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Gospel
The Hard Work of Silence
by
Amena Brown
Some of my favorite songs have what I like to call “breathing room,” where the beat breaks down, the singers stop singing, the emcees stop rhyming and all you can hear are the instruments and sounds making music. It’s like a moment of musical
selah.
The Roots’ album
Undun,
a concept album about a hustler’s downfall, ends with four movements—“Redford,” “Possibility,” “Will to Power” and “Finality,” a sharp departure from the rest of the album. “Redford” features Sufjan Stevens soloing, contemplative and melancholy, on piano. “Possibility” is upper register piano with viola, violin and cello. “Will to Power” is spastic piano and drums, while “Finality” is mostly strings with a final stunning piano chord. It’s different: the last four tracks on a hip hop album with no rhyming, no steady beat, no hook and only instruments.
In an age when music sells more by the single than it does by the album, the pleasure of listening to an album all the way through has become lost, but every now and then I push past my inclination to download a single from my favorite music provider and buy the whole CD, download all the tracks and listen. I saved my first listen of The Roots’ record for a road trip. As I got to those last four tracks, I felt as if I had finally driven out of the smog- covered city and taken my first breath of air surrounded by trees, flowers and honeybees. It was as if I had been holding my breath and bobbing my head to my own chaos until I finally had a moment when there were no intruding voices and no blaring, annoying beep or beat. There was only the steady count of a bar of music, which included full notes, half notes and rests.
Part of the art of the album was not just the songs but the interludes. The brief pauses in a full work of music provided space for me to reflect, breathe, think, sit, do nothing, prove nothing.
If interludes make for good music, they also make for a fuller, richer faith. What I’ve learned about God is how much he treasures the interlude—those brief moments in time when we sit still and quiet ourselves to listen.
This reminds me of Psalm 23, which unfortunately in all my Sunday school lessons and youth retreats had become cliché to me, until the first time I took a yoga class.
I took yoga because while I hate working out, I was stressed out with my job at the time and thought yoga might be simultaneously relaxing and rigorous.
In yoga, I was forced for the first time to pay attention to my body as it moved, to focus on how joint, bone and sinew were connected, to notice the pressure in one muscle group and the relief in another as I practiced the various yoga positions. This reminded me of the amazing God who created all joint, bone and sinew with his very fingertips, who breathed life into what would have otherwise been inanimate objects.
At the end of the class when the teacher typically facilitates meditation and clearing the mind, I recited this Scripture I’d learned as a child, wanting to remember the wondrous and creative God I had surrendered my life to.
Psalm 23:1-3 reads: “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters,?he refreshes my soul.”
These verses sound like the opposite of my life. Why doesn’t the Scripture say this? “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall want EVERYTHING. He makes me run around like a chicken with my head cut off, He leads me to busyness, He repeats my chaos.”
The things it really takes to follow God don’t come easy in today’s culture. I’ve always got my phone on me, and half the time I’m carrying my computer. There’s always more work to do, and even when there’s not, social networking gives me the voyeuristic pleasure of eavesdropping on other people’s lives while posting all of the ignorant, attention-getting things I can muster.
Following God is an ancient practice that sometimes requires us to silence our modernity and unplug to plug in. I am by no means advocating that we all move out to the country, forsaking the Internet and all our modern machines for a life of solar-powered everything. I’m not preaching an extreme here. I’m not even preaching. I’m simply telling you what I know: In every relationship, in every ridiculous decision, in our devastation over failure and our constant drive for success, we’re just looking for God. And as long as we’re busy, noisy and in a hurry, we’re not going to find him. We’re not going to hear his voice.
Something about lying still with no cell phone, no music and just this promise of the Psalms in my mind during my yoga class reminded me that even though I fight it and resist, these are things God wants to provide for me. He wants to be my shepherd, my contentment. He wants to be my peace, my healing. A good bit of the time when God brings me to a quiet place, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming.
Silence drastically breaks my rhythm. It’s so much easier to avoid what’s really going on in our souls, shifting our focus for busyness, for noise, for people, for teeny tiny distractions. Truly coming to know God, to hear his voice, is about bringing our souls to silence, bringing our hearts to a place where they can be alone and quiet with him.
Even in the silence and rest of an interlude, there is still rhythm.
Silence in music has its own rhythm. It lasts for a certain amount of bars. Silence is necessary to complete a song or a poem. The silence or pause allows us to differentiate the refrain from the verse, one stanza from the next. Maybe
selah
is God’s way of using interlude to let us know when he is about to begin a new refrain or write a new couplet. Maybe he wants to give us a chance to breathe so we can really hear his symphony when it begins.
This article is adapted from
Breaking Old Rhythms: Answering the Call of a Creative God,
by Amena Brown. Copyright (c) 2013 by Amena Brown. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515.
www.ivpress.com
Editor's Note: Image by
Shawn Wines
.
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