We live in a world of words. From
the incessant chatter of 24-hour news, to the ping of the emerging email, to
the advertisements plastered on every imaginable surface, words are our
constant companions. We hear them, we speak them, we process them, we think
them.
We pretend we are in command of
them. We imagine that words are our friends, our essential tools for living —which, on many occasions, they are.
Yet, words can also rob us of
something very precious. They can rob us of the silence.
The poet T.S. Eliot captures our
dilemma — our poor, silence-starved state — as he laments that we moderns have:
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?1
It is only in the silence — the
shocking, unexpected silence — that it dawns on us how naked and helpless we
all are before life’s inevitable suffering. The Isaiah passage for today, a
passage applied in the New Testament to Christ, tells of a suffering servant who
“was oppressed, and ... afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb
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