Silence & Silencing
“I don’t understand why you Protestants have to talk so much,” Maeve said as she sipped her tea.
“Well, we have a lot of theology around verbal confessions,” I replied, not sure where she was going with her comment.
“Okay, but don’t you also have a lot of theology around listening? You should. We do.”
Immediately after my friend made that statement, while we were sitting in a cafe in Belfast, another friend of ours entered and the conversation shifted. Maeve was distracted and we never returned to that topic, but it sent my brain on a rabbit trail. Maeve had recently attended her first ever Protestant service after a lifetime of Catholic mass. She regaled me with some stories about how confused she felt, like a traveler to a strange land without a map, and then settled on how there was no space for silence.
She was befuddled how she was supposed to confess her sins or have any space to reflect upon her life when the “man in the front” kept “going on and on and on”. I realized as she spoke that I had never really thought about it before.
For over three decades, I’ve participated in various Protestant groupings; high church and low, evangelical and liberal, free church and denominational. I’ve led in them, I’ve worked in them, I’ve studied them and I can count on one hand the number of religious spaces I’ve been in where silence was a value. With the exception of one, they were all prayer rooms, separate from main services. Even those had music playing, or meditative phrases being called from the front – I can’t remember a single time where a holy space that I was in was completely silent.
About a year after that conversation with Maeve, I married into a Catholic family. My first time at mass in Ireland, I was careful to note how much silence there was, how many pauses the priest took before another section of liturgy, how many times the congregation was asked to ponder something or to think on their own lives and then given space to do it.
Now, I clearly cannot speak for all Protestant congregations nor all Catholic ones, but my colloquial experience got me thinking: do we have an issue with silence?
I ask because most Christian congregations have an issue with silencing.
We guard who can speak, who can participate, who can lead so fiercely. Even the congregations which are the most open still police participation, through ordination or membership. In many cases, those boundaries are good things and protect people from hate speech or from being put in positions they’re not prepared for. However, some of the practices of curating voices leads to a lack of empathic understanding of opposing viewpoints.
For example, if you go to a liberal Protestant church, my guess is that you’d be more likely to have an Imam come speak in Sunday School than a Southern Baptist pastor. If you attend a moderate church, perhaps you’re more likely to have someone just to the left than just to the right. If you go to a conservative church, statistics tell us your congregation is the most heavily curated and the voices that you hear would most likely be uniform in their message.
I make the connection between silence and silencing because the group with the closest relationship to silence – the Quakers – also has the least experience with institutional silencing. By making their meeting egalitarian and embracing silence until someone is moved to speak, they connect intimately with the idea that each human has the light of God within them. They ask their meetings to be conducted in silence until someone feels moved to speak or sing aloud, a testimony, a message, something of the sort. It is meant to be edifying to the group, of course, as that is also a scriptural principle. In their comfort with silence, and their ability to let other voices speak both internally and externally, I find a lot the rest of us can learn from.
I wonder about some of my congregations who have been the most closely monitored – like the one in Kentucky that would never let a woman preach or teach men and was so programmed that intro music started 30 minutes before a gathering so that no one would ever be in silence. Or the number of worship planning meetings I’ve been a part of where only certain folks were allowed to lead and the fear of any pauses were palpable – like if we didn’t keep everyone entertained for every single second, they may take their focus off of the stage. We said we were afraid they’d take their focus off of God, but why did we assume God was only on stage?
I digress.
Do you have thoughts on silence? Or on the connection with silencing? I’m early in my exploration of this idea and would love to hear your thoughts.
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About The Author
Dr. Kristen Donnelly
Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly (MSW, M.Div) holds a PhD in Sociology from Queen's University Belfast, where she focused on the intersections of religion and gender in Northern Irish Protestantism. Professionally, Kristen serves as the Director of Abbey Research, a concierge research firm for small businesses and non-profits. Her research interests revolve around the intersectionality of practical theology, especially how gender, faith, and popular culture all play together. Learning and asking questions are her core hobbies, which is why she is both an unrepentant bookworm and serial traveler. Kristen and her husband, John, live in Philadelphia, surrounded by piles of books and video game consoles.
Could it be that it is the particular silence of the Quaker’s open meetings, which is connected to their not silencing people? Maybe there are different “acts of silence” just as there are various speech acts that can be a part of church service. A silence where individual members of the congregation are expected to reflect on their sin and confess it to God is very different from the silence of an open meeting where members of the congregation are free to speak and expectant to hear a word from God. I might further explore the connection between this type of silence and not silencing by looking at the bodily practice of open meeting, which in my tradition is based on a reading of 1 Corinthians 12-14.
Robert – thanks so much for commenting. Can you tell me more about your tradition so that I can better frame your questions?
The idea of particular silence/bodily practice is fascinating. I do a lot of work with orthopraxy around female bodies, so that’s a poke to my brain. You touched on the idea of individual silence vs. communal silence and I think that may be where my connective ideas are – if we’re comfortable with communal silence as you describe above, are we more open to a multiplicity of voices?
