Last week we sat in silence with John Cage, listening to 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a pianist doing nothing, so the audience could hear everything. That cough two rows back. The radiator ticking. Somebody’s stomach growling. Cage wasn’t hiding from sound. He was making room for it.
This week a different kind of silence showed up in recent research. It is not the kind Cage had in mind.
Psychologists Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl spent fifteen years listening to actual people talk, using audio samples pulled from the ordinary days of more than two thousand participants, none of them performing for a microphone. In 2005, the average American spoke something like sixteen thousand words a day. By 2019, it was under twelve thousand words – a reduction of 28%. That’s a lot of words disappearing from our lives. They titled the study, with a straight face, “Sliding Into Silence.”
It would be tempting to read that and feel a little proud, as if the culture had finally caught up to Cage. Sought out meaningful silence. Learned some discipline. It hasn’t.
Pfeifer and Mehl take care to note what conversations are missing. It’s not the deep ones. It’s not the hard ones. It’s the small ones. Asking a cashier a question about their day instead of tapping a card. Getting directions from a stranger instead of trusting a blue dot. Saying good morning to a neighbor instead of walking past with earbuds in.
And those missing words aren’t being replaced by silence. They’re being replaced by a scroll, a tap, a meme, an emoji. All standing in for a sentence somebody used to have to craft in order to acknowledge the presence of another person.
That is a notable difference. Cage’s silence makes you pay attention. This silence lets you not.
Purposeful silence opens our ears to the room, to the person across the table, to whatever it is we’ve been running from at sixty miles an hour. It is disciplined. It costs something. It is, if we’re honest, often as close to prayer as most of what we call prayer.
But a text or a tap does not make room for meaningful silence. And a meme requires no self-restraint; you have just traded the hard, human work of speaking to someone for the easy work of forwarding something somebody else already said. That isn’t silence. That’s just fewer words, and less of us in them.
Which is exactly the ground the church has been given to stand on. When the crowds were shouting Jesus into Jerusalem and the religious leaders told him to hush them, he didn’t reach for restraint. “I tell you,” Jesus said, “if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40). Creation itself, he’s saying, will not stay quiet. Neither should we.
So here is one question worth carrying into your board meeting this week: what is at stake when we lose our words, when we ‘slide into silence’ in our ordinary lives and interactions? This is not about saying the hard thing instead of staying silent. This is about the small things: whether you build the sentence yourself or forward somebody else’s meme, whether you write the real word or send the simple thumbs-up. Putting yourself forward, in your own words, in ordinary rooms with ordinary people, is what actually builds community. Not the gesture. The word, handed to someone, on purpose.
Howard Thurman used to say there is something in each of us that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in ourselves. The world is getting quieter. It still needs to hear that sound. Somebody has to keep making it, out loud, on purpose. That’s a share of our joyful work.
Thinking about your own day-to-day, where are you using fewer words these days?
What fills the space in those moments? Is it silence, or something else?
Why does Jesus refuse to quiet the crowd in Luke 19:40?
How, as a church board, do you encourage one another to speak or not to speak?
When and where do you see the use of words, in ordinary ways, building community in your congregation? How might you encourage people to keep that up, in a culture that is sliding toward silence?
No Comments