Kyle Dresback

Friends,

I’ve never participated in a silent retreat. Maybe you have.

Previously the domain of ascetics and mystics, silent retreats have become widely popular. I have read about and heard from practitioners, some of whom remain silent and tech-free for days. The experience is almost always described in profound and meaningful terms. (“It nearly broke my brain” was the description in a recent column.)

There’s something about silence.

My family just spent a week touring the national parks in California’s Sierra Nevadas. That much car time with two kids is far from silent. But on a few occasions, rounding a corner or cresting a hill, we encountered a scene of such natural splendor that the only response was silence—not merely the absence of sound but a silence bursting with awe and wonder.

Perhaps the experience colored my reading of Jeremiah’s call in today’s reading, but a line spoken by Jeremiah caught my attention. 

When God personally informs Jeremiah in chapter 1 that he will be a prophet to the nations, Jeremiah responds, “Alas, Lord God, I know not how to speak!” 

Some speculate that Moses suffered from a speech impediment because of his reluctance to speak in God’s presence. But Isaiah had a similar response. And now Jeremiah.

Taken together, I’m led to believe that this sudden inability to speak is less a speech impediment and simply how it feels to be addressed by God face to face. It may be the stuttering equivalent of, “Who, me?”—a profound sense of awe and wonder with the accompanying inability to speak.

And despite the fact that humans can, like Moses, be “slow of tongue” in his presence, God insists on partnering with us, so much so that he took humanity onto himself. Not only does God come to us in Jesus, he also shows us in Jesus how to be human: his radical humility, his self-giving love, and his pattern of communing with the father, often on a quiet hillside…in silence. 

We may not all have a weekend free for a silent retreat, but we could each probably use a bit of silence this week to listen, pray, or worship the God who sometimes speaks in a “still, small voice.”

In Christ,

—Kyle