The Sound of Silence

"The days are coming," declares the Sovereign LORD, "when I will send a famine through the land-- not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.
Amos 8:11

Amos had grown hoarse pleading with the wealthy farmers in the north of Israel to see that their religious faith had to translate into compassion and fair dealings with the poor – or it was completely fraudulent. He warned them that if they wouldn’t listen to God’s words, God would give them the silent treatment. And that silence would not remain golden for very long. People cannot live without spiritual resources, without answers for the questions of life. Their fears mount and they search desperately for direction.


Echoing everyone’s frantic search for water during the dry season, Amos said people would “stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it”(v.12).   Drought in the soul of the nation is a terrible thing.

Forty years later, in 722, Samaria, the capital, fell to the Assyrians, and 20-30,000 northerners were marched east into exile, never to return to their ancestral home. No prophet rose up among them to counsel and encourage them in Assyria as Ezekiel and Daniel did 170 years later when Judah was exiled to Babylon.

T.S. Eliot and other poets describe a similar time, the spiritual wasteland of the 20th century, a period when there seemed to be no word from the darkness, an age when we are suspicious of religious messages, but still searching for signs. Jesus said, hypocrites search for signs but are unwilling to heed them. Matthew 16:1-4. If we won’t listen, how will we hear God speak?

In their 1964 hit song “The Sound of Silence”, Simon and Garfunkel lament the tragic emptiness of “people talking without speaking;/ people hearing without listening.” In another stanza they plead to no avail,
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” describes “an old man in a dry month … waiting for rain.” He is looking back on his uninspired life, regretting that he had not lived or loved more passionately. He goes on to say,

“Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the Tiger.

When the vitality and potency of Christ is ignored or shrouded in religious ritual, the Word remains infant – which literally means ‘unable to speak’. When we tame the Tiger, there is no other life-giving, youth renewing word for our generation, the years run out and the silence remains.

No wonder Jesus said that if we have ears, we really should listen.”

GraphicsSources
Listening - Choose Success
Exiles - AfricaOntheBlog
Listening - Relating On Line
Tiger - MounainSeer