Holy Silence

By J. Brent Bill

An invitation to experience more fully the life-changing power of sacred silence

For over a decade, J. Brent Bill's Holy Silence has been regarded as a contemporary classic on sacred silence. With warmth, wisdom, and gentle humor, Bill presents the Quaker practice of silence and expectant listening to a wider Christian audience.

FEATURES

• Revised and expanded edition
• Includes new spiritual silence practices
• New section on incorporating holy silence into worship
• Written by one of the most respected interpreters of the Quaker tradition
• Introduces a fresh way of connecting with God

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467445580

J. Brent Bill

J. Brent Bill is a Quaker minister, photographer, retreat leader, and author. He holds an MA in Quaker Studies from Earlham School of Religion (a Quaker seminary) and has been a recorded (ordained to non-Quakers) Friends minister for thirty years. He has also served as pastor in Friends meetings (churches) large and small, rural and urban. After more than eleven years as executive vice president of the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, Bill now travels and speaks across the country serving as the coordinator of a project to seed new Quaker congregations across the United States and Canada. Bill resides in Mooresville, Indiana.

Book preview

Gulley

INTRODUCTION

One fine fall day in 2003, I drove with a friend to a writing conference in eastern Indiana. Now, eastern Indiana is not known to most tourists as must see, especially after the harvest, when the land lies bare. It’s not as traditionally scenic as the leaf-covered hills and valleys of Brown County in autumn. Or as the waterfalls that tumble from soaring cliffs into the Ohio River around Madison, Indiana. Still, to a Midwestern fellow like me, these seemingly flat lands hold a certain charm. Especially on an autumnal blue-sky day when the sun sits low on the horizon and casts golden shadows across the gentle risings and fallings of the farm fields, shorn corn and soybean stalks shining. As we drove I said that the scenery was almost sacramental. Then I changed my wording, dropping the almost. We Quakers believe that every moment, every scene, every action is God-imbued and thus sacramental. If, that is, we learn to quiet ourselves and our soul and partake in this means of grace, this visible rendering of an inner and often invisible work of God.

Throughout the drive my friend and I returned to that conversation. I said I thought I paid attention to the light and shadows and sacramentality of the quotidian Hoosier landscape mostly because of my training in photography. She wondered if my level of attention came more from my being a Friend, with the Quaker emphasis on silence and stillness opening my eyes to things busier eyes could not see. You’re used to paying attention, she declared. And I want to know more.

To be honest, so did I. I wanted the chance to explore this idea of holy silence leading me into a greater awareness of God’s presence around me in all places at all times. One of the ways I explore best is by writing.

By the end of the writing weekend, the seeds for what became Holy Silence: The Gift of Quaker Spirituality had been planted in me as surely as the corn and beans would be in the Indiana soil the next spring. It marked a change in my own writing witness. I found myself sharing from a deeper place than I ever had before. I even became more personally revelatory about my own spiritual life and daily life. And it gave me an opportunity to share with others the Quaker way of silence that shapes my life day by day and minute by minute.

In the years since its publication, I’ve been blessed by people who have shared how my little book touched their lives in good ways. Readers have told me that Holy Silence helped them get centered and quiet in renewed relationship with God, that they found it offering useful information in how to integrate silence into their lives, and that reading it deepened their own spiritual practices.

Such stories humble me. And delight me.

So you can understand why I was thrilled for the chance to revisit Holy Silence and freshen it. While it’s always been one of my favorite books, I often longed for the chance to tweak it and make it better. What you hold in your hands is the result of that good fortune.

One thing that hasn’t changed in this new edition is the inclusion, in chapters 2 through 5, of the Quietude Queries. These queries provide a time-out for reflection. Readers of earlier editions of Holy Silence said they found them helpful because, instead of just reading about an aspect of the Quaker way of silence, the queries offered occasions to actually engage it for themselves.

Queries is the Friends’ practice of examining our souls and seeking clarity. These questions and exercises help us to seek truth about ourselves and our spiritual condition, and to tap into divine insight. Queries guide us in listening for God’s voice in our lives. They are not intended to provide mystical experiences of God, though that may occur.

Quietude means a state of peace and quiet.

These exercises will help guide you in peacefully listening to God’s voice and to your own soul in silence. As you read the Quietude Queries, let your mind and soul fill with words, ideas, or images.

New to this edition is an appendix of silence practices. These include practical steps you can use to experience holy silence in your own faith life.

This little book is an invitation to experience more fully the life-changing power of sacred silence. As Caroline Stephen once said:

Everything, all beauty and rightness, seems to turn upon a right subordination of the outward to the inward, the transient to the permanent, in our lives and thoughts. Yet this right subordination cannot be achieved in a hurry. If we are to learn to assign to the weightiest matters their true place and predominance, we must allow ourselves, or rather we must steadily resolve to secure for ourselves, quietness enough not only to know our own minds, but to listen to the still small voice of conscience, or of God, speaking in our own hearts.

A sacramental silence is one where God gently invites us into the Holy.

CHAPTER ONE

Silence

The Quaker Sacrament

It was Sunday morning, First Day morning, as some Quakers say, and my wife, Nancy, and I were in a rental car headed to the airport after a restful stay at a Vermont country inn. We marveled at the fall colors glowing in the sun, the golds and russets and oranges of the leaves merging into the greens of the valleys. We wound along closed-in, curvy, country roads bordered by rushing streams and waterfalls, and were never able to see more than a few hundred yards ahead of us or a few hundred feet up. For a flatlander from Indiana, the scenery put me close to sensory overload. I was almost looking forward to getting to that airport and flying back to Indiana’s landscape with its gentler risings and fallings and bigger sky.

