Thin Silence

A Conversation with Matthew Wickman

In Good Faith podcast host Steven Kapp Perry speaks with BYU English professor Matthew Wickman about Divine Silence and how we can navigate the space between us and God.

Matthew: Our religious culture is one that preaches that people can have a connectedness with God, a connection to God—that one can pray to God to express one's thoughts and feelings, but also that God can respond in various ways through the Holy Spirit. Encountering, though, God's silence, there's a built-in, inherent frustration attached to that idea. Most of us are very familiar with it.

And, actually, it's a very important part of spiritual maturity. But the students that I teach are at a stage in life where they have rich spiritual lives, but they're also becoming increasingly accustomed to silence in ways that means that answers aren't always forthcoming, or they're deferred, or they encounter complex situations they can't quite negotiate.

And so, talking about divine silence—or God's presence and reality on the one hand, but His withholding of answers from us on the other—is a subject that they're very ready to discuss in the early twenties, I find.

Steve: I do want to ask one question about teaching at a religious school. Is there some taboo about suggesting that you don't know if God is speaking to you, or if you, for instance, aren’t sure God is even there? Do you find any hesitancy or are people just happy to dive into this?

The students I've encountered have been happy to dive into it because they experience this in their own circumstances. I had a student come to me, for example, last semester. She was saying, I like the class fine, but I find I'm not having spiritual experiences myself. I asked the students to keep a journal of their spiritual experiences that they just recorded for themselves. We got talking about how to notice these things and in her case, I think she just felt overwhelmed from life's complexities. So I said, instead of trying to focus on current experiences, why don't you focus on experiences you've had in the past? Go back and write about those. What were they like? How did the spirit communicate with you? What was the ordering and sequencing of how it happened? What did you feel? What did you think? What followed from all of it?

And she began taking careful note of past experiences. And once she did that, it opened floodgates for new experiences. I find that most students are very happy to talk about a spiritual life that's rich, but also more complicated, because they experience these things already.

And the class doesn't purport to say, there's no God out there. The class purports to say, there is a God, but God's mind is vast and large and much larger than ours. Our attempts to access the mind of God are going to be nuanced and learned, and we need to get better at this.

Would you read the poem: “In a Country Church”?

You bet.

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind' s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.

The line that you could skip over is: he kneeled long.

Yeah, and it asks that question, was he balked by silence? And it never really answers. It just says he kneeled long and saw love in a dark crown of thorns. You get the sense he's gazing up and seeing the altar and the crucifix right there at the altar.

And the answer, therefore, takes a couple different forms, as I interpret it. One way would be to say: He kneeled long in this cold church and did receive an answer, some sense that God was present, some vision of God there in the church came to him.

The other is to interpret it as saying, well, he kneeled long and never really received a full answer to some question. But he did have a sense that he wasn't alone. In being in that church, Christ was there with him in that place. And Christ's companionship was tantamount to a reassurance that God is there, even if the answers that he sought in kneeling long did not come to him.

I love what you said about starting from the supposition that God is vast. And often what we hope for as answers seem more like we called our uncle and said, do I sign up for the army or not? And the uncle says, well, of course. But, we're actually speaking to something bigger than what we just saw with the James Webb Space Telescope, which was mind-blowing. How would we get an answer?

I find a lot of times that the way answers come to me is that God will bring my attention to something and then just be silent. I know to attend to this thing and think about it more carefully so that the silence becomes, in my experience, a mode by which God communicates with us. It's a way of directing our attention to something without giving us the impression reduced to two sentences.

You know, our King James Bible has a phrase that is translated “still small voice,” right? It's how the Holy Ghost speaks to us. The focus there is on what's being spoken. But some other biblical translations have that not as still small voice, but as “thin silence.” And what I love about that is that there's nothing to grab onto there.

It's silence, but it's a thin silence. You detect the presence of God. So, the focus in that translation is not on what's spoken, but rather on what is momentarily withheld: this thin silence behind which God resides or dwells. I find that to be a great way to think about how many an answer to prayer comes— not as words given, but as a sense of God's presence even in things we can't quite grasp yet in the moment.

