inspired by the Remembrance Day two minutes’ silence. Each evening, I sat on my bed and said, “Lord, I’m here.” I waited for two whole minutes: it was as much as I could bear. The inside of my mind is like the dress rehearsal of a pre-school nativity where every thought stamps its foot and demands to be Mary right now!
Because of the internal mayhem I encountered, I began to meditate on the phrase, “Be still and know that I am God.” And, really, this was pretty much all I ever managed to do for two minutes, every day for a few years. I never ‘achieved’ inner peace; the voices never quietened.
Then, one Sunday at church, I’d gone for prayer after the service. I can’t remember what for now, but the woman praying with me suddenly stopped, mid-sentence, and said, “God sees you in the silence and he loves it. This is the close relationship he’s always longed for with you.”
It was a lightbulb moment in my prayer life: God saw me!
I began to search for new ways into silence, and came across Daniel Wolpert’s excellent book, Creating a Life with God, (published by The Bible Reading Fellowship). Chapter four was mysteriously entitled Apophatic Prayer, but it was the subtitle that really caught my eye: Be still and know.
The word apophatic was new to me. However, as I read, I discovered that this was the deep water into which I had been dipping the tippiest tips of my toes during those silent moments.
A Whole New Word
The word comes from the Greek apo meaning ‘other than’ and phanai, meaning ‘speak’. It’s the idea that we get to know God through laying out a blank page before him and saying ‘I don’t really know anything about you – please teach me who you are.”
This state is called paradox, the acceptance that, through not knowing, God can fill us with a deeper knowledge of who he really is.
Of course, God has shown us who he is through the bible: apophatic prayer is an accompaniment, not a replacement for scripture. But we come to scripture with our own limitations, while this prayer practice gives God the chance to break our stumbling blocks and stitch fresh knowledge of his holiness deeper into our being.
Alongside paradox comes nonthought. This word rings every alarm bell in my Anglican body: I grew up understanding that logic was God’s gift to me to enable me to understand him. Nonthought requires that I acknowledge my thought processes, but recognise that God is bigger than them, and may entirely bypass my logic in order to speak to me.
It’s a million miles away from a life of measurable goals. To acknowledge that it’s possible that I might know nothing of God takes tremendous humility. Simultaneously, it puts God back into perspective: he is God – and I am not, however clever I might think I am.
Apophatic prayer is not a dreamy wishing-time. We don’t plunge into the sea of silence adrift and open to any influence. Each pray-er chooses an ‘anchor’ word – something of God’s character that we would like to know more of: ‘love,’ or ‘joy’, and so on. When my mind inevitably wanders into shopping lists, troubling people or the weird stain that won’t scrub out of the sofa cushion, I return to my anchor word, and am drawn back to God.
This simple technique is the difference between stepping out into the pitch dark with a candle or with nothing.
Alone, Together
Wolpert raves about the benefits of apophatic prayer with a group. His words were an irresistible invitation to spiritual adventure and community.
Serendipitously, my church had just switched to an evening-class style of small groups. I was able to put forward the idea as a ten-week group open for anyone in church to whom it appealed.
I invited a friend, Lesley Davies, to co-facilitate with me, and was thrilled when the idea fitted well with where she was at in her own spiritual walk.
We submitted the idea to our church leadership. They gave their full support, with the advice that we call it anything other than The Apophatic Prayer Group. We decided Adventures In Prayer summed up this experiment, and went with that.
I began to chat to friends and family about it, and became accustomed to the response, “Apathetic prayer? I already do that!”
Suspicion was a common reaction, too. “Is it to do with yoga?” was something that I was nervously asked more than once.
Another friend said, “Jesus told us to go and make disciples, not to sit on our bums and do nothing.” I felt a wobble of doubt at that: were we wasting God’s time?
Would anyone sign up, anyway? As a church, we’re known for our great singing, animated sermons and passionate crying out in prayer, but not our times of silence. Lesley and I agreed - if no one else wanted to join us, we would do it anyway. We posted the group with space for twelve, and braced ourselves for rejection…
Before breakfast the next day, the group had filled. Over the weeks that followed, both Lesley and I were approached by disappointed people who hadn’t got in fast enough.
Suddenly the group was real, and preparations needed to be made. We decided to meet in my garage, which is badly named really, because it’s actually quite a nice room at the end of my garden. We squeezed all our garden chairs together in a circle and realised immediately we’d taken on more people than we had space for: never mind.
