A time to be silent and a time to speak

Hello, dear friends, after this long hiatus. Grad school is finally past, and I'm six months into a year-long chaplaincy gig, and today I wanted to share a little about my long silence here, about seasons for listening and seasons for sharing.

Photo by Garry Knight

It was 2016, I'd just spent a summer interning as a chaplain, and I was sitting around my parents' dining room table, eating eggplant caprese and catching up with old friends. They asked me what I had learned as a chaplain.

I answered the first thing that came to mind: less talking, more listening.

As chaplains, we're trained to support people's own journeys rather than to guide; we're trained not to answer people's questions but to help them explore for themselves. So when a tearful mother at the bedside of her dying child says-- "Can people who believe in God but don't go to church can still go to heaven?" or simply "What do I do now? Where do I go from here?"--90% of the time I do not answer. I ask the mother to explore her own beliefs and feelings and hopes. I listen to her wriggle around the abstract into the concrete. I watch the tears rolling down her face as she shares her great fear. I feel the strength rise in her voice as she realizes her opinion matters to someone else. I let her puzzle her own way to an answer, and her own journey to that point means more than anything I could say.

That summer, I had to listen. It was my job not to answer. And it taught me that most of the time it's more blessed to listen, even when you can speak.

These days, now halfway into a year-long chaplain residency, I still lean into the silence more than ever. I once stood silent by a bedside and stared at a dying patient for 45 minutes, while holding a box of tissues and occasionally patting family members on the back. I felt extremely intrusive, awkward, and incompetent not to be able to say anything to assuage their tears. At the end of it all the family said simply, "Thank you so much, for being with us at the really crucial moments."

Silence is more powerful than we know.

*

It is May 2017, I've just graduated, and my seminary is in national news for a situation involving a racial diversity training and a professor's resignation. I am discussing it all with a couple friends. We are all white. We recognize that we cannot really understand.

"I guess that's why I feel my place is to listen," I say, fumbling for some way to come to grips with years of inequity, to bear witness to the brilliance and testimony and complex experiences of my peers who are people of color.

But one of my friends challenges me. She wonders if sometimes listening becomes yet another wall we hide behind when we don't know what to say. If you have a voice and a platform, there are times when you need the courage to speak out loud. Even when what you say will be imperfect and might cause misunderstanding. Even when it you could be wrong. Even when you are still wrestling. Even when your speech may reveal your true colors as one who does not, cannot understand.

If you have been listening closely and you have a voice, maybe you have to take a risk. Maybe people are listening to you, and you could speak a sliver of truth and justice and meaning and connection.

*

A time to be silent:

There are so many compelling reasons to listen, to be silent:

When you are grieving, and people you love are grieving, and words are paltry.

When you are still listening and learning from the voices you've only just discovered.

When God can be encountered in the sound of a quiet whisper.

When the social media war is raging with words flung carelessly into an impersonal void, or (worse?) into an echo chamber that lets status updates pose as repentance and activism.

When you are gathering your thoughts and feelings into the sacred silence of your heart for awhile.

When you are a chaplain resident brimming with tears for the pain you are carrying, and to corral the deluge of your feelings into a single static word--"sad" or "angry" or "longing"--is to be dishonest to the complexity that is in you.

A time to speak:

And there is a time when the silence is no longer enough. Someone is hurting, perhaps, and it is time to sing, or wail, or say "Me too," or say "I see you," or say, "That is not your fault." It is time to say, "These are the small words I will offer along with my silence in hopes that grace will give them meaning for you, too."

Or you are in a close friendship, a community, a marriage, and the things you don’t say have piled up, have become a barrier preventing true communion. You have to say even the half-baked or bumbling or inconvenient thoughts that are within you, because it is in offering yourself, both the good and the ugly parts, that you will forge a path to more conversation.

Dear friends, for so long, I've scarcely written a thing here in this space. I've been nearly silent for three years during grad school, and then still for this first stage of chaplaincy. I've been tired, needing the fallow time to let the fields recover the life that is in them. And I've been scared of having nothing to say, scared of having too much to say, scared my words may be frivolous against the enormity of the world.

This post is an imperfect way back. I hope it is the first of many, one way into further conversation.

It has become time for me to speak again.