I’m a Mennonite, so part of a tradition that is famous for practicing ‘the Ban,’ When our founder Menno Simons excommunicated people, he said he was ‘dumping them on the garbage wagon,” since “garbage wagon” was his name for the other Anabaptist church they most often became a part of. This was an alternative to violent conflict however, so it was a start.
A better part of my tradition came before Menno Simons. The first Anabaptists started as disciples of Zwingli in the Zurich reformation. This reformation began with Zwingli’s holding a council on theological issues when the Catholic church forbid it. He wrote: “In Zurich we do not yet practice the counsel of the congregation, but everyone has the right to go to the priest who teaches publicly, and to address him where he believes that he has taught deceptively.” Zwingli did not practice this consistently and made too intimate a connection to the city for the Anabaptists. They practiced a more radical form of open meeting. In explaining why they did not attend the Reformed churches, they said “The first reason is that they do not observe the Christian order as taught in the gospel or the word of God in 1 Cor. 14, namely, that a listener is bound by Christian love (if something to edification is given or revealed to him) that he should and may speak of it also in the congregation.” They also drew on the example of Acts 15.
I believe this idea of open meeting that was taught by various groups during the continental reformation is the direct ancestor of Quaker congregational practices.
I’m sorry, I should have been more clear that by “bodily practice” I meant a practice of the church understood as a body politic. I was thinking that the various social dynamics of an open meeting give the silence in Quaker meetings a special quality that make it different than other types of silence.
You might be interested in what the Anabaptist theologian John Yoder says about Quaker silence:
“Quaker silence in meeting is not, as some have thought more recently, a form of elite mysticism or a “silent worship.” It is a time of expectant waiting until someone — and the point is that it can and will be anyone — is moved to utterance. There is in this respect no formal difference between a meeting for worship and one for deliberation. Until the consensus becomes clear, as it became in Jerusalem [in Acts 15] through the silence of all other voices, no decision has been reached. There is special concern not to overrule the unconvinced by majority vote or parliamentary closure and not to miss the voices of the absent. Until everyone with something to say has had the floor and until those who care have talked themselves out, the Spirit’s will is not clearly known.
Because Quakers can do this meetings for worship and in deliberation, they can do it as well in mission. A meeting for worship “after the manner of Friends” and a meeting for business have the same shape and operate under the same rules. The administrators of a relief agency such as the Friends Service Committee or of a Quaker college use the same format of unscripted openness, listening to the Spirit speaking through each other, and consensus. It is also Friends who have found special ways to bring together representatives of warring parties — in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, for instance, especially in United Nations circles — to foster the potential for dialogue among individuals even when their institutional loyalties are in conflict.
George Fox had said that as he roamed around Britain he was “speaking to that of God in every person.” Later Friends apply that image, positing in every person whom one addresses some divinely imparted potential to hear, not only to the baptized nominal Christians of England three centuries ago, but to anyone they meet. That is not a generalized humanism but a careful rendering of the passage in John that affirms that what became human in Jesus was already present throughout creation enlightening everyone (John 1:9).”
I plan on bringing this up in an up-coming post. But having quoted John Yoder, especially in commenting on this subject, I think it is important to acknowledge that he sexually abused women he knew, and used his theology and position of power to silence them.
Here is a good article on this: http://www.washburn.edu/academics/college-schools/arts-sciences/departments/history/images/R%20%20Waltner%20Goossen%20Mennonite%20Bodies%20Sexual%20Ethics.pdf.
There is a lot to say, but I will say this about it. It is deeply regrettable and awful. Nobody comes close to Yoder in his articulation of Anabaptist peace convictions. As someone who is new to these convictions, I find myself drawing on his work a lot. But I would give it up if it meant being unwelcoming to women who experienced sexual abuse. A lecturer at Eastern Mennonite University who has spoken with his victims and thought deeply about it has suggested a 3 year fast from his theology in order to make this point. This is something I would be a part of. It is also a reminder to me that the use made of theology can contradict its content, as Yoder used his theology in his abusive behavior.
I’ve been thinking about your first post for a few days. I’m familiar with Mennonites, and so many of the points you brought up are part of the puzzle I’m trying to solve. Thanks for your comments.
There is clearly a piece I missed in my original post about the nature of the silence and who controls the silence. If the silence is group controlled, then I think my theory of a more permissive group to a diversity of voices stands. If the silence is enforced and mandated by the officiant of the service, then it doesn’t. So, really what I’m saying is that congregations who allow multiple voices in their worship experiences without policing – perhaps they silence less outside of their worship experiences.
I am always uncomfortable dealing with Yoder, so I really appreciate your second comment. While I agree with him that it’s “expectant waiting” and that’s the kind of space I’m trying to talk about – the fact that he behaved how he did makes me cautious to use his works without reflection.
Finally, in Northern Ireland, in particular, silence/ing is so complicated. I’m actually going to be dedicating my next several posts to religiosity in Northern Ireland and I will be touching on Friends’ involvement, briefly, especially as it pertains to restorative justice since the ceasefires.
I definitely will be interested in hearing how you put the pieces of the puzzle together.