9th December, 2024

Rachel Muers, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication ​(Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 4.
Image: Danielle-Claude Bélanger, Quebec, Canada, unsplash.com/@dcbelanger
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This quote begins with a text from the New Testament: Revelation 8:1, NRSV.
 
‘"There was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.” Silence is both something we encounter or discover – the silence of a deserted place, an empty room – and something we do, and experience done by others – conversational silences, silences in response to questions. Silence is found, and silence is made; but often these two appear difficult to separate.  Even Revelation’s “silence in heaven” is made by those who fall silent – the angels, the singers, all the others whose voices and sounds have been heard so far – but it is then encountered by the writer and the reader as something that exceeds any of those performances of silence. We hear, not “they fell silent,” but “there was silence.” When we speak of keeping silence, we point to this relationship between silence as a reality we find and silence as a part of our communicative activity; silence, the idiomatic expression suggests, is in some sense “already there,” for us to discover and keep. 

The fact that silence can be treated as both a part of conscious communicative activity and as a feature we discover in the world makes a phenomenological approach particularly helpful [in] an attempt to talk about silence; an approach that centres on silence as something intended and experienced by the human mind, without needing in the first instance to determine its “objective” and “subjective,” its found and made, components.   Examining silence from this perspective can give us a starting point for talking about silence as something not reducible to speech – or sound – or to its absence.'
 
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