The Silence

Elijah had just called down fire from heaven. On the height of Carmel, before all Israel, he had prayed and the fire of the LORD had fallen and consumed the sacrifice and the wood and the stones and the very dust, and the people had fallen on their faces and cried that the LORD, he is God. It was the greatest public vindication a prophet ever received. And yet a few days later we find the same man alone in the wilderness under a juniper tree, asking God to let him die. The fire had not fixed him. The spectacle had not held. A single threat from a wicked queen had emptied him of everything, and he fled to the mountain of God with nothing left, and hid himself in a cave.

There God asked him a question that every soul must eventually answer. What doest thou here? And when Elijah had poured out his complaint, God did not argue with him. He told him to stand upon the mountain, for the LORD was about to pass by. Then came the wind, strong enough to break the rocks in pieces, and the LORD was not in the wind. Then the earthquake, and the LORD was not in the earthquake. Then the fire, the very thing Elijah had commanded down on Carmel, and this time the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire, when the great violences had spent themselves and passed away, there came a still small voice, and in that Elijah knew his God was near, and he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out to meet him.

WHERE WE LOOK FOR GOD

We look for God in the wind and the earthquake and the fire. We always have. We want the mountain to shake and the sky to open, some unmistakable sign that would settle the matter once and for all and leave no room for doubt or for the slow discipline of faith. And God does, at times, come in power, as he came on Carmel. But the lesson of this passage is that the power is not where he chiefly dwells, and it is not what most changes a man. Elijah had the fire and it did not keep him. What he needed was not another spectacle but the voice, and the voice came only when everything loud had gone quiet. God let the wind and the quake and the fire pass by precisely so that Elijah would learn not to mistake them for God.

The words the old translators reached for are worth holding. A still small voice. The Hebrew is stranger and finer than even that, something close to a sound of thin silence, a voice so quiet it is almost the absence of sound, a whisper at the very edge of hearing. This is how the living God chose to make himself known to his exhausted prophet. Not because he lacked power, for he had just shattered the rocks, but because the whisper does what the thunder cannot. The thunder makes you cover your ears. The whisper makes you lean in. The thunder can be heard by a whole distracted nation at once and forgotten by nightfall. The whisper can be heard only by the one who has drawn near and grown still, and it is never forgotten.

THE GOD WHO WHISPERS

Consider what it means that God should choose to whisper. A shout keeps its distance and commands. A whisper requires closeness, mouth to ear, and it is the speech of intimacy, the way a man speaks to those he loves and not to a crowd. When God lowers his voice he is not withdrawing from you. He is calling you nearer. He is refusing to be one more noise competing for your attention among all the other noises, and he is insisting that if you would hear him you must come close and be quiet, because what he has to say is not for the street but for the inner room. The silence of God, which we so often take for his absence, is frequently the opposite. It is the sign that he wishes to speak to us in the manner reserved for friends.

And here is our true difficulty, which we would rather not face. The problem was never that God is silent. The problem is that we are loud. We have made our lives a continuous wind and earthquake and fire, a wall of sound and motion and stimulation that we maintain from waking to sleeping, and into which no thin silence could ever penetrate. We fear the quiet. We reach for the noise the moment it threatens, because in the noise we do not have to hear what the quiet would say, about God and about ourselves. A man may complain for years that God never speaks to him while he takes elaborate care never once to be still enough to hear a whisper. The wind and the quake and the fire in us must be allowed to pass before the voice can be heard, and they will not pass while we keep feeding them.

LEARNING TO HEAR

The hearing of God’s voice is a thing that must be learned, and it is learned only in silence. When the boy Samuel first heard God call in the night, he did not know it was God. He ran to Eli, three times, before the old priest understood what was happening and taught the child what to say. Speak, LORD, for thy servant heareth. The voice had been speaking; the boy had simply not yet learned to recognize it. So it is with us. God is not as absent from our hours as we suppose. But we have never learned the sound of his voice, because we have never given ourselves to the silence in which alone it can be learned. The sheep know the shepherd’s voice, the Lord says, because they have heard it long and often. A stranger they will not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers. We must become familiar with our Shepherd, and familiarity is the fruit of long quiet attention, not of a single dramatic encounter.