We discussed what we would do if, during the silence, someone began crying or laughing. We decided we would assume God was working, and would try to keep out of the way. If it began to disturb others, one of us would accompany the weeping shrieker to my kitchen.
Couch-to-5k
Our aim was to sit together in silence for 45 minutes. This felt a bit like running a marathon on the first attempt at jogging, so we took inspiration from the Couch-to-5k running programme. We would start our first week with just five minutes’ silence, adding five minutes on each week until our last two weeks would be 45 minutes of silence each time.
We also agreed to eat together first, because we didn’t all know each other. Meals would get shorter as the silence got longer. We’d start with full meals, and end our last few weeks with just puddings or cheese.
Predictably, everyone in my house was ill for our first meeting and we had to delay. We contacted the group and asked them to try five minutes’ silence at home. When we met the next week, people spoke of how difficult it had been to justify sitting in silence doing nothing for five long minutes.
Already we were having our attention fiercely drawn to the constant pressure to appear productive.
Open Secrets
We asked the group how they felt about sharing experiences after each time of silence. One brave member said, “If I know there is an expectation to share and I haven’t heard anything, I will be tempted to invent.”
We also spoke about how we could feel if the person next to us had received wonderful revelations and we’d heard nothing. Likewise, if you’d heard great stuff and no one else had, you could feel you were ‘good at this’.
Our catchphrases became, “To share is to compare” and, “Process over product!”
Apophatic prayer holds you in the process because you give God your time understanding that he may not say anything at all! After all, who are we to say, “Ok God, you’ve got half an hour, get on with it!”
Our ten minutes together on that first night were full of noisy stomachs (we’d had chilli con carne). Justin, a doctor in the group, introduced us to a word that goes hand-in-hand with apophatic group prayer: borborygmy. It’s the name for those gurgly noises your body makes as it digests. Apparently it’s very healthy.
Our second meeting saw us sitting together in silence for fifteen minutes. The third, by which time we were no longer so self-conscious, saw us sitting for twenty.
And so we went on, focussing on our key words (which we also didn’t share), not sharing anything we heard or felt during the silence, but encouraging one another at the end of our time to come back and keep at it.
Keeping Watch
Lesley and I took turns to keep vigil as people sat. As the weeks went on and the silence lengthened, this increasingly involved watching heads nodding and flopping left, right and centre, once going down like a row of dominoes. Even this felt special: there was something about coming together and just relaxing in God’s presence.
Because we weren’t sharing, it sometimes felt a bit like nothing was happening. Certainly people were reluctant to come out of the quietness each week, but we had no idea if this was any more than just a lovely, peaceful bit of time out.
Six weeks into the process, we invited group members to share feedback with us on a one-to-one basis.
This was how we discovered that, in the midst of the tummy rumblings and gentle nasal wheezing, God had been at work.
Breaking the Silence
Feedback covered a wide spectrum, from “My fear has been reduced, both in the time of silence and outside of it,” to, “I have discovered I can fall asleep with my eyes open!”
Reflection and insight abounded: “It can be difficult to focus on the process without any product being required,” and, conversely, “The removal of pressure to produce a result is wonderfully liberating.”
Another said, “It has made me question the need to always share my experiences, with consideration as to the effect upon others of sharing: it may ‘undo’ or somehow devalue their own experience of what God is saying to them.”
People spoke about how “Sometimes nothing happens in the silence, but I enjoy resting peacefully,” and “I am enjoying just sitting with Jesus.”
The effects overflowed into other areas, too: “I’m experiencing greater intimacy in times of worship,” “I’ve been more motivated to read my bible,” “I’m experiencing a greater love and mercy for others that is outside my normal attitudes,” and, from one member who’s been a Christian for many years, “It has transformed my inner and outer relationship with God.”
Something unexpected was the acknowledgement that, “The silence together means that no one can annoy anyone! There are no disagreements, just pure unity under God’s authority.”
In terms of facilitating, it was the easiest group I’ve ever been involved in. As the weeks went on, meals became a bring-and-share affair. The only preparation was to pray for the group in advance each week.
Everything else was in God’s hands – and how well he held us! We closed each week by saying the Lord’s Prayer together, and the atmosphere between us as the weeks went on grew increasingly tender.
We hope to begin the process again with a new group this autumn. This time, Lesley and I are coming to it with a faith and a confidence built through experience. God will draw close to us as we give up our own agendas and draw close to him.
