How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Is the Pope Catholic?

Who knew?

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?

If practice makes perfect, and nobody’s perfect, then why practice?

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?[1]

Sometimes silence can be an answer.  In fact, it often is.

If you’re familiar with rhetorical questions like the ones above, you know how they work. They look like questions; they even end with a question mark; but they’re each a boomerang of a statement. The silence after the question mark—when we would normally start to answer—returns us again to the question, where we find the answer hidden all along.

Silence, as you may already have experienced in your life, can sometimes be an answer. It may be the kind of answer that feels nowhere near as clear or humorous as these rhetorical questions. Or it might be clear as a bell, and simply not the answer you were hoping for. It may even feel like the real answer hasn’t come, and perhaps your feeling is correct. But sometimes, more often than we’d expect, the silence itself holds an answer.

I invite you to consider this use of silence from two perspectives: the silence we receive as an answer, and the silence we give as an answer.

The silence we receive

Kevin Hart tells the story of his early years, when he lived in Philadelphia and was struggling to make it as a stand-up comic. He knew money was going to be tight, so his mom told him she would help him with his rent money.

But the first month came and went, and no rent money arrived. So he called his mom and asked about it. She responded: “Have you been reading your Bible?”

Kevin shrugged it off, convinced his mom was simply unwilling to help him out. So the next month, when two months’ rent was due, he called and asked again. “When you read your Bible,” she insisted, “then we’ll talk about your rent.”

Frustrated, Kevin decided to follow her advice. When he opened the Bible his mom had given to him earlier, six rent checks fell out.[2]

Now, even though it’s true, this is a dangerously kitschy story, an analogy that may connect with your life in only a sliver—if at all. However, it’s also an eloquent exaggeration of what happens when we ask a question and don’t receive the answer we expected (or perhaps no answer at all): we can choose to get frustrated, or we can choose to explore the silence as if it is in reality part of the answer, possibly even all of it. 

This idea, by the way, this active reflection back on our own seemingly unanswered questions, is at the heart of patience. Patience, as I’ve heard my wife say many times to our children, isn’t fuming, just with our mouth shut. It’s choosing to be happy while we wait. It’s understanding that some of our questions may already have as much of an answer as they’re meant to. Patience shifts into active mode when you begin to suspect that a magic trick may have been performed, and we’re still asking for something we already have. Where is it? Is it in our pocket? Up our sleeve? Behind our left ear? This kind of patience looks much more like curiosity than like resignation.

Philosopher William James calls this decision to move forward “acting as if,” which some have unfortunately stereotyped as “fake it until you make it.” If you long for something, and haven’t received it yet, how might you act if you already had it? What might you do differently, or do next? The very momentum of acting as if the answer has come is often what we need to move forward.[3]

As I thought about silence as answer, I remembered a pattern I’ve spotted in films about space. Again and again, characters find themselves trying to use a 2-way radio to communicate with mission control, or with their fellow astronauts, but hearing no response. Are they being heard? Does the silence on the other end mean death? Or disconnection? Are they just talking to themselves? As space movies have gotten more sophisticated over the last decade, this seeming one-way radio has started to sophisticate plots in new ways.

For instance, take Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), a space traveler in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. In one time-bending scene, Cooper visits a planet on which time moves much faster (relative to the Earth) because it’s near a black hole. He and his team are there for less than an hour, but by the time they exit its orbit and return to the main shuttle, those back on Earth have aged more than 20 years. Cooper and his teammates are eager for news, so they begin to catch up on the news of the last two decades on Earth. Cooper realizes, while watching his own personal backlog of messages, the increasing fear from his son Tom that no one is listening. In one early message, Tom shares that he’s decided to marry. In another, soon after, he shows off his young son to his dad. Then, he apologizes for the delay in a next message: Grandpa has died, and they have buried him next to Tom’s wife and their young son, inexplicably dead between the silences.

“You’re not listening to this, I know that,” Tom tells his father. “All these messages are just . . . drifting out there in the darkness. Lois said I should let you go, and uh, so . . . I guess . . . I’m letting you go.”[4]

Of course Cooper is listening. Just like we are as viewers of the film, he’s listening now, right now. Not in Tom’s now, but still . . . he’s listening, as someone both in and out of time. This thread of Tom’s message has drifted out into space, an unmoored canoe. But it has also found its intended recipient. It has been heard. It will still make a difference.

In 2013 (the previous year), Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón released his own film set in space. Gravity imagines a disaster in space that maroons astronaut Ryan Stone (played by Sandra Bullock). An asteroid hits the shuttle she’s working to repair and sends her hurtling through space, away from her only fellow astronaut, Matt Kowalski (played by George Clooney). Shortly after the crash separates her from him, she drifts. And as she drifts, she calls out for help, again and again: “Houston, do you copy? Anyone? Please copy . . . please.” No one responds. Not Houston. Not Matt. No one.[5]

In a typical space film, this would be the end of that character’s story. But for Ryan, it’s only the beginning. From this point, she goes on an adventure that is as much spiritual as it is a literal journey through space. Her beliefs are challenged radically, and she begins to grow as a person—enough that we reach a scene in which she is huddled in a Russian spacecraft, and receives an unexpected guest. She has resigned herself to simply embrace her fate and die. But then Matt reappears outside the hatch and comes to join her in the cockpit. He informs her that the Chinese space station is not far, and that she should use the landing jets in order to take off. Even though these are new thoughts to her, a viable path forward, she begins to resist.

