Picture: Forests are often the most silent places we know to visit.
Silence is violence. Silence is compliance. Phrases such as these echo through our culture. Silence has become a marker of oppression and apathy; in a culture that so highly values the sharing of one’s voice, we have lost the multifaceted meaning of silence.
The act of saying nothing has come to speak so loudly in contemporary culture. This is the result of those who witness injustice becoming silent bystanders. Bystanders do not work toward justice, and instead just encourage the action of the perpetrator of violence by not speaking up and against them. While staying silent can be a violent or compliant act in such circumstances, silence is not always evil. There are so many different sides and meanings of silence. Silence can mean apathy and lack of care but also anything from grief to empathy. Silence was once a highly valued spiritual discipline and it is important that this value is maintained if anyone hopes to properly engage in culture.
In late October and early November, our student body experienced hardships I had never witnessed firsthand before. Before I learned everything that had happened, before I even knew about the hate crime against the Korean students, I was asked to speak at MIO Chapel last minute. I found myself at a complete loss of words even then. So, I went with it. I opened my testimony with a minute of silence. That single minute might as well have been an eternity standing up there in front of my peers not feeling adequate at all to share anything. Still, I had nothing I could do but be honest and share what I could best assess as what God was having me share. This is a snippet of my speech:
“I began my time in silence because, over the past several months, I’ve been attempting to learn more about what’s happening in our country and about how to listen better. I don’t pretend to know the pain of other minorities here in America, or even other Asian-Americans. I’m not east Asian so the aggression and discrimination many of my peers have experienced due to COVID is not something I know about personally, but it’s something I care about deeply. So, in all this, a large part of what cultivating Shalom has looked for me has been in a quiet contemplation with God and in quiet listening to those who have experienced hardships greater than I can ever imagine. My parents are Filipino and Indian immigrants and I spent the majority of my childhood in an international school in Tokyo, Japan. In a lot of Asian cultures, speaking up and individualism are not part of what we value. Instead, your communal identity means much more. Being slow to speak and only speaking when you have something to say is really important in the circles I grew up in.”
Silence is something I’ve valued quite highly throughout my life, both as a discipline of my faith and due to my cultural background. But, because of its current cultural import, I was afraid to encourage it. I do not wish to encourage apathy or lack of action in any way. So, I went on to clarify this statement:
“It’s important to remember that silence is not an end in and of itself. I’ve started this time with you in silence, but now I’m up here speaking–I recognize that God is calling me to speak, and I pray that after this, God will give me and you all wisdom to know how to act. As Christians, we know that we can take the time to pray, and to lament, and to seek after God, but we also know that faith without works is dead.”
Silence should lead to action, but I worry that the constant need our culture feels to share our voices, even when we don’t know what to say, even when we are unqualified to speak, encourages us to not be thoughtful about what it is we share and do. As a culture, we need to stop valuing our own voices so highly.
To constantly place ourselves above others and view our own word as the most important thing, we forget our proper standing in this world. We are meant to value our neighbors above ourselves, and most importantly, honor God. Apathy, not speaking out, and being complacent in the face of injustice is never okay, but to assume that silence implies such actions is wrong. Silence has so many different meanings and our culture is losing the nuance of this word.
I am not arguing against those who cry out against silence as a sort of perpetrator of injustice, but rather offering a plea for caution. The way that language is used shapes its very meaning, and I fear that our current treatment of silence runs the risk of losing good forms of silence. Silence as a spiritual discipline is such a beautiful thing that actually works toward, not against injustice.
Pictured: Jasmine Rupani, author.