Embracing the Silence

Silence is frightening. It’s frightening when it reveals how unsettled I am when I’m surrounded by it. Like a crack fiend’s craving, I’m looking for my fix of lyrics and music. Withdrawal is difficult. LSD users have flashbacks. Musicholics have earworms… an auditory itch that yearns to be scratched in the form of sound waves. But instead, there is silence.

I decided that for some people music is just a pastime. It’s something fun to move to, something you belt out with friends when you’re cruising down the highway with your windows down. For others though, it’s like psychological cutting… the emotions that are squeezed out of the blank spaces between the black dots on lined paper and the insinuation of experiences in the lyrics are the razors that remind us of our existence. The bleeding that ensues confirms that we can still feel, for better or worse. We breathe a sigh of relief after our depths are stirred, even if we know nothing has changed after having the last three minutes and fifty three seconds light up our auditory cortex.

For the last five days, I haven’t listened to music. Like an addict, all I’ve wanted to do is to take an injection of iTunes. I cooked and I cleaned without the normal hiphop. I walked around in my boxers, while the gravity of the piano called to me like a black hole. “Just a few chords,” I thought. “Just one or two times through the Damien Rice and Over the Rhine songs I’ve been learning.” Being forced under the lulling non-noise of the ceiling fan and air conditioner, I realized that the frightening roar I heard was my own emptiness.

This is the very emptiness I sought to inundate with music. From Scr-pture, I get the vague sense that G-d isn’t a fan of artificial opiates. When I sat there in silence and kept the professionally recorded melancholy from using my heart as a treadmill, I could no longer ride over this chasm on the borrowed wings of someone else’s talent.

The process of addiction is often perpetuated by the fear of facing reality on the road to sobering up. A temporary escape becomes a desire to remain in a state of ignorance. (Insert Homer Simpson here, toasting, “Here’s to alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!”) I’ve always prided myself in being a realist. And I’m too proud to turn my back on that claim now. So here I am, simultaneously acknowledging my idolatry and confessing the unexpected emptiness left by a masked but shriveling spirituality.

I take great comfort that J-sus is “G-d with us.” I’m relieved that we are indwelt by the Holy Sp-rit. I’m grateful for a love that casts our fear and grounds my identity as a child of the Father. I think sometimes, we can worsh-p in silence. I look forward to when this naked emptiness will be filled again.

But not with music or lyrics.