Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down. When we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the volcano of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and tweets and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite thinking, not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Silence is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

I’m talking about silence as a powerful spiritual tool. I’m also aware that silence can be a powerful tool of oppression. Silencing is not a gift, nor is it healing. When you are silenced by political or social norms, when your voice can’t be heard, when your experience isn’t recognized, when you’ve been erased by dominant culture, you’ve been silenced. When our government removes mention of LGBTQ protections from anti-discrimination guidelines, millions of people are silenced. When the talking heads on TV giving their opinions about the day’s events are all white, millions of people are erased. When subways are designed so only people with working legs can use them, millions of people are disappeared. When previously incarcerated people aren’t given a vote, millions of people are muted. When bathrooms are labeled for men or women, millions of people are forgotten. When I list ways people are marginalized in my sermons, but I forget the way you live differently in the world, you are also silenced.

Silence can be a wrench closing the opening where the steam can get out, used by people in power to keep the hissing noise down. It can become a weapon of dominance, wielded to ensure submission and irrelevance. Language is used in courtrooms and welfare offices and at child protection hearings to ensure the silence and continued existence of an underclass.

But silence can also become the resistance, a non-participation in the language of oppression. A response to subjugation. A liberation rather than an accommodation. Sometimes we use silence because it’s the only response to a world of too many words, of violent words, of threatening and destructive words. Silence can be self-determination. When systems use language to oppress, our nonparticipation can use silence to express sovereignty.

But, mostly, I’m talking about silence as a spiritual tool, the silence that brings us back to ourselves, back to the Source of our being, the single place where we are most authentically who we are. There’s a voice that has to be heard without language. It’s the healing silence we experience when we first walk in our doors after a busy day, when we take that first deep breath; or that magical silence after a hymn of shared faith is over, when the last word was sung, the final note played; or the meditative silence of standing in a field while it snows.