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If I’m able when I travel, I like to pick up a couple of CD’s along the way.  And so it was back in July in Innsbruck, Austria, that I found myself at Musikladen Innsbruck looking for some local musical flavor.  I walked out with a couple of albums from ECM, which is a fancy German jazz label.  Connoisseurs enjoy ECM because it’s a fancy German jazz label.

One of my finds was a new solo outing from contemporary jazz pianist Fred Hercsh called Silent, Listening.  It’s one of the best newer jazz releases I’ve caught recently, and one of the quietest albums I’ve ever heard.

But it’s a good, even fascinating, quiet!  In interviews about Silent, Listening, Hersch has discussed how not only his playing, but also his not playing, is musical.  (Somewhere, John Cage is smiling.)  Hersch’s assertion might sound too precious by half, but if you spend time with Silent, Listening, you get it.  The silences there are productive, generative, musical silences.

My favorite silence in the Scriptures is Genesis 1:2.  After God creates the raw form of the heavens and earth, we read, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”  So much is about to happen as the Spirit broods over creation.  It’s pregnant silence.

Check that, I have two favorite quiet moments we encounter in the Bible.  In addition to Genesis 1:2, there’s Luke 22:44, where we discover that as Jesus has died on the cross, “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.”  This time it’s a visual silence, not an aural one.  A productive, generative silence that’s poised to birth resurrection.

In our current cultural moment, we’re typically afraid of silence.  Don’t be.  God is at work in such spaces, and that’s when you can wait on him.

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