Listen Slowly!

“All the evils of life,” said Pascal, “have fallen upon us because men will not sit alone quietly in a room.” Do you think he had a point?

Chuck Swindoll told of a time when he had been “caught in the un-dertow of too many commitments in too few days.” He says he reacted the way most of us do: by snapping at his wife and children, choking down his food at mealtimes, and forcing down irritations when people inter-rupted his over-scheduled schedule.

Speed Demon

But the worst of it, said Swindoll, was that he began to expect that everything around him suddenly had to catch up to his speed. If someone wanted to talk with him, he danced impa-tiently till she blurted out quickly what she had to say. One evening, as he was rushing out the door, Swindoll’s youngest daughter, Colleen, caught him by surprise. Something important had happened to her at school, and she sort of yelled out to him as he breezed by: “Daddy-I-wanna-tell-you--somethin’- and-I’ll-tell-you-really-fast- . . . ”

Suddenly, Chuck realized her frustration and stopped for a moment. “Honey,” he said, “you can tell me. And you don’t have to tell me really fast; just say it slowly.”

Her response cut deeply. “Then,” she said, “you have to listen slowly!”

Into the Quiet

Listen slowly!

That’s not a bad command for all of us to remember now and again! Rupert Brooke wrote a powerful poem about catching the meaning of life in the silence, and losing it again in the banging of noisiness. He said:

Safe in the magic of my woods

I lay, and watched the dying light.

Faint in the pale high solitudes,

And washed with rain and veiled by night.

Silver and blue and green were showing.

And dark woods grew darker still;

And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;

And quietness crept up the hill. . . .

In that moment, Brooke says, he felt all his puzzlement unfold, as God seemed about to speak to him the key to the mysteries of life. He knew, as he lay there, that in the next moments the meaning of his existence and the depth of his love for one special person would whisper out to him.

 “And suddenly,” Brooke goes on, “there was an uproar in my woods.” Who should it be but his love, “crashing and laughing and blindly going,” stomping with her “ignorant feet,” dragging the small creatures of the for-est to destruction with her “swishing dress,” and “profaning the solitudes” with her voice.

“The spell was broken,” says Brooke, “the key denied me.” His love prances around, “mouthing cheerful clear flat platitudes,” and quacking trite noise till the anger welled inside him. “By God!” he thought to him-self, “I wish—I wish that you were dead!”

Strong language, that. And strong sentiments. But maybe we, in our noisy world, need to be moved once in a while to covet the quiet. Does grace always find us in the crowded business of life? Is there no urge within to capture the meaning of our souls again in silence?

The Power to See It Through

When  Winston Churchill turned 75, a photographer was summoned to capture his scowling face on film. Honored to be the one for the job, the cameraman attempted to pay Sir Winston a compliment. “I hope,” he said, “that I will be able to shoot your picture on your hundredth birthday as well!”

Churchill eyed him closely and finally growled, “I don’t see why not, young man; you look reasonably fit and healthy.”

We should all be so positive about our futures! Yet too well we know how the days and months ahead will sap from us what Harry Emerson Fosdick called “the power to see it through.” Rarely do we lose hope and courage in an hour. Instead, our passions leak away over time like a dripping faucet, and we drain our emotional resources a nickel and a dime at a time. Said the poet:

East and west will pinch the heart

That cannot keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by. (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Day by day we feel the pinching, and night by night our spirits are thinned. Charles Darwin, who grew up in a devoutly Christian home, wrote in his diaries that he never lost his faith through scientific challenge or intellectual argument. Instead, he said, belief slipped away over time until it didn’t really matter anymore. His story is rewritten a thousand times each generation by others who have simply “lost” faith and felt their souls flatten.

Homecoming Port

What can broaden and deep and empower our souls enough to help us live lives of significance? Years ago a friend in Israel pointed me to the writings of the great mystic of modern Judaism, Abraham Joshua Heschel. For hours on end I sat in the library of Hebrew University in Jerusalem poring over his sensitive inspiration. Heschel said this: “In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where a man may enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity.”

Everyone looks at one time or another for places like that, especially those who experience the trials of life that James predicts. Yet where would the tested soul find these islands? Heschel went on: “The Sabbath is the island, the port, the place of detachment from the practical and attachment to the spirit.” He pictured us in mad motion: “Rushing hither and thither time becomes soiled and degraded.” That’s why, he said, we need the Sabbath. It is God’s gift, allowing us “the opportunity to cleanse time.”

The Sabbath is a biblical concept that helps us step out of our own lives in order to see things again from God’s perspective. The Sabbath allows us to worship, gaining a harbor for the soul where we can find again our bearings in a sea of lost horizons and wintry winds. This third millennium has begun with great promise, but those who “persevere under trial,” as James put it, will likely know well the value of the Sabbath.

Sabbath

Leslie Weatherhead once preached a sermon called “The Significance of Silence.” “There are two ways of getting through life,” he said, “and I think we must decide which we shall follow. . . . The first way is to stop thinking. The second way is to stop and think.”

Many of us, he said, try the first way. We fill up every hour with rush-ing, with noise, with earbuds and iPods, with radios and television, with action and reaction. There is no silence, and therefore there is no real thought.

But, said Weatherhead, there are some who long for Sabbath. And Sabbath, that old Hebrew word, means to stop doing, to find silence, to tune one’s heart, to commune with God. Those who long for Sabbath, he said, find more than just rest. They find themselves. They find the immensity of creation. And they find God.