I Can Hold A Silence With Anybody But Him

Aoife can sit with a person in the worst hour of their life for as long as it takes and she cannot manage four seconds of it on her own.

The first part is not a boast. It is simply what she is for. People bring her the ones who cannot be comforted, because she does not rush, and she does not fill, and she has sat in kitchens for two hours saying almost nothing while somebody worked their way toward the thing they actually came to say.

She has been doing it about twenty years. She would tell you it is the only skill she has.

And then she asks God a question and she cannot hold the gap at all.

She has timed it. The honest number is about four seconds. She asks, properly and sincerely, what something means, and within four seconds she has begun supplying: reasoning, weighing, remembering a verse and applying it, constructing a sensible answer out of what she already knows.

None of that is wrong in itself. It is the same good mind she uses for everything.

But it means she has genuinely never once waited. Twenty years of holding space for other people and not four seconds of it for herself, and she has only recently seen the shape of that, and it embarrasses her more than she can easily say.

She is forty-five. And what makes it worse is that she knows exactly what to do, because she does it for a living, and she cannot do it in her own front room with the door shut.

You may know that gap.

Maybe you also wait beautifully with people. Maybe you have never counted your own. And maybe the number would embarrass you too.

What he did with his body

There is a prophet who has just asked God a hard question, and the next verse is not about his state of mind. It is about where he went and what he did while he waited.

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.Habakkuk 2:1

Look at how physical it is. He stands. He goes up somewhere. He takes a position, deliberately, in a place chosen for waiting, and then he watches.

None of that is metaphor about attitude. It is a man arranging his body so that waiting becomes possible, because he apparently knew what you know: that a person who asks a question standing in the middle of their own life will answer it themselves within about four seconds.

And notice the last clause, which is the one nobody quotes: and what I shall answer when I am reproved. He is braced for the answer to correct him. He is not waiting for a confirmation of what he already thinks. He has left room for the reply to be something other than his own conclusion, which is the only condition under which waiting is anything more than a pause.

And waiting is something you do with your body rather than your intention. The written word has him stand, and go up, and take a position, and then watch, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has never once held her own gap.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word keeps both halves in His hands, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the second rather than requiring you to construct it out of what you already know.

Why yours is four seconds

Now the mechanism, because you have been treating this as a spiritual deficiency and it is not one.

When you sit with a person, the silence has a shape. There is somebody in front of you. Their face is doing something. The silence is occupied, and holding it is an act of attention toward a body in a chair, and you are extremely good at attending to bodies in chairs.

When you sit alone, the silence has no shape at all. There is nothing in front of you to attend to, and your attention, which is a strong and trained thing, goes to the only material available, which is your own mind.

That is not lack of reverence. Your attention did what attention does: it found the nearest object. And in an empty room the nearest object is always your own thinking.

Which is exactly why the prophet moved. He did not resolve to concentrate harder. He went up a tower, and the tower gives the silence a shape, and the shape is what holds a person still.

And what fills the gap is your attention rather than your unbelief. The word says be still, and know that I am God, and the stillness comes first in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that an order of operations rather than a rebuke.

And nothing about you is under review for twenty years of four seconds. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has sat in other people's kitchens for two hours at a time.

And nothing here promises you an answer

Let me be plain, because a woman could take all this as a technique and then be crushed when it produces nothing.

Nothing here says that if you wait long enough you will be told. That is not mine to promise and the promising of it is precisely how people get hurt, and you have picked up enough of those people in twenty years to know it.

And nothing here rules on what any gathering should do, or on anybody's practice, because that is not this page's business.

What is on offer is the sixty seconds itself, and the willingness to reach the end of it with nothing. Not resignation. Willingness, which is a different substance entirely and is the one thing you cannot fake and the one thing the whole exercise is made of.

And you are permitted to wait without being owed a reply. The word has him brace for an answer that might correct him, which is what waiting is when it is real, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a method.