A little less than 2,000 years ago, something really astonishing happened. Well, actually, two astonishing things happened right in a row. Allow me to set the scene. A group of people—mostly fishermen—got into a boat, and as they were crossing a lake, a huge storm unexpectedly swept up. The waves were so huge that they started to capsize the boat. Then the leader of the group stood up and spoke directly to the storm. To the storm! He shouted, “Silence!” And when he did, the storm packed up and went home. Oh, I forgot to mention the first really astonishing thing. Before he spoke to the storm, his friends had to wake up the leader, because he was sound asleep in the hold of the boat—during the middle of the squall.[1]

You know this story, I imagine. It may even feel cartoonish in your mind, a caricature. But for those fishermen on the sea of Galilee, it was probably the biggest freak-out moment of their lives up to that point. Their lives were spent on this lake, so for them to be panicking, you know it had to be a storm of legend. The shocking part to me has always been that it’s in the middle of this storm that Jesus is so at rest he falls asleep. He’s not pretending to be asleep. He’s actually able to tune out the storm. To me, that’s just as astonishing a miracle as changing the weather.

This is the fifth use of silence: rest.

To better understand the magnitude of this story (the humanly repeatable part, I mean), please allow me to ask a seemingly random question: have you ever worn noise-cancelling headphones? It’s a wonderfully strange experience, right? When you turn them on, it’s like the sound you just experienced is suddenly and silently vacuumed from the room—like you rocketed from the city to the countryside in a split second. Here’s why: your headphones aren’t playing a blast of white noise that overwhelms all the background sound. Instead, they’re detecting the actual background noise around you, and then they’re playing the opposite sound waves into your ears. The collision of opposite waves reverses the noise around you, which effectively cancels out the sound, and creates silence.[2]

In this encounter on the sea, Jesus is teaching us something about the nature of rest. The silence of rest isn’t a destination out there, like an anechoic chamber where we can travel away from all people, all ambient noise, a place where we can imagine that the unpleasant parts of our life, the dangerous fringes of the world, don’t exist. That’s not rest; that’s psychosis. Instead, the silence of rest is portable and can be carried and accessed wherever we go. It can be deployed in any setting, no matter the number of people nearby, no matter the intensity of events around us, or even the weather for that matter. The silence of rest speaks like a voice that first listens to the noise and then unravels it by speaking the opposite back. It doesn’t speak the opposite out of revenge; it speaks it in order to make peace with the silence—literally to make peace out of it. We need to stop imagining that healthy silence only exists somewhere else, a destination that we need to travel to and park in. It can come from within and flow out. We might even call it a heart condition. And if we don’t have enough in our heart yet, the person who called out “Silence” to that storm still exists. He’s become equally famous for his invitation: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”[3]

A life raft of health benefits

I’m not sure about you, but I appreciate rest, peace & quiet. In fact, these are a few of my favorite things! Until a few years ago, though, I didn’t prioritize rest. I didn’t schedule it. In some moments of intensity, I forgot it was even a possibility. Now that it’s a more normal part of my daily rhythm, I’m shocked I ever tried to live without it.

After all, silence is good for your health. It’s been scientifically proven that the kinds of silence that lead to rest also bring a huge life raft of health benefits. Lower blood pressure, better sleep patterns, released tension in the brain and the body, and a healthier heart. You even grow new brain cells when you experience silence.[4]

So how do we benefit from this silence, this rest? Do we actually need to take dramatic steps to create silence at the right times? Or is it instead a condition of our spirit, less like what we create or do, and more like who we choose to be? Yes. I’ll start with the spirit.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.”[5] Some of us know just what he means. We could be transported to an anechoic chamber, safe from the many concerns of our life, and still carry those concerns right into the room with us. The bend of our hearts might even magnify them to distended sizes in that kind of isolation.

So, how do we begin to rest if we don’t know how? As T.S. Eliot knew, and wrote into his poem Ash-Wednesday, we must be taught:

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks

Our peace in his will [6]

Caring and yet ultimately not obsessing—that is a condition of the spirit, one Eliot believes can be learned, if only we will listen to the Teacher. Silence itself can descend like peace, once it finds a home in our hearts. And don’t excuse yourself because of your personality type. None of us comes by a silent heart by birth. We all must be taught. We all must learn.

The spirit level of resting

Several years ago, I became convinced that learning to sit still, this spirit level of resting, is the lesson of the Sabbath. The reason I started to learn this was that I grew up in a culture where Sunday was often the busiest day of the week. Just as bizarre was that this version of Christianity I grew up in insisted on calling Sunday “the day of rest.” If that’s your experience too, I’m sorry. This is not the way it’s supposed to be.

