While we have been cultivating an interior silence in this
course, tonight I would like to explore the physical and metaphorical silences
and silencings of Lent. While doing so, we will re-emphasize themes of
pilgrimage and God’s transcendence.
Bracketed by Silence
The Lenten journey begins with the procession into the Ash
Wednesday service. As the procession enters, we stand in silence. We do not
beautify the moment with singing or bells or organ music. Instead, we watch as
the cross passes by without a sound. If you are like me, you sometimes wonder
if the cross is going on without you or if you are truly following.
We feel these quiet moments in something akin to slow motion. Their silence lets us know that something out of the ordinary is beginning.
By the time Lent is drawing to a close on Maundy Thursday, we will have learned much more about the journey. The solemn and mysterious silence of Ash Wednesday will become a shocked silence of disbelief as we see where the journey has led. We will leave the sanctuary without a word.
Dust
We begin Lent at the end of ourselves. Our Ash Wednesday liturgy starts us on the Lenten path by repeatedly asserting that, someday soon, we will be nothing but dust
again. At that time, no one will be hearing anything else from us.
Alleluia
On Ash Wednesday, we also stop saying “alleluia” in worship.
That special worship word goes underground and we pretend we've never heard it.
“Alleluia” is a transliteration from Hebrew and is an
exhortation to praise God. It is a word that emphasizes that God is the
self-existent One, and it is used by those in God’s presence in
Revelation 19. When we say it, we celebrate the fact that the kingdom of God
has come. But in Lent, (just as in Advent) we recognize that the fullness of
the Kingdom is yet to come, that some aspects of God’s reign are not
complete. Thus, we wait until Easter to say “alleluia” again.
In the Desert
On the first Sunday of Lent, we hear that the Spirit drove
Jesus into the desert, a place of relative physical silence. Those who visit
such wilderness places are struck by their qualities of “silence as eternal as time itself. Silence for thinking deep thoughts, or for simply existing, hanging suspended in a sea of canyons and cliffs, of life and of death.”
Angels ministered to Jesus after his temptations, but it doesn’t
seem that God was particularly present to him during his experiences of being
tempted. That fits with the broader picture of temptation in the Bible as well
as our own experiences. The psalmist repeatedly describes a sense of
abandonment when in need, and today, we find that temptations are not really
tests of our moral fiber, occasions to which we can rise. Real temptations
come when we feel powerless, alone, and maybe even unsupported by God. Ideally,
we respond by pursuing God, and that changes us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores
this dynamic in his Biblical study Temptation.
Doubt
Sometimes, when we feel we’ve lost track of the voice of
God, we are drawn into doubting and fear, but occasional doubts might not
really merit our panic.
Being made in God’s image, we are imaginative. Our brains routinely ask “What
if?” Much of the time, those what-if questions help us. For example, as we
drive we consider, “What if that car veers into my lane?” Such questions prepare
us for possibilities. As part of our what-if habit, we sometimes wonder,
“What if God isn’t really there?” Posing such questions is just something the
brain does like dreaming or remembering. There’s really nothing alarming about it.
In addition, our thoughts and feelings are not going to be
able to apprehend the essence of the transcendent God. If it seems that they can, then the
thing we’re calling “God” must not actually be transcendent. Traditionally, wordless
prayer has been a mode of opening oneself to that inscrutable nature of God’s
being.
4'33" is the most famous work of the highly imaginative composer John
Cage and consists of
four minutes and thirty-three seconds of no notes. Cage had experimented with a
method for generating notes and rests to fill in different segments of time and
it occurred to him that this method would eventually generate a piece that was
all rests and no notes. 4’33” is a
philosophical challenge, a joke, and an invitation to meditation, all rolled into
one. Related to his work and these concepts, Cage liked to say, “I have nothing
to say and I am saying it.”
Since thoughts and language collapse as we reach out to the essence of God, this “having nothing to say” is appropriate as we try to
approach that being.
Such silence might also be relevant during certain gaps between the
sounds of our worship. The spaces between verses of hymns, the purely
instrumental offerings, and times of prayer when there is no one recommending what we are to think are all times when, realizing no words will measure up, we can offer God our silence, and maybe God can get in a word edgewise.
When experiencing doubts, I think it is wise also to
consider that we are traveling with God. Whether I am thinking or feeling or
believing well on any given day, that relationship continues. Whether I think I
am on the right path or feel I am wandering, the same God is caring about
me and has a bird’s eye view of the whole journey. John Ylvisaker's beautiful hymn I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry conveys the sweetness of this truth.
