This month I’m practicing the virtue of silence and I was sure it would be simple because:

a).  as an avowed introvert, I loooove silence;

b). I deal with some sensory oversensitivity to noise. My open concept high school without walls was an absolute delight (and by delight, I mean disaster). I could partake of not only my own class, but the classes happening 15 feet on either side of my class and those on the other side of the hall as well. Let’s just say that my Algebra II class was a real distraction from the discussion of A Prayer for Owen Meaning happening in the 20th Century American Novel class next door.

But mostly, I thought practicing silence would simple because:

c). I was already sort of practicing silence as part of my temperance practice from last month.

Given how simple silence was supposed to be, I was surprised to run into a big problem: I’m not sure that silence is a virtue.

There are myriad silences to explore and that are beautiful and can show us how to be better humans. But silence can also be ugly and festering. Now take a look Martin Niemöller’s take on silence:

Niemöller was talking about the silence that led to the Jewish Holocaust. That kind of silence is not a virtue, it’s a cowardice born of deep fear and powerlessness and perhaps indifference. The antidote to that fear and powerlessness is to speak up.

 The question of whether silence is a virtue obviously depends on context. The problem, then, becomes how to discern when it’s better to keep silent and when we have an imperative not to be silent. My guess is that if we’re honest with ourselves, our conscience lets us know. As I continue practicing silence this month, I find that I’m paying more and more attention to understanding individual contexts of silence and whether they’re virtuous or not. That contemplation cultivates a wisdom that I’m not sure I have yet. But while I work on it, I’ll leave you with Khalil Gibran’s lyrical advice on the topic:  

What do you hear in the sounds of silence? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Notes:

Image by Khalil Gibran
"File:Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet 12.png." Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. 2 Jan 2019, 03:46 UTC. 8 Nov 2019, 19:12 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Kahlil_Gibran_-_The_Prophet_12.png&oldid=333118154>.

1. Juster, Norton. The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2011. p. 151

2. “Martin Niemöller: ‘First They Came for the Socialists…’” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 30 Mar. 2012, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists.

3. Lourde, Audre. “A Litany for Survival.” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997.

4. Khalil Gibran. “On Talking.” The Prophet. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2005. p. 60