The Sounds of Silence

Some fragmented thoughts on what it means to be quiet, a warming pot of short rib, Adele as a companion through grief, and the world's northernmost church

Thursday, January 13
East Sandwich, Massachusetts

Hello, gentle reader.

If you were in our home on any given day, you’d be able to eavesdrop on a long-running, one-sided conversation between Fozzie and us. He is deaf. Yet we talk to him anyway. Why? I have no idea.

When we first picked Fozzie up at the shelter in northern Indiana, the woman who had been caring for him told us that he wasn’t just deaf—he was 93% deaf. The specificity baffled me. Over time, we’ve gotten a sense of the 7%: For instance, he always hears our sneezes, but he inevitably looks the wrong way in search of the noise. But so many of the other sounds that orient a dog—the plink of kibble going into a dish, the rustle of a leash, the barks of other dogs, the word “walk”—don’t register. He can’t hear us calling. We doubt he even knows his name. The shelter lady told us that, even though they’d been calling him Fozzie, “You can call him whatever you want, because he can’t hear you anyway.”

Fozzie on the beach this morning

We still call him Fozzie—or, more frequently, Fozzie Fozz. 

“How are you doing, Fozzie Fozz?” 

“Are you hungry, Fozzie Fozz?” 

“Do you need more water, Fozzie Fozz?”

I thought about the relative silence that life has imposed on Fozzie, the things we have (and haven’t) done as we’ve built our relationship with him and sought to love him well, and the challenges and opportunities of engagement with those around us after I read a piece about silence that my friend Chris Palmer wrote in The Christian Century. In his essay, Chris, a pastor at a church in Waco, Texas, reflects beautifully on the place and the power of silence in the context of corporate worship—something that, he argues, is diminished and even lost when we gather online, as many of us must right now.

To you, this might seem odd: Why did an essay about church make me think about my dog? I concede this might be because I think about Fozzie a lot; he happens, right this very second, to be snoozing on the floor to the right of my work table. This might also be because I needed a way to start this letter to you and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. (It’s been a busy week.) But it’s also because Chris engages beautifully with silence as a means of communication and as a method of relational attentiveness. 

The kind of silence for which Chris advocates “teaches us about mutual forbearance, respect, and collective wholeness.” He writes about how silence invites us to engage with what’s around us in other ways. And he makes a compelling case for how closing our mouths can also open our hearts: “Silence, in the Christian tradition, is a corporate activity as much as an individual one. It is not just a private interlude before returning to the streets. It is an act of the church’s public and visible worship to seek the Spirit’s presence anew.”

While Chris reflects specifically on church, and particularly with what happens in physical spaces, I think there’s also an invitation to think beyond the precincts of religion and consider other places, too, that yearn for our silence. Where else could silence foster mutual forbearance? What are the other venues in which it could signal respect? How else might it move us toward collective wholeness?

“Silence makes us acutely aware of the presence of others,” Chris writes. While he’s imagining in the context of a church sanctuary, of pews filled with bodies, this can equally be true in other spaces of community—a room, a home, a social-media platform, an entire society. And silence can also be a respectful response to the presence of others—a way in which we can honor others, sit in the wisdom and knowledge of others, and learn from the experience and expertise of others.

Silence, of course, can come in many shapes and forms. It can be weapon or welcome. Sometimes it can hurt and sometimes it can heal. It can be symptomatic of a long history of not having been listened to, or even actively silenced, and it can be a healthy exercise of hospitality. It can be imposed on others, by outshouting them or by erasing them, and it can be offered as a gift—by making space, by opening one’s ears, by stifling the “Well, actually...” even as you feel it forming in your throat.

In recent times, it has become trendy to trot out sayings such as “Silence is complicity” and “Silence is violence.” I’ve seen these phrases on posters and T shirts. The problem with these appealing but trite lines is that they aren’t always true. Sometimes speaking is complicity, and sometimes speaking is violence. Context matters.

Part of the work, then, is to figure out when silence might be helpful and what forms of silence are good. In the clamor that I often encounter on social media, I see, for instance, so many of us who have long been saddled with forms of involuntary silence, and now that we have spaces in which to speak out, we struggle to know how to do so wisely. To learn how to use our words thoughtfully also means to understand how to deploy silence carefully. It’s often said that a good writer is also a good reader; perhaps one can also argue that one who speaks well is also one who knows when and how to be silent.

One key, I suppose, is to discern carefully and thoughtfully when our silence is healthy and when it is not, when it is driven by love and when it is fueled by selfishness, when it’s inspired by care and when it’s a method of defense or a sign of past trauma. The silence I hope for seeks to make room and create welcome, not to shut off relationship or halt dialogue. The silence I long to cultivate regards my surroundings with quiet respect, in search of growing awareness and understanding. The silence I want to practice is a form of care.

