Say Less

The hospitality of silence

Over the years, I’ve written quite often about hospitality, especially as a call for Christians. Maybe this is why I find myself writing obliquely about this topic this month: last week, about the hospitality we must show to our real lives; today, about the hospitality we demonstrate in inhabiting and extending silence. I don’t think these are distortions of true Christian hospitality, which author Christine Pohl describes, in Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, as always involving a “moral component.”

I grew up in a home where hospitality was more occasional than frequent. Yet somehow, I learned to instinctively yearn for a more generous sharing of ourselves and our stuff. Even as a child, I can remember the delicious feeling of being invited to someone’s home for a meal, to know the honor of being a guest at someone’s table. I have always loved the din of human community, a reminder of what is woven together in the vulnerable exchange of words.

But as I’ve already indicated, this isn’t a post about tables and conversation, though I may love nothing more than gathering with people I love and lingering long over empty plates and candles that have burned down low. This is a post about another kind of hospitality—about a hospitality that makes room for the silences that are never more urgent than now. Silences in which we find God. Silences in which our neighbor appears to us as the specter of the Macedonian man in the Apostle Paul’s night vision, “Come and help us.”

The Scripture tells us that God is to be found in hushed places. Though his voice can thunder, it’s often turned down to a quiet whisper. God does not usually bluster into our lives noisily and demand our attention. We make room for God by making room for quiet, which I know can be a devastatingly hard truth for those of us in noisy seasons who cannot turn down the volume on our lives. Still, I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t moments we can seize: to pause, to sit in a small pool of quiet, to say, even if haltingly, Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.

Yet here’s something more about an unexpected practice of hospitality. Tending a little patch of quiet, in daily life, to commune with God can become a generative practice. The quiet we learn to inhabit can enlarge and become a quiet we learn to extend to others, as a grace.

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

When we stop talking, we make generous room for others. To feel what they feel. To say what they mean. Maybe even to allow themselves to cry. Is this what happened to me recently, when the parents of a close friend made themselves available to listen to my indecision regarding the future care of my mother? I blubbered on, and they simply listened, nodded, and murmured kind words to indicate that they were still with me.

I confess that I am only recently learning the good of observing some downbeats of silence in a conversation. In fact, my husband would say that one of my worst habits is interrupting him. But it’s not just interrupting my husband that is a common vice. It’s also the aggressive curiosity I turn on others, misunderstanding that my insistent line of questioning prevents the quiet that might be a truer expression of love than probing inquiry.

If the world is a ceaselessly clamorous place, shouldn’t our company be a small respite? What might others discover in the pasture of quiet we tend for them?

Here are a couple of exercises for practicing the skill of generous quiet in the context of human community. These are skills I’m trying to get a little better at. First, notice when your own emotional reality dominates a room, a relationship, a conversation. Are you so busy venting your frustration, your anger, your sadness that you can’t make room to rejoice with those who rejoice? Or, by contrast, is your thoughtless cheerfulness getting in the way of mourning with those who mourn? We practice hospitality when we make room for another person—and another person’s reality. We receive them as they are and don’t expect them to conform to our emotional state.

Second, simply make room for the other person to talk more. This doesn’t simply mean you should ask more questions. Rather, consider that a conversation requires not just words but pauses. Forego the impulse to abbreviate the pauses and close the awkward spaces. Instead, let those spaces open up. Maybe your friend’s voice drops off—and before you take the baton of conversation from her hand, she starts to speak again. Maybe what she adds, after the pause, is the really important thing. Maybe you resist offering advice or turning the conversation back to yourself. Maybe you simply hold up a mirror to her reality. That sounds really hard. Or, you must be so happy!

Like any skill, good listening—and generous, non-anxious presence—will have to be practiced. And as Pohl writes, “Almost all insist that the demands of hospitality can only be met by persons sustained by a strong life of prayer and times of solitude.” In quiet company with God, we can learn to become people whose own quiet company heals.