A meditation on silence and listening for the voice of God.
Photos by Colin Hoogerwerf
Our world is noisy. It hasn’t always been that way—at least if you consider that for much of the history of the earth, there were no creatures with the ability to sense sound. But there have always been vibrations, which after all is what sound begins as. For a long time those vibrations sent soundwaves crashing, one upon another through the air, but there was no membrane for them to crash into and no neurons to make sense of the amplitude or frequency of those waves. Then, some early creature found a new way to sense the world. And since then the world has erupted in sound. Creatures call out in their various ways to find each other, to warn each other, or to say something about themselves to the world.
Several million years ago, humans added our particular voices to mix, and then also the sounds of rock upon rock, metal upon metal. The noise we’ve brought to the world is not only outside of us but within us. We can’t say whether that is new to our time since we can’t enter the minds of early humans, but humans must have begun to fill their minds with the sound of their thoughts soon after language developed. So I suspect that inner noise has been around for a while. What is new, is a world that never allows for the quieting of those thoughts. We are constantly barraged with a world which wants something from us and which screams at us to move faster, do more, be better. The voice inside of us yammers away.
I recently went from one of the nosiest places in the world, from a standpoint of pure amplitude (and shown by the fact that over 750,000 noise complaints were submitted in 2024) to one of the quietest. In the span of a two hour train ride I went from New York City, where six-story fully electronic billboards blasted messages about the newest gadgets and secrets to happiness, to the Adirondack Mountains, which of course has a lot fewer people to be hitting metal upon metal. Back in the city, even 17 floors above the street, the night was filled with constant sound, sirens and car horns, and the constant humming and whining of machines, gears, fans. The quiet of the Adirondack night wasn’t void of sound though, it was a different kind of sound. A barred owl called through the night, the rain dripped, and the beams in the log cabins creaked occasionally, moved by some unseen force.
Our experience of noise is a filtered experience. All of our sensory input comes into our brain in a mass of data. There is far too much information to be able to process it all. And so we have, over the course of our evolutionary history learned how to attend to only what is most important. Much of that work is done unconsciously. We quickly adjust to new inputs without being aware of it. We don’t notice the hum of the air conditioner until it is turned off. We can sit in a crowded coffee shop across from a friend and we are able to focus on their particular voice even as dozens of other conversations happen at similar distances from us. (I’ve heard that noise cancelling headphones have actually made it harder for some people to do this filtering, since they spend so much time letting the technology do it for them.)
But even with the noises that do exist in the Adirondacks, the soundscape of woods and mountains allow for a new kind of attention. At first, the wet, early spring, seems to be dead silent. My hearing is dulled by the city, like eyes after walking from a lit room into the dark. As I wait, I first begin to hear myself differently. I notice the rumble of my stomach and, if I’m still enough, I can notice what sounds like the thrum of blood behind my ears. Then I start to notice the light drops falling from the trees, still laden with last night’s rain. I hear the faint call of geese far above me in the sky and then the chattering of a squirrel somewhere in the treetops. And in the quiet I also begin to see differently. Our hearing is closely tied to our seeing, of course. Our eyes jump to the placements of sounds. Without the constant distraction of high-decibel calls for my attention, my eyes wander more freely, noticing the tiny spores of moss by my feet and the emergence of all the other green things waking up from winter. In this new wandering of my senses I begin to sense a new presence.
I’ve always wished God would speak to me in a booming voice, the way I imagine he spoke to Abraham and to Moses. It’s never happened to me. That kind of voice never seemed like the thing I have to listen very carefully for. Surely it would overpower anything else in my soundscape and claim all my attention, like a jackhammer in lower Manhattan. But lately I’ve wondered if maybe the voice of God is actually more like a constant whisper. There’s biblical backing for this too. In 1 Kings, Elijah hears the voice of the Lord while standing on a mountain (where else?!).
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. (1 Kings 19: 11-12)
With all the noise in the world today, I wouldn’t mind a booming voice telling me what to do, where to go, how to be. But my intuition tells me that if God is to speak to me, it’s not going to be in the most convenient way. Instead I imagine the voice of God to be more like a small woodland creature. Maybe if I sit still enough, for long enough, the voice of God might see that I have settled into being a part of creation, humble and willing, and might tiptoe up to me and whisper as gently as the breeze.
After spending a few days quietly listening, I didn’t hear anything that spoke in words I could understand, even in a whisper. There were no answers given to the questions that keep me searching. The monks of times past (and probably of those of today) have made a life of listening for the voice of God. The wisest of them have learned that it is the listening, not the voice, that teaches us about the creator, or maybe that what we heard when we paid enough attention was the voice of God all along.
It is the listening, not the voice, that teaches us about the creator, or maybe that what we heard when we paid enough attention was the voice of God all along.
My days of listening in the quiet of the mountains were short and I’m already back to a life more crowded with sounds of all kinds. My kids run across the floor above me as a type and I can hear the bass pounding as a car goes by on the street outside. But a few days of quiet have restored in me a desire to listen and to wonder about where the voice of God might be best heard. I think I will seek out quiet places more often, will be more careful about what distracts me, and will pay more attention to what whispers may be present always behind the bustling world.