In the poetic account of God’s creation of this universe, it’s stated that on the seventh day (the original Sabbath), God rested. In the verbal rhythm of the poem this ends, the meaning is clear: God’s final act of creation in that season was . . . rest. Yes, rest was created just like trout, moss, and nectarines. And somehow, he knew we’d miss it, so the poet makes it clear that God proceeds to announce that every seventh day is meant for the experience of this final and distinct creation. Rest.[7]

I don’t know if you imagine questions like this, but I know I have: what do you think God was up to on that seventh day? I mean, how does God rest? How does someone with the powers of a far holier Aladdin-genie even settle down enough to rest? Well, I imagine, like many other theologians have, that he was spending this seventh day by appreciating what he had just made in the last six. His work. As if respect and rest are inseparable friends. He wasn’t chest-thumping. He was actually being grateful. “That’s good,” he’s been saying all through Genesis chapter one, right after he makes something new. After he made people who bear his image, with all the potential of culture and care that that can mean, he even says, “That’s so very good.”[8]  

God’s rest is a preview. It’s a preview of the reality that he has immense power, but that he doesn’t always have to use it. He’s under no peer pressure, no FOMO, no obligation, no nervous inner drive. Like the retiree who drives a brand-new Corvette under the speed limit, he has nothing to prove. As a reminder, this is the being who actually is in control of whatever he chooses. And he can be at rest; in fact, he regularly chooses to be—which is why Jesus is in the boat.

If this is what the Sabbath means for God, what does it mean for people? I mean, what should we do when we’re choosing not to work? After all, there’s so much to get done! Isn’t it a bit insane to take a whole day off every week, to be so unproductive? Aha. No, it’s actually out of touch with reality to think we’re the one running things. On the Sabbath, we actually get to focus on not doing much of anything; we get to simply be. And we get to appreciate. We get to look around and see the work we’ve done. See the work others have done. And most importantly, we can rest, we can enjoy the silence, because God has already done the most important work of all.

In learning the silence of canvas, we began to realize that we’re not in control of most anything. Rest adds a soft layer to that creative, generative reality by encouraging us to go one step further and practice actually setting our work down. Rest reminds us that we are not only what we do, though that tends to be the second question in any first meeting (“What do you do?”). The universe won’t fall apart when we take a break, which is enough reason to restore our sanity through acting that out. But we don’t just take a rest because it can be done. We rest because we need to be reminded that rest is just as crucial to life as work is. Stretch your work into workaholism and you’ll generate only noise. Check out of work permanently and you’ll generate only silence and deprivation. Commit to a rhythm of both and you have a chance at making music out of both.

The practice level of resting

So, in my own experience and I hope in your own, silence as rest can begin in the spirit and then extend to action. But it can also begin the other way around. If you don’t feel ready for rest, you can start doing it anyway, and convince your feelings through evidence. After all, unless you have a loving person in your life, no one’s going to insist that you rest. You may just have to prioritize it for yourself. 

Here’s one way: you can drive without listening to anything. It’s possible. Not only possible, but good for you. Hey, you can even go old school on a good-weather day and roll down the windows. Enjoy 4 minutes and 33 seconds of whatever sounds happen to be drifting on the breeze. This works on mass transit too, by the way. Maybe not the windows part, but the silence part.

If you look at a screen all day for your work, practice the 20 / 20 / 20 rule.[9] Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. As you might expect, this rests your eyes, it rests your mind, and even allows your whole body to relax (if you’ll let it). You might even try some noise-cancelling headphones. You don’t even need to play anything on them! Just turn on the noise-canceler. Because, as I’ve already shared, it’s been proven that regular doses of silence help you get your best work done.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, you shouldn’t be looking at any screens at least 30 minutes before you plan to go to sleep—and ideally, you should stop even earlier than that. It not only helps you rest more during those 30 minutes, but improves your sleep that whole night.[10] I’ve found the same thing is true about the next day: if I wait to look at any screens for at least 30 minutes after I wake up, my day begins more restfully.

Remember the statistics about how frenetic screens have tricked us into being? (2,400 interactions a day, if you forgot). The way to fight it is to pull a Sabbath on your phone. Tell it: “I can use you. I can even get work done. But I don’t have to. I’m not defined only by my ability to get things done. That’s just one part of who I am. I’m made in the image of a trinity who is great at doing but also at resting. So I’m growing in that too.”