I use the word “practice” intentionally, because I suspect that healthy silence, life-giving silence, nourishing silence, needs to be practiced; it doesn’t come naturally to most of us—neither to those among us who have endured so much enforced silence nor to those among us who have never had much reason to be silent at all. For most of us, we need to reorient ourselves to this kind of silence, but I suspect that, as we do, we’ll find ourselves opened up to new forms of beauty and reinvigorated relationships with the world.

Over the past week, as I’ve taken Fozzie out into the yard for his last walk of the evening, I’ve resisted the temptation to take my phone out and scroll, scroll, scroll. Nearly every night, a great horned owl has made its presence known. Whoo-hoo-HOO, it says. Whoo-hoo-hoo-HOO. I’ve gotten into a new habit of listening for it. One night, it was somewhere in the trees in front of the house; the next, it was out back. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it. And yesterday, I searched out some information about this neighbor of mine—where it nests, what it might be up to (this is the beginning of breeding season), its significance in different cultures (it’s a fixture in the mythology of many Native American tribes), and of course what it likes to eat (rodents and rabbits and, very occasionally, one website told me, “small canines,” which Tristan assures me will not include Fozzie).

As I’ve sat at my computer, sometimes I’ve paused my typing or my endless rambling across the Internet, and I have just sat. Then, I’ve heard the trees clattering and creaking in the wind, and the not-so-gentle whoosh of the wind itself. The day after a big snowfall, the snow crackled in the sunlight, and as it melted from the deck, the water drip-drip-dripped steadily onto the woodpile below. Chickadees chatter to each other. Fozzie, mid-nap, lets out a big sigh.

When I choose healthy silence, the world around me has so much to say. It sings of resilience, but it also cries out for care. And in listening to the stories, I’m invited into humility. Into a sense of appropriate smallness. Into wonder.

What I’m Cooking: We’ve had some very cold and windy weather of late here on the Cape—it plunged to 7 degrees Fahrenheit the other night, but boy, the stars were bright. When it’s that bitter outside, I want something warming and hearty. So I pulled the Dutch oven out and braised some short rib. 

Short rib is a cut of meat that resists mightily if you rush it. But your patience will be rewarded with tender goodness. I seasoned the meat with salt and pepper and seared the pieces off in hot oil. Then I took the meat out and set it on a plate. While the meat cooled, I added a few smashed cloves of garlic, a couple of spoonfuls of tomato paste, a few chopped-up carrots, a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, and a big glug of red wine to the pot to simmer, scraping up all the browned bits from the beef. I smeared some gochujang on the short rib (skip it if you don’t like spice), then put it back into the pot, and covered it all with beef stock. The pot went into the oven for about three hours at 275—low and slow, until the meat was tender and nearly falling off the bone.

Yum.

Sides: Mashed potatoes—I like a big dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream mixed in, for tang, along with plenty of butter and the requisite salt and pepper—and some broccoli, simply steamed and salted, as well as the carrots from the pot. One recipe writer said that the carrots should be thrown out, because they would have given all their flavor up to the stock. This appalled my thrifty Chinese heart. Also, it was not true; the carrots were delicious. We like gravy, so, in a small saucepan, I made a quick light roux, poured in a few ladles of the stock from the short-rib pot, added some port, and let it reduce for a few minutes. To be honest, I probably could have let my gravy thicken a bit longer, but few things erode my patience like hunger. 

What Else I’m Reading: This L.A. Review of Books essay about grief and Adele... it’s odd, and it’s personal, and it’s gorgeous, and I had to read it a couple of times to get all the feels. Really, my only quibble with it is where the writer (Kathryn Lofton, a scholar of religion and popular culture who teaches at Yale) says that Adele “isn’t a great live performer.” Tristan and I saw Adele perform live, in Austin, in the Before Times, and she was funny and brilliant and engaged. But anyway, I digress.

I appreciated this piece by Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic, who wades thoughtfully into the messy debate about how we evaluate art (Hamilton, Harry Potter) vs. how we feel about the artist (Lin-Manuel Miranda, J.K. Rowling). I’m not saying I agreed with it all—don’t cancel me!—but I do think (and hope) that we can consider work with nuance.

I also loved this photo essay in The Guardian, by the photographer Guia Besana, about a pastor with a unique ministry. Siv Limstrand works in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is only 500 miles from the North Pole. Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s biggest settlement, has just 2,000 people and one church. Though it’s nominally a parish of the Church of Norway, which is Lutheran, it has to serve the entire community—and the church building is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

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That’s all for this week. As always, I am glad to hear from you. How are you doing this week? What’s on your minds? What can I be remembering in prayer?

I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

Best,
Jeff