“Do you want to go back, or do you want to stay here?,” he asks, empathetically. “There’s no one up here who can hurt you. . . . But still it’s a matter of what you do now. If you decide to go, then you gotta just get on with it . . . You gotta plant both your feet on the ground and start living life.” After a moment, there’s silence.

As Ryan looks up, she realizes Matt is gone and that he had never been there. She has been hallucinating. Or has she? Through that conversation—real or most probably imagined— she gained new information. She learned what she needed to do in order to heal, but also how to literally move forward as well. It was at this moment that I realized it: these radio calls, out into space, pleading, asking for help, and hearing only the silence . . . these are prayers. Or at least, this is just about the closest depiction of prayers you could commit to cinema, symbolically.

Cooper’s son and Ryan believe no one is hearing them. They believe they’ve been abandoned. And yet somehow, they come to realize that someone has not abandoned them. That someone may be listening. In fact, that they are. It just may not be the person on the other end of the broken line.

This is why, in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, the main character Rodrigo prays and prays and prays, but receives only silence. That is, until the very last moment, the eleventh hour, when he’s being forced by the shogun to apostatize and step on an image of Jesus. As he looks at the image on the ground, he finally hears it: the voice.

Come ahead . . . it’s alright. Step on me. I understand your pain. I was born into this world to share man’s pain. I carried this cross for your pain. Your life is with me now.[6]

My friend Chris once told me that God sometimes gives us silence as an answer to our prayers because he wants us to keep traveling on the same path as the last answer he gave. He doesn’t have a new direction to give us; the earlier one still applies. So if you find a prayer seemingly unanswered, you might ask yourself, “What was the last answer?”

These moments of agonied prayer, of crying out for help while you’re nearly capsizing, may feel like the opposite of funny, but these moments of silence as answer are just as circular as those rhetorical questions we saw earlier. The silence returns us to the questions themselves. They return us to the present. They return us to what we already have, what we’ve already been given, and sometimes, to the answer already hidden in the now.

Sometimes it even leads us to a condition philosophers call aporia. Essentially, the term describes a mental impasse, a space we reach where a solution may exist but is beyond us.[7] It is a place where words fail and cease to help. The philosopher George Steiner describes it this way in his essay “Silence and the Poet”:

[I]t is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of statement: light, music, and silence, which gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and unfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God.[8]

Silence in the face of an answer we have longed for but believe we have never received is entirely appropriate. Speaking into such a space would be an exercise in futility. We’re reminded of our humanness, which has its glories but also its limits, its borders. As a result, aporia is a silence that both puts us in our place, and is the place where we are put.

The silence we (should) give

When we begin to practice listening for an answer in the silence, we may also begin to recognize the places in our life where we too should be giving silence as our answer. As the Dalai Lama has said, “Silence is sometimes the best answer.”[9]

This is a message we need to hear in our era, when it is so easy to become the online trolls we dislike so much. Today we can fire off an email, a text, a post, or a response from the privacy and relative safety of our lives, and not be there when it explodes directly into the heart of another human being. When damage like this is done, it doesn’t primarily matter so much that that other human being was the one who “started it.” That other person is not us, and not our responsibility. So what matters is that we joined them in the brawl.  As Groucho Marx reminds us, “Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”[10] What arguers often need from us is our silence.

Instead of that hurtful argument someone’s trying to lure you into—the one where it’s impossible for anyone to “win,” give silence. When a troll posts an inflammatory comment on the very article you just treasured, give silence. When you stumble across an outrage someone expresses on social media or email, instead of the slightly holier outrage you’re about to respond with, give silence.

Yes, I suspect what you’re thinking. So I’ll address it. When you are finally able to respond regularly from a place of health and help, consider also giving more than silence.  But you’ll probably find in these moments that it’s best to begin with silence, with a much healthier dose of it than your instinct supplies. The silence itself will help you find the wisdom you require to give anything more than silence. Sometimes as a result, our silence and the wisdom that comes from it, enables a completely different kind of answer from the other person. Sometimes it helps us realize what they are actually ready to hear.

Consider, for instance, the Danish politician Öslem Cekic. In 2007, Öslem was elected to be the first female MP in Denmark with a Muslim immigrant background. Soon after, she realized that she was a target for hate mail. She had earned her position fairly, so she might have chosen to joust with each comment from a place of conviction. Instead, she responded in a revolutionarily different way.

“[At first,] I never answered,” she explains. “I’d just delete the emails. I just thought that the senders and I had nothing in common. They didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand them.” That’s good silence as answer, for starters. But it didn’t end there.