I had an experience years ago. I was at a real life juncture career-wise and didn't quite know the next step to take.

And I was walking down the shore and thinking about how large things in life had happened. And what really came to me was that when really large things happen in my life—the relationship that led to my marriage, big career decisions, big graduate school decisions—there was no impression about where I should go. There was no word given. It's like a door opened and I was expected to walk through it. And once I got through it in faith, then I'd find out more from there. But, when God really had to give me important things, he didn't trust me to hear Him properly.

Will you read another poem from RS Thomas, “Kneeling”?

Moments of great calm, 
kneeling before an altar 
Of wood in a stone church 
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase 
For silence; the sun's light 
Ringing me, as though I acted 
A great role. And the audiences 
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I, 
For the message. 
                Prompt me, God; 
But not yet. When I speak, 
Though it be you who speak 
Through me, something is lost. 
The meaning is in the waiting.

Thomas sometimes writes about the anguish of divine silence. In this case here, though, it's about almost the luxury of divine silence. Prior to receiving some word of inspiration, there's a full expectation that such inspiration is going to be coming. I imagine this being given to a minister—like, Thomas himself was a minister, right—waiting in a church before he goes out to give a sermon.

In this case here, there's a confidence that he'll have the inspiration that he needs, but he wants to wait in that moment before the inspiration comes. Because when he translates that inspiration into his own speech, something will be lost.

The meaning, the density, the richness of the spiritual experience is in the waiting and the anticipation for the word that's not there yet. It's as though, in that thin silence, you sense God but God has not yet spoken. And when God does speak through you, you'll try to capture the best you can, but you're an imperfect translator.

How do you approach prayer because of your consideration of these things?

As I have gone through my own life challenges and as my children now have gone through life challenges, I found I've been asking often in prayer, how do I pray for my child? I feel like I've had to learn how to ask the right question of the Lord in prayer.

Not because the Lord needs that from me to know how to bless, but so that I know what to look for, for signs of God's presence in my children's lives. I've also found that in recent years, I've prayed often and I've sought the Spirit. And once I feel the Spirit's presence, I often will sit without asking anything.

I'm listening, but I'm not expecting speech. I just sit in that place of spiritual fullness, because I find that, in many cases, God is the great untangler of knots. And by sitting in that kind of space, I feel like it works through some of the knots in my own soul.

I've had the experience of having asked certain things fairly regularly for a period of years and not seeing any apparent direction or answers. And so I stopped praying about them. And at first I thought, did I give up? And then I thought, no, I think I realized that He knows what I think. He knows what I need to know. I am just going to leave this in His hands, and I don't think it's giving up. I think it's trusting.

I think a lot of the most complex questions that we ask of God ultimately find answers like that.

We pray for a long time. We never have a concrete sentence spoken. We might not see things occur to us in a way that it's clear that God's manifest Himself and answered something. But over time, as we think about what has changed and developed in us or in things external to us, we see God's presence there and say, wow, something about this is different.

Are there moments or thoughts or reasons why you believe in God?

Let me borrow here from one more writer. Simone Weil writes about the “infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception.” So, infinity means we might perceive anything at all out there, right?

At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is silence. A silence which is not the absence of sound, but which is the object of a positive sensation. More positive than that of sound. I believe in God because I sense God's presence both in forms that have been very concrete and tangible to me, forms of virtual speech, but also because of God's presence that I've learned to recognize in times when I had no answer.

When there was a very palpably thin silence in my life, that presence to me has always been one I associate with the greatest kindness and depth and richness. The poet Christian Wiman says, “nobody believes in God without first perceiving God.”

For me, God is a perceptible, real being, and my perception of that is always what's given me my richest life experiences, the most meaningful ones. And that's why I'm a believer in God.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode here.

Matthew Wickman is Professor of English at Brigham Young University. He teaches and writes on Christian spirituality.

Artwork by Barnett Newman.