My grandmother said that the deepest silence echoed when she was the last one sitting on the front porch on Sunday afternoon.
It used to be that her father and mother, sisters and brother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, and neighbors gathered there, but now, they’ve all gone. She alone is left, wondering where and when she will follow them, seeing only shadowy memories of what once was, never hearing their voices call to her anymore.
When she speaks out of that silence, I listen and catch her words like butterflies in a net. I string them together to weave into music that we can both enjoy like an old record on a gramophone.
If silence is pregnant, then something better must be coming.
Isn’t that what the prophets have said? That the desolation haunting silent streets will again be filled with the laughter and running feet of boys and girls, full of life?
Is the half hour of silence ringing through heaven a death-knell of all or the space God has left for us to anticipate coming joy?
My friend’s daughter tells me that my house is the quietest place she’s ever been- like a church- but she likes it because silence gives her room to think and speak. She speaks in Dakota- the language of the people where we live- as she prepares for a Dakota Language Bowl competition. She smiles with pride as she speaks those musical words into my silence because she has learned them in spite of English, and I am listening attentively.
The Kunsis who spoke Dakota before they ever heard English are passing away. Their front porches are empty, and their chairs are silent. Perhaps only fifty native Dakota speakers remain, and it is a pregnant silence.
We still use cultural terms: Kunsis are grandmothers. Wateca is leftovers. Pidamiya is thank you- but the language is dying with the people.
Only, children like my friend’s daughter scoop up the words out of the silence- like butterflies from the air- and they string them together to make music from the past so that we can dance to tunes that now will not be lost.
We do the same with the Word. Once, it was the familiar language of our lives, but it has become silence, the lone survivor sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon while we have gone to pursue noise elsewhere.
A friend recently gave me a translation of the Book of John into Dakota. He sat in silence many nights with his butterfly net, just waiting for the right Dakota word that would capture exactly what the Word said.
I ask him about John 3:16. I had heard that Dakota has no word for love. What word has he caught from the silence to express that God so loved the world?
He shakes his head. The silence has been so full that he had no trouble catching just the word he needed.
“Cantewicakiya,” he says. “It means God has made the whole world His heart. He has made them His heart.”
My own heart beats as I listen to him speak from the silence where he sat with the Word on the front porch. He has caught from that silence exactly what I needed to hear. It has been woven into music, played on a gramophone. The anticipation of labor has been rewarded by the joy of new birth, a word incarnating an idea that has changed the world.
The Word will string together the silences we catch until they are a hymn we can all sing together.