tower of babel
Speak Silence to Arrogance
This morning I was thinking about the new and very cool buzz phrase “speak truth to power.” It always comes into play at the pivotal moment in an interview when a rock star wants to sound immersed in the cause of justice worldwide. It is a perfect period at the end of a rant about the abuses of power in governments worldwide. I have a wee problem with this: It is so easy to say and yet I don’t often see these folks knocking on the doors of the bad guys in power and giving them a piece of their mind. Aren’t words easy to throw around?
I can’t talk. I can be guilty of dropping a profound tidbit just as criminally. Some things sound so profound and edgy they are hard to pass up in a conversation.
So, today is no exception. Except that I am inventing the new buzz phrase. Speak Silence to Arrogance. This is my 2009 version of the pithy one liner, which is free for use by celebrities and the like. Please add that to your Late Night with David Letterman discourse. Twitter this one to your friends for me.
Let me explain. Everywhere that I researched set forth the idea that silence is a very active sound. We need to think of it as just another modality of sound. It can be seen a way of speech as much as yelling. It is full and potent in its own right.
Today I have been thinking about silence and the contrast of God’s silence with the three loudest events in the Bible. Take a minute and come up with your list before you read mine. Here are the three noisy affronts to beauty that I believe are the worth examining. First, is the tower of Babel, second is the noisy rampage of Pharaoh’s army to the Red Sea, and third is the crowd yelling “crucify Him.” just days after Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem where they had called out, “Hosanna, be blessed!”
The three loud moments all have some things in common. Wendy Brown writes about loud public scenes in Edgework. She describes it this way: “the situation is so crowded with humanity that one’s own humanness becomes a question.” In each of the three loud moments in the Bible this is true as well. The mob is pushing in. They share one mind, bent towards aggression. There is no pause toward silence or sensibility. Think of the violent Egyptian soldiers after the plagues. They feed off of the lust for revenge and blood while chasing Jewish slaves on horseback. They are a deafening and impersonal force. As is the crowd wanting a spectacle at the feast of the Passover. They remain anonymous; faceless and nameless individuals. A powerful crowd calling for the blood of the innocent.
Soon in each of the three scenes God causes arrogance to drown. I am amazed by this pattern. I had never seen it before. This overwhelming experience brings humanity back from the brink of its arrogant self destruction. The funny thing is: Silence is the tool God uses.
God speaks silence to arrogance. For the image of man to be lifted back to its status as a glorious ruin some loud noise must be cut off. With noise we are just a ruin and we are incapable of empathy or sacrifice for another.
Primo Levi, writes in The Drowned and the Saved, that there are places in history “filled with a dreadful sound and fury signifying nothing; a hubbub of people without names or faces drowned in a continuous, deafening background noise from which, however, the human word did not surface” The human sounding word. Isn’t that what your heart wants to hear at a family table? Isn’t that what we want to hear of the negotiating rooms within the United Nations? How different would it be to have a world leader that listens to God in reverence and lets his power be a shelter for humanity instead of a war zone. A man of silence could be that shelter. Maggie Ross has written eloquently about the power of silence. She describes our initial fear of being reflective. She says that we use our busy and loud lives to”bark at the angels.” We fear the mystery that might captivate us as we listen so we choose to scare any unknowns away from sight. Do you agree? have you known times that you deliberately loaded your schedule so that you would plug your ears to keep from hearing any whispers from God? I have. As I face that my mother is in the care of hospice I catch myself saying “yes” to things that keep that reality of her death at bay. I say “yes” and get moving into a chaotic life before I realize what my yes was actually accomplishing for my spirit.
The Pharoah of Egypt was equally clueless about his barking at the angels. Ten times you wait for Pharaoh to sound human when God says, “Let my people Go” and over and over again he refuses shelter and spends the lives of those under him like worthless coins. His noise was finally stopped. Can you imagine the silence when the boisterous army about to catch their prey is swallowed up by the walls of water? The Red Sea closes over them and there is no battle cry heard over the desert sands. Golden.
What about loud Babel? Like children with a miniature chemistry set they decide to play God and break their way into the top place. What is the gift God bestows on that bad idea bunch? They find quickly that the linguistic order is lost. Each person drowns in a sea of words that they cannot interpret or use to communicate. It is loud but not for long. To fight off insanity each person disperses to remote corners of the civilized world. Soon the magnificent tower of human ingenuity falls strangely silent.
Have you ever felt insane because you were assaulted by a barrage of words? Talk radio? The View? Advertisements that broadcast two steps louder than your setting on the TV? These are bad but words of my own invention some times are even harder than these to untangle and clarify.
Why is it terrifying to be adrift in a sea of words? I can only guess at how it would be for an adult to be illiterate in the US today. How would you feel to be lost in a sea of words that you can’t decipher? A world of advice that you cannot heed? Confusion is the end result of deafening noise. You are adrift and not sure how to find solid ground because there isn’t a centering weight. This is the anxiety that is a restless master. We have fears of others, fears of death, and fears of fears rummage through our minds without fences or filters. Everything is laid waste. You are loud and clambering after solutions that are no solution at all? At midnight you might cry out, “who can deliver me from the body of this death?”
Recovery by Drowning
My thought is, accept the drowning of your arrogance. That is the first step out of the mess.This drowning will have some component of silence. A new kind of listening to God.
And finally.. It will have some kind of return to individual work instead of the big public push. When the big crowds cried out “Give us Barabbas” in the loud New Testament event they showed how politically they were pinning their hopes on a big answer. Babel is a big tower looking for a big way to be God. Egypt’s Pharaoh and his army is a big enforcer with a big stick outnumbering the Jewish slaves by thousands.
So.. Big didn’t win and loud didn’t convince heaven to bend an ear. In the scene on a hillside as the quiet darkness falls on the area around the crucifixion you only hear of individual responses. There isn’t a mob anymore for either the good or the evil. It is one brother, one mother, one thief and one soldier. One Pilate, one Joseph of Arimeathea. They have names and faces. They quietly decide where their loyalties will be given. God always works in singular decisions. Not nameless or faceless mobs. He offers a still point of making a humble decision even to Pharaoh. T.S. Eliot wrote.” Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” I really believe that. The reason God wants to stay stronger than our noise is actually so we can be more fully alive. More human. Not less.
We may hate that we cannot hide into a group and make a loud splash politically or even with our proud and orthodox beliefs. My hope is that before I run to the loud options I remember how God will flood me until I stand alone relating to Him and listening. My fears can look to Him and be radiant in that flood light. My name and face are out of hiding. It is safe in the shelter of God’s silence; a depth that is the only shelter for true power.