Then one day, a friend suggested something radical: calling up the harassers and visiting them in person. After overcoming her sense of shock, Öslem agreed and decided to start with the one who had sent her the most hate mail. To her great surprise, the man answered the phone, and agreed to meet, provided he could check with his wife first. When they met at the man’s house, she ended up staying two and a half hours. “We had so much in common,” she remembers with great surprise. And it launched her into what she named hashtag dialoguecoffee.

Hundreds of conversations later, she shares her findings:

“I have made it a rule to always meet them in their house, to convey from the outset that I trust them. I always bring food because, when we eat together, it is easier to find what we have in common and make peace together.”[11]

Is she the only one who leaves the meeting with more actual peace in her heart? Not at all. There is often a breakthrough where the other person, frustrated because they don’t think they have any influence, realize that they have already been exercising their influence—through hate. That now, they can exercise it for good. This breakthrough began through Öslem’s silent answer, and it unfolds, as you might expect, through the silence of listening.

Giving silence as an answer, and then allowing it to lead to a new kind of listening has helped Öslem to realize that silence can be disarming. In effect, it can take the weaponized silence right out of the hands of those who wish to dehumanize. After all, it takes two to tango.

Imagine if the world had more of silence-as-answer instead of the never-ending arm-wrestle of noise. If you wish to see that change in the world, you can be it.

[1] These rhetorical questions come from a variety of sources. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” comes from the film The Sound of Music (1965). The line about “why practice?” comes from Kurt Cobain (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/115450-practice-makes-perfect-but-nobody-s-perfect-so-why-practice). H. L. Mencken is responsible for the comment about marriage as an institution (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85277-marriage-is-a-wonderful-institution-but-who-would-want-to). And the soliloquy about Jews being as human as anyone else comes from William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice).

[2] Kevin Hart has recounted this story on numerous occasions. This account is based on the version he told to Oprah Winfrey, found here: https://www.christiantoday.com/article/comedy-star-kevin-hart-recalls-his-moms-brilliant-strategy-to-make-him-read-the-bible/105276.htm.

[3] William James’s idea of acting “as if” (not to be confused with the expression popularized by the film Clueless) comes from his lecture “The Will to Believe,” described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe.

[4] This scene from Interstellar can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoLkabPK3YU.

[5] These scenes from Gravity can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV-UEca2W9U and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EThczHxvjKo.

[6] Though the original version of Jesus’s breaking of the silence is found on page 183 of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, cited earlier (chapter five, note three), this version is taken from Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation. The scene can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXmubA7z_Ew.

[7] The philosophical idea of aporia is discussed here in the context of Socrates, who aimed to achieve it in his interlocutors frequently: http://thereitis.org/socrates-1-4-aporia-and-the-wisdom-of-emptiness/.

[8] George Steiner’s thoughts on silence come from his essay “Silence and the Poet,” in his volume Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, which can be viewed here: https://books.google.com/books?id=7jBwCP7PE7IC&pg=PT49&lpg=PT49&dq=george+steiner+%22language+does+have+its+frontiers,+that+it+borders+on+three+other+modes+of+statement:+light,+music%22&source=bl&ots=LVv1806F35&sig=ACfU3U2wmzcwAdRpmnrmk5JCrI--l52shg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPy7PHmbHnAhVEOKwKHWk4AsAQ6AEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=george%20steiner%20%22language%20does%20have%20its%20frontiers%2C%20that%20it%20borders%20on%20three%20other%20modes%20of%20statement%3A%20light%2C%20music%22&f=false

[9] The Dalai Lama’s thoughts on silence as answer are referenced here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3354-silence-is-sometimes-the-best-answer.

[10] Groucho Marx’s thoughts on speeches made in anger are found here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/17/angry-speech/.

[11] Öslem tells her story in a TED Talk, here: https://www.ted.com/talks/ozlem_cekic_why_i_have_coffee_with_people_who_send_me_hate_mail?language=en.

Selah

Take a few minutes to consider each of the following questions, in your own silence. After you’ve pondered them, I invite you to journal about your own thoughts, and even to act on them.

Where have I received silence when I wanted an answer? Is it possible that I might already have an answer? Or part of an answer?

Where, specifically, could I begin to give silence as an answer?

Your Turn

Everyone has received silence as an answer, and everyone faces moments where silence is the right answer. Here are some practical suggestions to help you continue practicing this use of silence:

●      Identify—specifically—where you are experiencing silence in your life right now, silence where you want an answer. Write these down in your journal. Give yourself permission to write down both the question and the kinds of answer you’ve been hoping for. Then give it some space, at least a day. When you come back to your journal, play angel’s advocate: what answer may you already have received, by the mere fact of not receiving the answers you expected?

●      Identify where you are most likely to give an answer that is unnecessary, unloving, or not your place to give. Is it in conversation, perhaps with a specific person or a specific group of people? Is it online, in your work Slack, or on a particular social media platform? Determine to take a ‘fast’ from answering in that setting; in other words, for as long as you can (an hour at first, perhaps, or a day), determine that you will not give an answer of any kind in this setting, or to this person, unless you are specifically asked for one.