This is why silence is not an optional refinement for unusually spiritual souls, but the ordinary condition of anyone who would hear God. It is not a technique to master and it is not sought for the pleasant emptiness it can bring, as though the calm were the point. The calm is not the point. The voice is the point, and the God who speaks it. We go into the silence not to feel serene but to hear our Lord, and to obey what we hear. And this last must be said plainly, or the whole thing curdles into a private indulgence. When Elijah had heard the voice, he was not left in blessed stillness on the mountain. He was sent back down. Go, return on thy way, the voice said, and it gave him kings to anoint and a successor to call and work to do. The silence commissioned him. It always does. The soul that meets God in the quiet is sent back into the noise to serve him there.

THE QUESTION IN THE QUIET

God’s first word to Elijah in the cave was not comfort but a question. What doest thou here, Elijah? The silence always asks it. This is a great part of why we flee the quiet, though we would never say so, for as long as we keep the noise running we are spared the question, and the question is searching. What are you doing here, with the one life you were given? Whom are you avoiding? What have you left undone that you know you were sent to do? The noise is how we keep from answering. A man can fill forty years with sound precisely so that he never has to sit still long enough to hear that question put to him plainly.

But the question is a mercy, not an accusation. God did not ask it to shame his prophet but to draw the poison out of him, to bring the buried complaint up into the open where it could be answered, and then to answer it, not with a rebuke, but with himself and with work worth doing. The silence that questions you is not your accuser. It is your physician, and its question is the probe that finds the wound so it can be healed. Do not run from it. When you have grown still and the old question rises, what doest thou here, do not reach for the noise to drown it. Answer it honestly, out of your real condition, and then wait for the One who asked it to reply.

WHEN HE SEEMS TO SAY NOTHING

There will be silences that feel like abandonment, seasons when you have grown quiet and listened long and heard nothing at all, and the temptation then is to conclude that no one was ever there. The saints knew these dry and darkened times better than we do, and they did not take them for proof of absence. Often God withdraws the felt sense of his presence for a purpose, to wean us from loving his consolations more than himself, to teach a soul grown fat on spiritual sweetness to seek the Giver rather than the gift. The absence of the feeling is not the absence of God.

In such a season the discipline is simply to stay, as Elijah stayed, wrapped in his mantle before a God gone silent, keeping the appointment though nothing seems to come of it. The seed grows secretly, and the soul is being deepened in the very silence that feels like nothing at all. Faithfulness in the dark is worth more than fervor in the light, for it loves God for himself and not for the warmth he gives, and it is proved only when the warmth is taken away. Keep the watch even when the watch is dry. He who seems to say nothing is forming you by the silence itself.

And learn, in the quiet, to know his voice from the other voices that speak there, for not every thought that rises in the silence is from God. Your own wishes will speak, and the enemy will speak, often in tones of great urgency or great despair. The voice of God never contradicts the word he has already given in the Scriptures. It does not flatter, and it does not drive you to panic or to despair. Even when it corrects, it leaves behind a settled peace and a deeper humility, and it draws you toward him and toward your plain duty rather than away from them. Weigh everything you seem to hear against the written word, and keep only what agrees. The sheep that know the Shepherd’s voice know it because they have tested it and found it always true.

So do not despise the silence, and do not fear it, though at first it will feel like nothing and then for a while it will feel like an affliction. Wrap your face in your mantle, as Elijah did, in reverence before the One who condescends to whisper, and wait. Let the wind of your restlessness blow itself out. Let the earthquake of your anxieties shake and subside. Let the fire of your appetites burn down to ash. And then, in the thin silence that remains, listen. He is nearer than the noise ever let you believe, and he has been waiting, not for a grander occasion, but only for you to be quiet enough to hear him speak your name.