Do you know why the world seems so silent when it's snowing and when everything is blanketed in sparkling, new-fallen snow? Scientists say that fresh snow absorbs sound, lowering ambient noise over a landscape, because the trapped air between snowflakes traps sound waves and dampens vibrations.
Snow may be silent but it still can accomplish great things. Snow can act as a thermal insulator, protecting crops from extreme cold. Many farmers depend on the slow melt of snow in the Spring to provide ongoing moisture for their crops. If snow melts into water, and then refreezes on sensitive crops like oranges,the ice protects them from dropping temperatures. Rivers originating in mountains or high latitude regions receive a significant portion of their flow from snow melt.
God may be silent, God may seem hidden, but God still accomplishes great things. My husband Paul loves to tell the story of his High School Nerd days. Great at studying, but socially awkward around girls, he knew how to dance but worked in the cloak room during school dances, industriously hanging coats while inwardly yearning to have his hands around girls instead of jackets.
Then one day, walking down a school corridor carrying his book bag, he heard voices coming from a classroom and went to investigate. A group of students were reading lines, trying out for the next school play. "I wonder," Paul said to himself. He walked in, and for the first time in his life decided to see if he could act. He got the part, and it changed his life. Newly confident, he began to date and relate. About ten years later, while teaching at that same school and acting as assistant drama coach, he attended a party and put his arms around a girl he'd just met to dance with her, - and the rest is history. I was that girl, and that one dance transformed our lives.
Where had Paul's sudden impulse come from to audition for a play? Why had the shy nerd decided to try a brand new, unknown experience? Our silent, hidden God had already been at work in him, slowly transforming him so that he was ready to seek and choose even more transformation. God doesn't change us - God simply makes us more of who we really are. Silent as snow, God waters the ground of our souls to bring forth new hearty crops; silent as snow, God protects new fruitfulness in us and re-fills rivers of grace. Every day of our lives, God's works tell us " See, I'm doing something new for you. Can't you see it?!"
The sounds of God's silence can be heard around our country today. Today Paul and I took cartons of bottled water to a local Church, True Bethel, which is collecting water for the people of Flint, Michigan. A local entrepreneur, hearing of their Water Drive, lent them a huge truck and gave them additional water. True Bethel parishioners plan to take the truck to Flint and distribute the water themselves.
True Bethel is a black Baptist city Church, yet thanks to their plea on t.v., people of all races and religions are driving to their church and dropping off bottled water. Mutual "God bless yous" ring out around the parking lot. Our silent, hidden God is subtly at work, helping people become more of who they really are, and encouraging unity as they work together to help brothers and sisters in need.
Maybe God's sounds seem like silence to us. But God's got to be as explosively jubilant as Tina Turner celebrating her 76th birthday when He encourages our local "winter resort" for honeybees to get the bright, new idea to send the bees on a six week assignment to sunny California. Honeybees are critical, directly responsible for at least one-third of our food supply. But their populations are dwindling because of pesticides, invasive mites, and genetically modified plants.
Our local commercial beekeeper, the only one who over-winters his honeybees indoors, will ship a truckload of bees to California in February, renting them out to pollinate flowering almond trees. It's a lucrative deal for the beekeeper, a lucrative deal for the almond growers, and a game-changer for the honeybees, who will be back in time to pollinate local apple orchards, vegetable farms, and pumpkin patches. Once again, God is helping humans - and bees! - to become more of who they are during our ecological crisis.
The apex of God's silent work for us happened when Jesus quietly originated from the silence of the Father, the great "I Am." Jesus' humble, almost-silent birth "is anything but an idyllic, folksy legend. This story bursts all normal notions and expectations: the birth of the savior from a virgin, not in a palace, but in the stable of a shelter in the midst of poor, despised shepherds. Something like this is not made up!" (Cardinal Walter Kasper in "Mercy: the Essence of the Gospel.") God has stepped out of silence to become the Word Made Flesh.
The Book of Wisdom captures this perfectly:
"For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
your all-powerful word leaped from heaven." (18:14-15.)
A Christmas hymn poetically says that Jesus, the Rose blooming amid the cold of winter, when half-spent was the night, is the shoot miraculously blooming from dead root stock in the midst of a winter, silent and frozen-cold with new-fallen snow. So silently he came into the world, and silently he left, dying a criminal's death on a cross, and thought to be soon forgotten. Until God, in an explosion of jubilant joy, raised him up and in so doing promised us victory over death. "See, I am doing something fresh and new! Don't you see it?!"
Yes, we can be full of hope. Our silent God is still at work, especially for all the silent and suffering and dispossessed people of the earth, whom, as a crucified criminal, He understands from the depths of His merciful Heart. Our silent God can be heard in the sounds of teens industriously rehearsing plays, the working poor saying "thank you" for food and clothing, the thuds of cases of bottled water hitting the ground in Flint, Michigan, the buzzing of honeybees intent on the work of crop-saving pollination on both sides of our country.
In all cases, in all countries, among all races and faiths, our hidden God labors to make us more of who we really are. Soon with Lent we will remember the closing part of the Gospel story, the brutal historical reality of the death of Jesus, again in near silence, and then the victory of his quiet morning rising from the tomb. The Risen Jesus is our living God! In silence, He approaches us, comes near to us. In silence, we can contemplate the book of our lives and see the footsteps of his passing on every page, in every one of our little resurrections when he has brought us out of death and despair into new life. "See! I Am doing something new for you! Can't you, don't you, see it?"