If you’d like something other than pure silence when you rest, did you know that scientists have definitively named the most relaxing song ever? The song— “Weightless” by Marconi Union—was even composed in consultation with sound therapists. You might think the result would be white noise (or brown, or pink). But no. There's an actual sound pattern: this is music, not noise. And when the song is played for listeners, researchers found that it can reduce a person’s anxiety by up to 65%. That sounds good, right?[11]

Here’s the thing. That’s not the only recent scientific discovery about sound and rest. There’s a sound that other scientific researchers have determined to be even more relaxing than “Weightless.” What is it? You already know: it’s silence. When researcher Luciano Bernardi conducted a study in 2006 to determine the physiological effects of music, his most surprising finding came while he continued to measure his subjects’ brain activity between the sounds he played for them. During those brief periods of silence, every one of his dozens of subjects experienced far more physical rest than during any of the sounds, even the most relaxing sounds.[12]

You’re not in control of this world (or your life) and neither am I. As a result, we’re both perfect candidates for practicing the reality that the world doesn’t revolve around us. When we rest, we’re not just reminding our spirits and our minds of our place and the relative importance of our work; we’re also healing our body and restoring our brain. In a world obsessed with doing, there’s almost no better way to turn noise into music than resting.

[1] This account of Jesus asleep during the storm on the Sea of Galilee can be found here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+8%3A23-27&version=NLT.

[2] A description of noise-cancelling technology can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/16/noise-cancelling-headphones-sound-modern-life.

[3] Jesus’s invitation to rest can be found at https://biblehub.com/matthew/11-28.htm.

[4] The health benefits of silence can be found here: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/science-silence-is-really-good-for-you.html, https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-hidden-benefits-of-silence/, and https://www.fastcompany.com/3068168/quiet-doesnt-cut-it-why-your-brain-might-work-better-in-silence.

[5] Blaise Pascal’s thoughts on the inability to sit quietly in a room can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/19682-all-of-humanity-s-problems-stem-from-man-s-inability-to-sit.

[6] T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash-Wednesday can be read here: https://books.google.com/books?id=1r8RrQ4SI1gC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67.

[7] God’s enjoyment and institution of rest can be found here: https://biblehub.com/genesis/2-2.htm.

[8] An overview of the creation mandate (sometimes called the cultural mandate) can be found here: https://tifwe.org/the-mission-of-gods-people-is-found-in-the-cultural-mandate/.

[9] The 20/20/20 rule is described here: https://www.healthline.com/health/eye-health/20-20-20-rule.

[10] The National Sleep Foundation’s recommendations can be found here: https://www.sleep.org/articles/sleep-hygiene/.

[11] An overview of the “world’s most relaxing song,” as well as a link to play it, can be found here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanpassman/2016/11/23/the-worlds-most-relaxing-song/#3f452c892053.

[12] Luciano Bernardi’s study on the physiological effects of music and silence is discussed here: http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence.

Selah

I invite you to create some time to rest. I don’t mean sleep; I mean rest. 

15 minutes should do it, or 20 if you can. Set your timer for whatever length you have, and be compassionate in choosing a gentle sound to signal the end.

First, find and play the song “Weightless” by Marconi Union (it’s toward the end of the chapter above). It will last 8 minutes. Feel free to watch the video of it on YouTube, although I think you’ll find it even more restful to close your eyes instead.

Once the song has finished playing, stay there in the silence. If you like, keep your eyes closed. If your mind wants to imagine or wander, let it—assuming that it’s projecting calm into the theatre of your thoughts. If it’s not calm, let that thought slip away. You can’t go wrong by imagining the sound of the ocean, one more entity that is shockingly powerful and yet so calming.

Your Turn

You need rest. Not just every night, but also as a normal part of the rhythm of every day. Work, and rest. Work, and rest. Here are some ways you can start practicing this use of silence:

●      Consider how you spend the Sabbath day (no matter your religious tradition): how might you use it as an actual day of rest?

●      If you do most of your work at a screen of some kind, begin practicing the 20/20/20 rule (every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to refocus your eyes 20 feet away). You’re not going to remember to do this, so set a notification.

●      If you commute to and from work, run an experiment and determine not to listen to anything on the way home from work. Start with one day, no matter what that day was like. If you take mass transit, and the commute is especially noisy, feel free to put on noise-cancelling headphones, but don’t play anything.

●      Identify where you might be caring too much in your life; in other words, where you might need to rest instead of pretending you have control. Now, set a small goal to practice rest in that part of your life. Decide in advance how you will rest (for instance, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let it go; walk out of the room and focus on something productive; say a prayer for help).

●      Read the book Why We Sleep and then consider how much actual rest you are getting every night.[1] If you are not feeling rested, determine to start getting one more hour of sleep every night. If you haven’t chosen a specific bedtime that you’re honoring, start with that.

[1] Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2017.