PAINTING THE SILENCE
PAINTING THE SILENCE
BY John Tuft
One of my favorite activities of all time is to be in the living room at night, alone, with the Christmas tree all lit up, candles in the windows glowing, simply absorbing the silence. Letting it soak into me, into my body, into my thoughts, into my soul. Another place for that kind of silence was when I was pastoring congregations of perishables. I would go into the darkened sanctuary and sit in the middle of the room. Then I would try to imagine those who sat in each of the pews, bring their faces to mind, and whisper a thank you. I see you. I know you are here seeking. When it rains, I go to the screened in back porch to listen to it painting the silence. I can see the mountains to the west and after the rain stops I watch the sunset painting the silence. These words are my attempt to paint that same sort of silence.
I don’t think of prayer as begging and beseeching some divine entity so much as I consider it training for my mind, for my imagination. Prayer is painting the silence, not with noise, but with concentrated vision. Yeah, I just made that up on the spot. But it is actually the same thing as Fred Rogers always talked about. Fred is famous for telling his audiences in his numerous speaking engagements to take a minute. Use that minute to call to mind someone who helped you get to where you are right now. Spend sixty seconds painting the silence with a picture of that person who is special to you. In whatever way. Is it going to change that person, living or dead? No, it’s going to affect you. The very act of recalling them and their influence on you is making real the gratitude that you feel. It is the sheer arrogance of humility in a world hellbent on self-fulfillment.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention another kind of silence that I experience. The kind that the word brooding was invented from. Painting the silence with self-pity and the foreboding of self-fulfilling prophecy. It is Christmas morning. I am on the cusp of adolescence. To this day I don’t know why I remember this so clearly, but I suppose it speaks to the way we each paint our inner worlds with the noise of our own choosing. I chuckle to myself even remembering this but the three great things I wanted for Christmas over the years were my own radio, a set of walkie talkies, and a football game. Maybe it was all the years of hand me downs, clothes, bikes, baseball gloves, etc. Maybe it is just the audacity of being number six in the birth order of seven. Maybe it was the year I was certain that I was getting my very own long coveted radio for my bed shelf. But alas, no, it was a radio alright, but it had to be shared with my younger brother. In our bunkbeds.
I expressed my keenly felt disappointment by simply trying to disappear. Lying face down on the green carpet in the middle of the living room. Alone in the darkness of my self-congratulatory grief, my loss. What did I lose? I lost a dare. For don’t we constantly dare the realm of life to reward us? And when we lose the dare we cover ourselves with the sackcloth and ashes of our own low expectations. Of course, that is not what I thought at the time. It was the petulance of “nobody cares that I am here. No one would miss me if I disappeared.” The family celebration of Christmas continued on about me as I lay there in my own little comfy darkness. Painting the silence with petulance.
As I sit here in central Virginia, staring out the window on a chilly October morning, I am not mourning the passing of my adolescence by any means. In the current world of social media and the politics of petulance where so many seem imprisoned still in a state of perpetual adolescence, I am glad to leave it behind although those who know me will assure you I have never quite abandoned the realm of childhood. If you were observing you might note that I have headphones on. I stare out the window a lot. I burst into song at random moments. A large white dog keeps watch nearby because he takes his responsibilities very seriously. A nearby M&Ms container sits empty. All of this while inside my head, in my imagination, I attempt to paint the silence. With words. These words.
Those much-desired Christmas gifts? In the following years I saved up allowance and grass cutting money and bought them for my younger brother as Christmas presents. Cheap walkie talkies that we wore out in a week. The football game, the one where little plastic players moved about as the board vibrated. Yeah, I bought him that. And I watched him enjoy it with our oldest brother one Christmas morning. The shared radio? It was my turn to have it the morning I woke up to reports of Roberto Clemente dying in a plane crash taking supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua because he didn’t feel the world was paying much attention.
I apologize to those of you expecting more stories from me here in this space. Most of my creative energies at the moment are going toward completing the story of The Nightcrosser. I urge you to pay attention to how you are painting the silence of your own lives. It doesn’t always have to make sense. But it is you. Very much a part of you. We see you. We seek together…
Words are magic and writers are wizards.