Out of
joint
We find ourselves wanting the things we shouldn’t and
struggling to get ourselves to want the things we should. A world that teeters on the edge chaos much of the time is the result of each and every one of us experiencing that dynamic. Those of us who have the means to do so often try to arrange
our lives so we don’t have to notice it too much, but there are times when
silences stop our self-deception. Such silences are Lenten silences in that they
lead through brokenness.
You speak to the tombstone with a name on it like your own,
but no sound ever comes back. Something went wrong and can never be fixed.
The doctor says the chances of a
meaningful recovery for your loved one are nil. You check the dictionary to
make sure “nil” means what you’re afraid it does before you make the decision
the hospital has been pressuring you to make. The next day, devices that kept
the kidneys, lungs, and heart going are unplugged and those particular
half-human/half-machine sounds subside forever.
Then, having put your hopes in the possibilities of a
miraculous and unexpected new life, no heartbeat can be detected by the
ultrasound.
Those are just normal occurrences on our planet today, things that happen to me or around me.
But there are people in our communities whose torment and
terror we only begin to understand in our nightmares. They feel like they live
in claustrophobic tombs where their vision is useless and they can hardly
breathe. And when they reach for the one hand they've always trusted, it isn't there.
We have a phrase for that.
“My God, My God. Why have you forsaken me?”
Maybe the silences that follow tragedies and surround perpetual
traumas provide the space necessary for us to begin to hear a
word from God. But I think Jesus suffers in those silences with us, and in
the fullness of his hurting humanity, he joins us in the loss for words.
Sometimes our hymns dress Jesus up like a powerful warrior
with armor and a horse. But prayerful music tells us he suffers with us, and
that's a truth that ministers to us in the here and now. Here's an example of a re-writing of a militant hymn that sounds more like the way Jesus behaved when he was among us.
The Journey
As we get closer to Easter, there’s more silence, especially
around Jesus.
As in the desert, it doesn’t seem that he hears from God in
the garden. In that picturesque place, his anxiety is excruciating.
And when he turns to the sleeping disciples, he just hears
crickets.
When he’s betrayed, the disciples flee and the sounds of
their voices disappear altogether.
Jesus has very little to say before Pilate, and Pilate takes
note of his silence.
Except for some shorthand references to Psalms, Jesus says
virtually nothing for himself on the cross. He becomes more and more silent,
finally emptying himself of everything with a child’s prayer “Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit.”
A Musical Journey
Franz Liszt’s “After a Reading of Dante” from his collection
of piano pieces Years of Pilgrimage,
is a work I travel with in life. Pianist friends who play this music agree that
it is something you return to in many seasons and discover new and deeper
layers of meaning.
Thought to be inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Inferno
in particular, the music begins with a series of stark descending tri-tones
appropriate to the mood of entering the realm of Satan. Throughout this
introduction, Liszt incorporates silences to increase the sense of suspense and
dread.
The first theme, really more of an unending moan than a
melody, has virtually no silences. It might suggest the scene in Dante’s second
circle in which souls, driven by their passions to sin, are relentlessly
buffeted by the winds of a storm.
This theme returns many times, and on one occasion, it is
transformed to the point that we are transfixed by the beauty of its halting
new setting which causes us to forget its painful origins. I played this piece
on my undergraduate senior recital in the old North Hall at Peabody. North Hall
was several stories above the streets of Baltimore and it overlooked the parks
of Mt. Vernon Place. The one most memorable moment of that recital for me was
the sound of a siren making its way through the windows as I played that exquisite version of the theme. Sounds of the real pain of
the world found their way to us even in that elegant, seemingly insulated time and place.
A theme of salvation and healing comes out of another Liszt's great suspenseful silences. It sounds as if from some impossibly distant
location. That passage reminds me of an incident in my father’s life, a rare
occasion on which he felt he might have heard an actual voice from God.
While drowsily waiting in the car on a warm afternoon, he heard a voice say, “The healing is coming.” He had been
struggling for a number of years with intense asthma attacks, so he initially
received those words as a heartening message that physical relief was on the way.
Eventually, that relief did come, but years later, we realized
that the healing was actually about much deeper personal pains, It
reversed some disruptive occurrences in his career that had deeply affected our life as a family. People
and plans we had no idea about at the time of his hearing those words were the
catalysts for that healing.
Sanctus
For me, the most profound moment of
the Christian year at All Saints’ follows the Maundy Thursday
service. It’s part of the stripping of the altar, which is an event that
suggests some of the abuse Jesus experienced on the way to the cross. Over the
course of fifteen minutes, each element is removed as we look on. At the end,
the bare altar is revealed, and on it, we see the words, "Holy Holy Holy."
Those words have been inscribed there
since before the first day any of us walked into the church, but they are
almost always covered. The revelation of those words on the altar says to me
that, when all else had been stripped away from Jesus – his clothing, his dignity,
his life - his essence of holiness remained.
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