"God's First Language"

By Debie Thomas

           God and I aren't talking.  We haven't talked in weeks — not since my spiritual director said the four-letter word that blew my mind:  "STOP!"  This after I spent an hour — many hours over many months, in fact — telling her how spiritually embattled and exhausted I feel.  "Put away the devotionals," she told me firmly.  Close your Bible.  Don't pray.  Quit Googling God.

           My Type A self argued with her — how can taking a break be the answer to anything?  I panicked and cried.  But she insisted.  "This is your new Lenten fast," she said.   "A fast from God.  No more striving, climbing, reaching, or pleading.  NO MORE TALKING.  Starting now."

           This is not — to put it mildly — the kind of spiritual advice I grew up with.  One of the mantra Bible verses of my Sunday School years was this one from St. Paul's letter to the Philippians: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure."  It's a beautiful verse, one that succinctly captures the paradox of the Christian life.  God works AND we work.  God saves, so we are empowered to work out his saving.

           In the wrong hands, though (ie: mine, or any other "good girl" perfectionist's) the verse is dangerous.  The very first time I heard it — I must have been in middle school — I fixated on three words: "work," "fear," and "trembling."  Those were words I knew what to do with.  God's "good pleasure" went right out the window, as did any real comprehension that God is in charge of my spiritual journey.  Not me.

           Compounding the problem was the fact that none of the prayer methods I learned in my early church circles included silence.  Either mine or God's.  Proper prayer was conversational, extemporaneous, casual,  and chatty.  If all was healthy in my spiritual life, I'd send streams of words heavenward — streams of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (ACTS, for short) — and God would respond in kind, making his presence palpably, verbally felt in my mind and heart.

           If something was amiss in my spiritual life, though, the magical formula wouldn't work.  I'd chat and chat and chat, ever more desperately, but God wouldn't chat back.  He'd go cold.  Cold and angry?  Cold and offended?  Cold and hurt?  Who knew?  All I knew was what I had to do in response: work harder.

           I told my spiritual director all of this on the day she ordered my "fast from God."  But in the course of our talking, I also discovered something else, something far scarier about the way I view my relationship with God.  It's not just that I've relied on my own efforts to keep God happy.  It's also that I've relied on my own efforts to keep God alive.  To ensure that he exists.

           "What if, when I stop talking to him, he disappears?" I asked her tearfully that day.  "What if the whole thing — God, Christianity, my faith — depends on the apparatus we've constructed?  Church, prayer, theology, Bible reading?  What if he's dependent on the culture we create with our words?  I'm afraid that if I stop conjuring God, he'll vanish."

           It was a staggering thing to realize, even as I confessed it.  Do I really believe I'm so powerful?  And that God is so powerless?  Are my spiritual foundations so rickety?

           Apparently, yes.   Of course, like any good spiritual director, mine turned the question right back at me: "Okay, Debie, what if he ceases to exist?  At least you'd know the truth, right?  Do you want to know or not?"

           After a very long pause, I said I did want to know.  I said I'm tired of being tired.  I said, "I don't want to be this crazy powerful.  Because I'm not."

The Great Ocean Road at night.

           I'm only a few weeks in, so I won't dare to say too much more right now.  So far, though?  God hasn't disappeared.  He's here.  But differently.  He's huger.  Wilder.  Gentler.  Closer.  But most definitely here.  In fact — is this possible? — I'm more consistently aware of his presence now than I've ever been before.  I don't have to magic him into being.  He simply is. 

           Turns out, God is much more comfortable with silence than I knew.  In fact, I'm starting to think he likes quietness — a lovely discovery for an introvert like me.  "God's first language is silence, " Thomas Keating wrote in his book, Invitation to Love.  "Everything else is a translation."

           Barbara Brown Taylor put it this way in her sermon collection entitled When God is Silent:  "By hiding inside a veil of glory, God deflects our attempts at control by withdrawing into silence, knowing that nothing gets to us like the failure of our speech. When we run out of words, then and perhaps only then can God be God. When we have eaten our own words until we are sick of them, when nothing we can tell ourselves makes a dent in our hunger, when we are prepared to surrender the very Word that brought us into being in hopes of hearing it spoken again — then, at last, we are ready to worship God."

           Many years ago, someone told me that one way to measure the depth of a friendship is to notice how comfortably two people can be silent together.  "New and less secure friendships rely on chatter," she said.  "But between old friends, the awkward need for words and more words falls away.  Silence becomes another kind of language, a marker of intimacy."

           I have known this to be true in human relationships for a long time.  But it never occurred to me — until now — to think about it in my relationship with God.  For years, I've interpreted the verse, "Be still and know that I am God," as a rebuke.  Could it possibly be an invitation?  An invitation to learn God's "first language?"  An invitation to put aside my work and my words, and rest in the good pleasure of the one who saves me?

           I won't lie; this process is scary.  I'm used to talking God's ears off.  I'm used to crafting my prayers sentence by careful sentence, as if God's approval — and his answers to my requests — depend on my getting each and every nuance right.  I'm used to equating piety with noise.  What's happening now is a complete re-education.  I'm back at preschool, learning a new and bizarre alphabet. 

           God and I aren't talking.  Instead, we're enjoying a friendly, intimate silence.  It's not the silence of shaming, punishment, withdrawal, or absence.  In some ways, it feels like the silence after a storm — the healing silence of rest and recovery.  I need those right now. 

           But it's more than that.  I feel anticipation in this silence.  The beginning of something new and still unformed.  This is the silence of God's Spirit, hovering over dark water.  The silence before dawn.  The silence before creation.  This is — dare I say it? — the holy hush before the Word.