Quoting Silence, September 2024:
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A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline. |
The first week of each month has a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the text below it. In other weeks, the short quote is taken from a longer one by the month's author, found below the image. The last week of the month has a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images.
Rachel Muers, our author for September, is a life-long Quaker, a current member of the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, and an academic theologian whose first book, from which this month's quotes are taken, delves deeply into philosophy and ethics and is a profound and challenging read: definitely not for the faint-hearted!
You can read more about Rachel Muers' book, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
You can read more about Rachel Muers' book, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Audio resources
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For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's short quote, click play on the image. To pause and restart click the same place.
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An audio guided Lectio Divina for the longer quotes. Click play on the image above. Allow 10-15 minutes for this. For a text version, click the button.
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Monday 2nd September , 2024
Rachel Muers, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 4.
Image: Harald Pleissnig, Klangenfurt, Austria, unsplash.com/@pliessnig
Rachel Muers is a cradle-Quaker, born into a Quaker family and remaining deeply committed to this community , and identifying within it as a Christian - which not all Quakers do - throughout her life. You can find out more about the Quakers here and about Woodbrooke, which offers lots of wonderful online courses and events rooted in silence, here.
After 15 years at the University of Leeds, where Rachel was Professor of Theology, in 2022 she was appointed as the Chair of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh - a post which is one of the oldest at the University, going back to 1620. It is incredible to know that she is the first woman to hold this post in over 400 years! This achievement indicates something of the high esteem with which Rachel is regarded within the academic theological community, and gestures towards the significance of her writing in the area of the relationship between modern Christian doctrine and ethics. You can watch her hour-long inaugural lecture for this post, 'Divine Among the Humanities: "Idle Decoration" or "Water of Life"?' by clicking here.
Rachel describes herself as a theologian who is 'passionate about the importance and relevance of our subject' within the context of both wider society and academia and, in seeking to speak into these different communities, 'tries to listen across boundaries - disciplinary, confessional, and institutional'. She has written and researched extensively on both twentieth century Christian history and on developing new responses from within theology to urgent, contemporary questions. A prime example of this was her role as the Principal Investigator for a research project, 'Vegetarianism as Spiritual Choice in Historical and Contemporary Theology', and the book of collected essays which emerged from it, Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2008): see here.
Those of you who would be interested in finding out a little more about Quaker theology in particular might like to view her 45 minute 2023 George Richardson Lecture, 'The Seed and the Day of Small Things: Finding Power & Powerlessness in Quaker Theology', which you'll find here.
For a shorter and easier to access offering from Rachel, and particularly for those who enjoy art, you might like to explore her virtual exhibition for the Visual Commentary on Scripture project. Rachel's contribution, 'Handwork', focuses on three images that depict hands, for which she provides written commentaries, all of which you can hear narrated by another contemporary academic theologian, Ben Quash. See here.
You can find a list of books by Rachel here, but be aware that they are all are intended for scholars in theology and ethics and so will be a dense and demanding read.
Monday 9th September, 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
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on page 4 of Rachel Muers' book. To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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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.'
Monday 16th September, 2024
Rachel Muers, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 11.
Image: Denise Sonnemberg, Lisbon, unsplash.com/@dsonnemberg
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 11-12 of Rachel Muers' book. To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'Silence is neither the absence of speech nor its equivalent. It does not differ from utterances in the way that they differ one from another, and it does not differ from them as simply their negation or their absence, and yet it is in some way related to them. A very similar account of the relations of “difference” between God and creation underlies the practice of apophatic theology* – not simply denying all creaturely attributes of God, but denying even their negation.
The paradox here is that to say silence is in some way “like” God is apparently to say nothing of what God is “like.” It is, rather, to indicate how God’s nature transcends our way of comprehending it. More than this, it is, within the patristic and medieval traditions of negative theology, to say that God’s nature is as such incomprehensible; not, then, that we happen not to have the right set of verbal or conceptual tools, but that the subject matter itself [i.e.God] cannot be spoken or conceived. Saying that God is silent, or that “nothing is so like God as silence,” is, for these theologians, not only saying something about our own inability to comprehend God; it is saying something about who God is in Godself, even if it is a paradoxical “something,” a something that does not enable us to claim comprehension of God.'
*Apophatic theology (also known as 'negative theology') is a theological approach that emphasizes describing God by negation — stating what God is not rather than what God is. It holds that because God is transcendent and beyond human comprehension, any positive descriptions or concepts we might apply to God are inherently limited and inadequate. Apophatic theology is often contrasted with cataphatic theology ('positive theology'), which attempts to describe God by affirming divine attributes, such as 'God is love' or 'God is omnipotent'. These two approaches are seen as complementary in many religious traditions.