Silence for Youth

I’m preparing a session for an upcoming youth retreat on the topic of “Silence and Solitude as Spiritual Disciplines.” It has caused me to think about the lack of silence in our lives in the US.

My parents owned a small cabin near Warsaw, Virginia on a tributary into the Rappahannock river when I was growing up. They never had a telephone installed there (this was way before cell phones) and the small TV could only pick up two stations on a good day. The place was amazingly quiet, and it gave me time to fish, swim, and walk in the midst of silence. Most of our teens today have constant noise, or the potential of noise invading their lives all the time. Cell phones, IPods, computers, cable TV, radio (how do you like yours—AM, FM, XM, Sirius, HD…?), and a host of other sounds invade the lives of our teens every day.

So, how does the church teach the power of silence and solitude to a generation that is engulfed in sound and image? Retreats are one way. Take the group to a location and confiscate all their electronics, even though they will wail and gnash their teeth at the beginning. Then structure times for them to be silent, and to give them the opportunity to listen to the voice of God.

However, I’m not sure that a weekend away once a year will really teach this discipline. It is too easy to return to all the electronic noise of our western culture. My faith tradition (Baptist) is not known for having times of silence in worship and the new worship styles seem to focus on how much sound, light, and how many moving pictures on a screen that they can cram into 25 minutes. To really teach the discipline and benefit of silence and solitude, it needs to become a part of our worship and our practice as a community of faith. We can spend our entire time at church making noise and never listening. We can spend an hour in Sunday School talking and never being quiet and listening for the Spirit to speak.

What a shame to think that we may be teaching a generation of believers that the sound is more important than the silence.

On the journey together,
Greg