In a recent meeting with my spiritual director, the idea of noise came up. Not physical noise, but spiritual and emotional noise, the kind of internal commotion keeping you up at night or plaguing your mind during the day, making it more challenging to hear the small, still voice of the divine.
That noise can be more dissonant than Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and invites distractions and disruptions, sounds that can be unbearable at times. Amid the noise, it’s not that the small, still voice is absent; it’s simply hard to hear through the clutter.
The psalmist writes in Psalm 46 about sea waters roaring and foaming, mountains quaking, and nations in an uproar. In the midst of that noise, the psalmist writes, “He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’”
I don’t know what noises are clamoring around you or what dissonance pierces your thoughts. You may be in a time of relative peacefulness or overwhelmed to the point of despair. What I do know that is we all need to be still. Whether you consider yourself a follower of Jesus, a member of some other religious tribe, or one who doesn’t even believe in the divine, we all need silence at times.
Silence is scary. Sometimes we actually welcome the noise to drown out thoughts we would rather avoid, words of unworthiness, insufficiency, or shame. Beliefs that paralyze and terrify us.
But the silence is also where we find the small, still voice.
Returning to the conversation with my spiritual director, we were talking about this very thing. I mentioned needing to quiet the dissonant music of life to hear God’s melody. That’s when she said something which was equally simple and obvious as well as profound and deeply true. “Listen to the space between the notes.”
Listen to the space between the notes.
When Ezekiel encounters the Lord in 1 Kings 19, most translations say he hears something like a small, still voice or whisper. I am not a Hebrew scholar, but from what I have read, the best translation is more like “a sound of thin silence.”
So maybe our goal should not primarily be to hear a word from the divine, but rather to sit with the silence between the notes. Maybe that space between the notes is where we move beyond knowledge and truly experience the divine. We often want God to answer us, to give us a clear message. While there are times to seek this, the true depth of intimacy with the divine may be best experienced in the sound of thin silence, the space between the notes.
Breaking Into Peace 