The phone goes straight to voicemail. The flashing three dots pop up on the text conversation, but then vanish. Gmail reminds you it’s been eight days since you sent that email (not that you needed a reminder). Each of these scenarios is its own little version of hell. As humans, we are made to be in relationship with one another. But whenever communication goes cold between two parties — when the job interview is never followed up, when the fun first date inexplicably ghosts you, when the adult daughter estranges herself from her family — the silence is not only deafening, it’s disastrous.
“Silence is golden” has its place in the world (the unabridged version being speech is silver, but silence is golden). The saying is a useful reminder that it’s often far better to listen than to speak. The counterargument is that, when it comes to relationships, silence can be a way of withholding love. After all, conversation is how we relate to each other. Studies have shown that talking to your baby is crucial for their brain development and emotional maturity. Simple conversations with the elderly can vastly improve their cognitive functions and enhance their health. Nine out of ten counselors will tell you that communication is not just important in a healthy marriage, but that it’s everything.
What happens when the conversation goes silent? Nothing all that good. Being ghosted by someone, for example, often leads to confusion, resentment, and a lack of closure. Rather than giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, the first emotions to fill the void are often fear, anger, guilt, and condemnation. Rather than assume the person is busy or that they simply forgot to put up a vacation responder, we assume that they have either changed their mind about us or have abandoned us for better, more interesting people. Hardly ever is silence accepted at face value.
We all have our own versions of over-interpreting silence. Whenever my wife doesn’t pick up the phone, I assume she’s either been kidnapped or hit by a bus. In Brett Goldstein’s latest standup special, he described his experience falling in love with a woman: all day, the two of them would engage in rapid-fire text conversations but, should at any point she fail to reply immediately to one of his texts, he assumed that she was having an affair. All it takes is silence to drive a man insane.
At its worst, silence can be a form of punishment. Last year, Arthur Brooks wrote about the silent treatment being used as a tactic for nineteenth-century sailors. Confined to an uncomfortably small space day after day, seeing the same handful of people, all it took was one obnoxious person to make life miserable for everyone onboard. Therefore, any offender of social etiquette would be ignored by the rest of the ship. According to records, the silent treatment was “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.” In defense of the weeping strong man, there is a physically painful element to the hurt that silence inflicts. In a recent New York Times article, a professor of psychological sciences reported that the silent treatment activated the same pain regions in the brain as physical pain, saying “It’s not just metaphorically painful, it is detected as pain by the brain.” Since we are wired to communicate with each other, cutting us off from conversation is enough to make us malfunction as people.
We often over-interpret the silence of God. If people never get a response (at least, a response they would expect from God), it may not take long until they assume that he is either dead or, at the very least, mad at us. Did our prayers go to God’s spam folder? Perhaps God left his phone on “do not disturb” mode. Or perhaps he doesn’t care enough to respond? As we wait for a reply, we imagine God doing little more than shaking his head, quietly resenting us for all those times we said his name in vain and coveted our neighbors. “I’ll talk to you when you realize what you’ve done wrong!” we expect him to say, arms crossed and pouting.
So we give up. We try to move on. Searching for connection, we pick up our phones that never disappoint in having something to say. Social media might be equal to a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, but at least it’s better than the deafening silence coming from above. We hope the hum of our busy lives will drown out the terrifying stillness, but the hum will only go so far as to numb the pain, not heal it.
Thankfully, we are not the only ones who have suffered from God’s silence. As he hung on the cross, utterly alone, Jesus called out, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” The silence that followed was deafening. As his onlookers looked skyward, expecting a thunderclap or an army of angels, his Father uttered not a mumbling word. No explanation, no consolation. Nothing at all. Jesus died in lonely confusion, having been given the silent treatment from his heavenly Father. When a son’s call repeatedly goes straight to voicemail, it is hard not to interpret such non-response as either judgment or abandonment. After one last cry of anguish, Jesus fell completely silent. Even his beating heart went still.
And yet, three days later, God broke the silence. With an earthquake, a stone rolled away, and the footsteps of a man escaping a tomb, the voice of God rang out once for all from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth and into eternity itself. After that day, the world we live in is not one of silence, but the abundant melody of life springing out of nothing. The song of the resurrection plays over and over until all the world joins in that triumphant refrain to fill the noiseless expanse of the cosmos with the sound of praise and thanksgiving.
