The Power and Presence of Silence

I recently watched a wonderful South Korean film titled The Way Home, a 2002 movie with English subtitles. It tells the story of a spoiled boy from Seoul being forced to spend time with his mute grandmother in a peasant village. The boy is aggressively rude and utterly self-centered. The mute grandmother, on the other hand, is hard-working, patient, generous, and humble to a fault. Years of physical labor have caused the grandmother to be permanently stooped over at the waist, with gnarled fingers and toes. The boy is addicted to video games and is enamored by the latest television characters. The grandmother meditates before the valleys and mountains of the countryside, while in the same landscape the boy can only see a frustrating barrier that prevents him from returning to the joys of city life. We can anticipate where the story is headed, yet tension is held throughout the movie. We know the boy needs to be healed of his spiritual illness because, at present, he lives in a type of hell. Meanwhile, the grandmother, despite her silence and her physical suffering, has become capable of absorbing life’s trials and tribulations with grace. The viewer grows worried that the boy’s tricks and verbal assaults will break the grandmother. This would be earthshattering, and we do not want it to happen. To the movie’s credit, we simply cannot be sure until the story’s end whether or not the boy’s soul will be turned by the grandmother’s silent, simple bearing, even as the boy mistreats her. The movie reminded me that we typically only recognize human dignity when that dignity is threatened. Most acutely, the movie challenged me to consider the power and presence of silence.

My grandfather lived on his Manitoba prairie farm until he was 97 years old. He only spoke German and had failing hearing, so he became a silent icon of a semi-divine character, intimately close to me yet a million miles away. Usually the space he occupied was filled with silence. He spoke very little, was disinterested in trivialities, and he kept his sufferings to himself. Even his own children did not know what to say to this old patriarch. He knew his own mind, bolstered by an ironclad yet gentle faith that gave everything to God. It is hard to relate to people like that if you are filled with the noisy doubt of our postmodern age.

Behind his farm house was a large and beautiful garden surrounded by towering trees, with an apple tree in the middle. It was a place of quiet and peaceful sanctuary. I understood that this garden was a model of the Garden of Eden. Because it fit the mystery and allure of the garden, it was not surprising to me when, in my early teen years, the apple tree was struck by lightning and split in two. The tree appeared dead. Many years later, in the still and silent twilight of an August day, I showed the now-abandoned farm to my newlywed bride. The tree was filled with fruit. Our lives are imbued with the mythical, if we have eyes to see it.

Sometimes, when the grandchildren were gathered around him, my grandfather would play folk and gospel songs for us on his accordion. While he charmed us with the music, it looked like he was lost to memory, remembering the people who had left his life, or were now with God. We would watch his hands handle the instrument, his mouth slightly agape, his eyes focused on an empty space above us, a straw hat on his head. What did he think of us? He was probably worried, for our families had all moved into the town or city, and the Mennonite faith of our agrarian ancestors was being forgotten, or at best, watered down by the fast pace of city life and urban values.

My grandfather spent his final two years in a nursing home, deaf and blind. He would sit in an armchair during the day, resting in silence. “Why doesn’t Jesus take me home?” he once asked in German. He remained patient, seeking to understand. I suppose one reason Jesus kept him alive was so that I could visit him one last time, in order to learn something about the wonder of life and the reality of death. Seeing this noble old man reduced to a meditative state, wearing fuzzy blue slippers and at the mercy of the caregivers, was hard for me. I felt his dignity clearly, and I was reduced to tears.

The pain of Mennonite history had an effect on some of my uncles and aunts. The older ones did not know how to speak with me, so they were often silent. I mistook their silence for a lack of intelligence. I would privately sneer at their simple ways, or ignore them. Now they have all passed away, and as an aging man myself I feel their loss. Something rich and vibrant was here that is now gone. Sometimes I was able to live in the presence of my uncles, aunts and cousins fully, for which I am thankful, but usually I did not. My haughty attitude wasted precious time. All I can do now is face my day and not make the same mistake with the people I will meet today. Every person is a living icon of the divine among us.

It is in silence that we remember, and hear the voices of the past. We are under no obligation to remember or to listen. Silence quietly and humbly invites us to listen. 

There were times growing up when I was bored. This was in an age before the cellphone and the internet. Back then, boredom offered only two possibilities: either you could take a walk in the woods and be confronted by silence, or you could rest meditatively in silence, mulling over memories, day-dreaming, or even contemplating questions of God, heaven, morality, and the meaning of life.

In my work, I occasionally take high school students by train to the James Bay coast, where they perform plays and music for students who rarely have visitors from the outside world. There are no roads leading to where we go. It is a wonderful moment when the train enters the Northern Ontario bush and cellphone coverage ends. Teenagers put their phones away and become bored. In silence they gaze out the train windows, watching trees and rivers pass, hypnotically. Or they turn to one another or play cards in the dining car.

Where I live, in the winter it grows dark by 4:30 pm. After supper I put on a headlamp and ski off into the night with my dog in the lead. It is very quiet in minus 20 or 30 Celsius. In the silence I remember my life, and I speak with God. Sometimes I push the distance and the time, heading deeper into the bush despite the frigid temperatures. The further I ski away, the less I dwell on the noise and haste that awaits me in the world. It is as though the forest is a prayer labyrinth at a monastery, or on the floor of a European Cathedral.

Sometimes I meditate in the silence of the chapel, where my office is. The phone rings, or students yell in the hall, but I am at ease before the tabernacle, resting in silence. “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

This summer I went hiking in the Rocky Mountains with my children. Above the trees and the scree, I sat in the sun and gazed over the deep valleys and the snow-capped summits. Slivers of silver waterfalls filled the creases in the cliff faces. As a breeze whistled through the trees below me, I thought of Elijah on the mountain, hearing the voice of God in utter silence. The Spirit who was present at the creation of the universe could be sensed lingering in this mountain scape.

On the way down the mountain we met a brown bear, its back end on the path, its head buried in the bushes where it was happily digging up grubs. It was twenty yards ahead of us, blissfully unaware of our presence. We backed up a few yards and I hollered out a loud hello, hoping to scare it off so we could continue our descent. Instead, the bear began to follow us as we slowly moved back up the mountain in retreat. We came upon a dried river bed, my children picking up large stones, me holding a can of bear spray. “Maybe you should have stayed quiet,” my daughter wondered aloud, trying to respect my age and paternal authority. As we waited, the bear lost interest in us and veered off the path. It didn’t make a sound as it moved slowly through the trees and bush. Later we would laugh at the whole experience.

Almost a week after summiting the mountain, poison ivy flared up on my arms and legs. I had encountered the plant in the mountains, and now had to endure the discomfort of the burn while staying at my mom’s house. I slept on the floor of her living room. Early in the morning, and late at night, missing home, I would meditate. In this silence I found a way to master my discomfort and my impatience. This taught me something about humility. Whether or not I deserved to suffer, I was at least reminded that I am not invincible, and that I need to accept what I am not in control of. This realization also helped me learn to better accept my mom and her foibles. In the evenings we would sit together quietly, and build words on the Scrabble board. We had never been closer.

The Way Home invited me to meditate on the realities of my life. I suspect anyone who reads books carefully will enjoy the movie because the story is told with patience, trusting the tempo and strength of the silent grandmother. The movie is also a reminder that young people who have lost their way may at times be best handled with a silence born of faith, patience, and love. Sometimes our words are lost on a soul grappling to find the way. It is in these moments that we measure our words, and measure the silence between them. Who among us can declare they know the way of the Spirit and the silent flow of grace that binds us to the mystery of existence?

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