But we had to make a stop first, at South Starksboro Friends Meetinghouse. We go to meeting most every Sunday, no matter where we are. We do it from habit. We do it because it feeds our souls. And my soul needed feeding that September morn.

South Starksboro Friends Meetinghouse might have been dreamed up by the Vermont tourism council. It is an 1820s-era plain, white, clapboard structure, its rectangular steepleless-ness tucked into a clearing halfway up a mountainside. Tombstones dot the meetinghouse grounds. Slanting autumnal sunlight threw their carvings into stark relief.

We took our obligatory leaf-peeper pictures while Vermonters indulgently smiled on. Then we made our way across the grass, through the front door, over the wood floor, and settled onto the benches. No modern, padded, or comfortable church pews for these simple Friends. No central heating, either. A black wood stove clanked, stoked for Sunday meeting. Afghans and comforters sat stacked on one of the benches for those wanting to ward off the chill. Sunlight softened by clear glass windows wavy with age filled the room. As did God’s glory.

It was a traditional Friends service conducted in silence. This small group numbered less than a tenth of the Quaker congregation we normally worshiped with in Indiana. There was no bulletin, no paid preacher, no choir. There was an old pump organ, but it sat tucked in a corner and needed dusting. Any music or message would arise out of the silence—but only if God’s Spirit led someone to sing or share. The preacher in me looked for a clock—it always hangs where the parson, if not the congregation, can see it. There wasn’t one. In spite of that, we all fell silent at about the same time. Some of us bowed our heads. Others wiggled in the benches for a moment, searching perhaps for a comfortable hollow worn by generations of Quaker backsides. Exterior sound fell away, save for the ticking of the warming wood stove, the popping of burning wood, and the occasional stifled cough.

I looked and saw Nancy sitting on the other side of the room, backlit by sunlight through the window. She sat with head bowed, blue eyes open, and hands folded in her lap. My gaze returned to the wood-planked floor between my feet. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes. Soon interior noise fell away. Thoughts of the late-afternoon flight to Indianapolis, worries about work waiting for me at the office, and the flood of minutiae that usually swamps my mind when outside noise stops, slowly vanished—dropping into a well of holy silence. I let myself be guided into the deep waters of the soul.

That is when it happened. The only thing I can compare it to is the Catholic belief that in the celebration of Mass, Christ is really present through Holy Communion to the assembly gathered in his name. Silence works the same way for Quakers. Friends believe that Christ is actually present—except we have no host to elevate or priest to preside. Rather, we believe that when our hearts, minds, and souls are still, and we wait expectantly in holy silence, the presence of Christ comes among us. That fall day, in the Green Mountains, Jesus was good to his word that, where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them. In the silence, where outer and inner noise ceased, we became what Quakers call a gathered meeting—gathered together and with Jesus. We sensed him in the electrified air. I felt charged with an awareness of the miraculous—the marrow of my bones hummed in holy recognition of the One who had stood at the dawn of creation and called the world into being. And I wasn’t the only one in holy recognition.

Our awareness of the presence of Christ among us changed the hour. Instead of squirming through sixty slow minutes of stale, stagnant silence, we felt that the first chapter of John’s Gospel had come to life in Vermont: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. As if something had been lit deep inside and now shone from our faces, we beheld grace and truth reflected in and through the people around us. We experienced a true Sabbath—free from noise and busyness as we worshiped and were spiritually nourished. Though no outward words were spoken, no formal prayers recited, no music played softly in the background to set a mood, God had worked down into the deepest parts of our hearts, and out to our fingers and toes and noses as well.

Then, too soon, meeting ended. Don, the person next to me, shifted and shook my hand—a sign among Friends that meeting for worship is over. No loud amens or formal benedictions for us. Instead we smiled. For a long while no one said anything. No one wanted to break the holy moment. We sat. But then our humanness broke in. Small talk broke out. Friends asked for news of mutual acquaintances or family back in Indiana. Huddled by the wood box, three men discussed who should close off the woodstove. Still, even in this after-meeting chitchat, we sensed that we were now part of each other and of God in a way we had not sensed just an hour earlier.

Nancy and I had come to Vermont hoping for some respite from eldercare and work. We were leaving with spirits rejuvenated from an experience that had nothing to do with fall foliage. In, through, and out of the holy silence, the Creator had breathed a blessing upon us. Such a waiting silence,

Reviews for Holy Silence

[brentbil · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

People of all faiths and backgrounds are drawn to silence. We yearn for it in these busy and difficult times, but often, when silence becomes available, we don't know what to do with it. For centuries, Quakers have taught that when we are silent, God grants us insights, guidance, and spiritual understanding that is different from what we might realize in our noisy, everyday lives. This book invites readers to discover this and other unique gifts of the Quaker way. It is a satisfying experience and taste of a spiritual tradition unflinching in its dedication to listening for the sounds and voice of God

[kaulsu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not every way of finding the Divine Source fits everyone. Having said that, I can joyously claim that Quaker spirituality resonates with me. Bill's book took me more deeply within than have most current books. He stops at appropriate times and guides the reader to experience a deeper sense of the silence. He adds a welcome glossary at the end, along with a list of quite profound queries. Finally, he gives an added gift of an annotated bibliography. Two quotes that encapsulates the flavor of the book are:1) "Holy silence gives us a way to be with others, helping them wrestle with the large questions of life--why this, why me, why them, why now, why God?" (51).2) "The apostle Paul's exhortation 'not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think' also carries the subtle suggestion that we should think RIGHTLY of ourselves....learning to care for ourselves" (56).

[wrmjr66 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting review of Quaker spirituality and worship as it compares to the more traditional forms.