Trusting God in Silence
What experiencing spiritual direction in a silent chapel taught me about trusting God.
I remember my first time in spiritual direction like it was yesterday. I was anxious to meet with a spiritual director because I thought I knew what spiritual direction was: someone would help me discern a direction for my spiritual life. Perhaps they would be able to penetrate my soul with words of knowledge, or maybe they would be able to see through me in such a way that I would find healing for some deep-seated wounds. I was thrilled to find that the spiritual director who was present during the week of my grad school residency was from my faith family of origin: a small network of loosely affiliated, independent evangelical churches that had founded a number of colleges to train ministers, including my alma mater.
As I sat with her for the first time in the confessional room just off the chapel at the retreat center, my mind raced. Would I make a good impression? Would she see me as a mature person, someone worthy of her attention? Would she be impressed by my knowledge and depth?
Regardless of my intentions to present as someone who “had it all together,” words spilled out of my mouth as if a great dam broke. I spoke quickly, racing against the 40-minute session time to try to win her over. Words came out that were sycophantic and self-aggrandizing, even if veiled in self-deprecation. I spoke in an unbroken sequence for 10 minutes before I finally took a pause to breathe.
She smiled. “Follow me,” she said calmly as she rose from her seat and walked out of the room.
Had I done something wrong? Did I ruin my opportunity? Stupid!
I quietly followed her, trying to gather myself, and we arrived at a set of ornate doors. The placard next to the doors read, “Silent Chapel.”
“We’ll meet for the rest of our time in here.”
As we entered the sunlit and quiet room, I was struck by the beauty and simplicity of the place. We were surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the grounds and a man-made pond. We each took a seat, orienting the chairs so they were facing each other. And then it happened: total silence.
She simply looked at me, and I looked at her. She smiled earnestly and sometimes closed her eyes in an unhurried way, but it felt like her attention never left me even when they were closed. In what felt like a moment, the thick silence was broken by her standing up and motioning for me to follow her.
“Our time is up,” she whispered as we left the chapel. 30 minutes had flown by in the thickness of the silence.
Silence in Spiritual Direction
Spiritual direction is marked by silence. Silence isn’t the same as quiet, though the two are related for obvious reasons: both include the absence of sound, both are marked by wordlessness, etc. But silence, in the context of spiritual direction, feels different than quiet. It feels heavy, potent, fecund. There’s a sense in the silence that anything could happen, but nothing has to.
In my first experience of spiritual direction, which I will note was rather exceptional, three-quarters of my time with the director was kept in total silence. This silence was punctuated with the sound of wind rustling the trees just outside the window and the occasional shuffle of either clothes as we repositioned in our seats. Importantly, though, the silence was unbroken.
Why would a spiritual director facilitate the first session this way?
I was incredibly nervous, obviously. I’ve been walking alongside people long enough to know that when someone is speaking at such a high rate for so long, they are either uncomfortable or anxious. My training in coaching was certainly about creating space, and my background in pastoral ministry taught me to listen and inquire diagnostically: my goal, in sitting with an anxious person, is primarily to help them understand their experience so they can take a (hopefully spiritual) next step.
But that’s not what happened in that spiritual direction session, and it isn’t what happens when I meet with directees. It might seem counterintuitive, but it felt like keeping silence was what we were there to do in that moment, and that my director was attuned to some kind of deeper reality than I was. Likewise, when I meet with folks, I am often drawn to create space for silence when common sense might dictate to fill the space.
So, I ask again: why? Why is silence such an important facet of spiritual direction? Why did my director take so much of our time with intentional silence?
Silence is Based on Trust
Spiritual direction is predicated on a deeply abiding and real trust in God’s active presence. Trust, according to theologian and classicist Teresa Morgan, is “the action of putting something…or an attitude of willingness to put something, in someone else’s hands…on the basis…that they other will respond positively…”1 It’s the idea of handing control over outcomes to someone else. She goes on:
We will assume that relational (and sometimes propositional) trust seeks to create, accept, maintain and/or inflect relationships, either on the basis that the relationship is worthwhile in itself, or in the expectation or hope that something positive will emerge from it, or both. Trust is always risky, with no guarantees, but, at a minimum, when we trust we believe (or accept, hope, assume, or wager) that (for instance) the person we trust is trustworthy in some particular respect or, more broadly, as the person she is. Normally, we also believe (or accept, and so on) that the benefits of trust outweigh the risks.2
Trust is risky because the outcomes become contingent on the character and history of the person, tool, or institution in whom I am placing my trust. And, as she notes throughout her work, the center of gravity for trust is in a relationship. That is, trust is always a relational act or, even better, trust always has a relational dimension. There are propositional dimensions of trust (think beliefs), and there are operational dimensions as well (allegiance, for instance),3 but they are held together by a relationship with the trust-holder.
