Listen to this: [silent count to three!] That’s silence. There are eyes widened in horror across the table from me right now; that’s what broadcast professionals call “dead air” – the ultimate radio no-no!
In sixteen-fifties London, there was a devout baker, who’d memorized the whole of the New Testament in Greek, up to Revelation, chapter eight, verse one. Why, you ask, did he stop there, just before the end of the Bible? Was there only so much capacity in his head? Or is the clue in the verse? Revelation 8:1: “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
It’s well seeing our godly Greek scholar was a baker, not a minister; we ministers have boundless faith in words. Silence isn’t something we do easily.
And as for politicians… Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney the other night were meant to be locked in debate, word-to-word combat for the American Presidency. The one, with everything to lose, seemed tentative, the other more animated, though bearing the stamp of much prep with his staff, each desperate not to say the wrong, campaign-destroying thing, yet each having to say something…
What do you say when there’s nothing to be said? The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the trauma of his young experiences ministering to bereaved folk. Schooled in theology, ordained to the ministry, he still couldn’t find the right words – or any words at all. He could only sit with people in their grief and pain. It took him a long time to realize that this was all right. Sometimes, we don’t have the words. We can only sit, in solidarity, in a silence that points beyond itself to God, in the faith that when the time comes, God will break the silence.
The Manchester funerals of two selfless policewomen; the disappearance of 5 year old April Jones in Machynlleth; I’ve been very short of words this week. Whether we come from a direction of faith or not, sometimes, we just have to sit in the silence… Sometimes, that’s what faith is.
Loci Communes 
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