In terms of the spiritual life, the primary trust-holder is God (although God also trusts us to varying degrees, too). The New Testament’s primary word for trust, pistis (also translated as faith), is used over 244 times, and one of the primary words for trust in the Old Testament, bāṭaḥ, is used 120 times. Here’s a small sampling:
Exodus 14:31: “And when the Israelites saw the mighty hand of the LORD displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.”
Isaiah 31:1: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel, or seek help from the LORD.”
Psalm 9:9-10: “The LORD is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.”
Isaiah 30:15-17: “This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’ Therefore you will flee! You said, ‘We will ride off on swift horses.’ Therefore your pursuers will be swift! A thousand will flee at the threat of one; at the threat of five you will all flee away, till you are left like a flagstaff on a mountaintop, like a banner on a hill.”
Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
What do you notice?
Upon first reflecting on all this, that trust and faith are related to action. We can trust God because he has a proven track record of doing what he promised. While you and I might only be able to haphazardly follow through, God doesn’t seem to phone it in - notably, faith (that is, trust) in God has a basis in historical fact and honest-to-goodness reality.
Similarly, I noticed that trusting God and peace are related. Peace is a sort of prevailing sense of well-being; it’s how you and I feel when we know that everything is going to be alright. Since God is a worthy trust-holder, when we give him our trust, there is a sense that everything will be okay. Mysteriously, and I have found this to be true personally and in my work with others, that sense is magnified when things go sideways.
Spiritual direction, as a set of interlocking and discrete practices, embodies trust through keeping silence.
The director is living out trust with the directee, understanding that their best prescriptions are almost always an attempt to dictate an outcome for the person they are companioning. Silence, though, makes room for us to notice when God speaks, acts, or, somehow, becomes mysteriously more present in our experience. In keeping silence, I think spiritual directors are attempting to enact trust in God through a concrete spiritual practice.
In the silence, I am trusting that God is the principal trust-holder of the directee and the person to whom that person’s life ought to be entrusted. And, as a director, I am aware from my experience of God and my embeddedness in God’s story that he follows through with people. It might not show up like we imagine it will. Sometimes, rather than showing up in the extraordinary and overtly climactic, God’s trustworthiness manifests in sheer silence (1 Kings 19:11-15).
Trusting God with Another Person in the Silence
Silence marked my entry into spiritual direction. Today, as a director, the discipline is to continue trusting God enough not to speak. My desire, in each meeting, is for the person I am sitting with to have an interactive relationship with God, and to facilitate that, I have to practice entrusting my directees to his care. I get the sense that my director, in that first session, was wrestling with a similar tension.
I needed the silence in my anxiety. I needed to see someone trusting God while refusing to fix my problem, solve my anxiety, or save me from discomfort. I needed someone to show me that, somehow, trusting God wasn’t something you thought about – trust is something you did. Paradoxically, what I learned is that “doing trust” looks a lot like being quiet.
You and I don’t have to be spiritual directors to keep silence and trust in mind when we walk alongside others. To keep silence while you listen to a friend or a coworker is one concrete way that you can practice trusting God: when we intentionally keep silent, we are practicing a posture of expectation that God will do something for and with the other person that is better than we could ever offer. Sometimes we ought to say something, or act, or fix something, but I wonder just how often we do these things instead of trusting God with the other person.
Teresa Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust: ‘This Rich Trust’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 22.
Ibid., 22-23, emphasis added.
See, for instance, Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017).
Thank you for this, Murphy! "There's a sense in the silence that anything could happen, but nothing has to." Yes! I appreciate the connection between silence and trust.