This Piece was originally written for the Mount Tabor Lutheran Church News Letter, though I thought I would share it here as well.
Moments of silence. We find them in prayer, in communion, and at the beginning of major sporting events after tragedies. Why only in these places? No one ever walks into there office after a massive tragedy like the Parkland shooting and has a moment of silence. A restaurant never falls silent after the death of a prominent member of the community. The only times in life we truly have a mass moment of silence are at sporting events and in our houses of worship.
Why? What is it that makes us strike the air out of a coliseum as we do in a church when the time for silent reflections comes? I posit it is because they are the places we feel most comfortable. The reasons for feeling at ease amongst a congregation are obvious. We are a community intertwined together by the common thread of praising the lord. At a sporting event though. Where is the community? Where are the lifelong relationships we form in a circle of church goers? Those comfy confines of familiarity disappear and we are intermingled with strangers in a mess of humanity in the stadium. We suddenly know no one but ourselves. Yet when the PA announcer booms over the loud speakers “please rise for a moment of silence to remember those fallen” we fall in line and become something, stunning.
Have you ever listened to silence? I mean really listened to silence? It comes so scarcely in our daily lives that we as a society have forgotten what silence sounds like. Even as you are falling to sleep every night, you can hear the roaring of your homes heating or cooling system, the cars on the main streets of Salt Lake and on the quietest nights distant train horns traveling through Murray or Rio Grande to Ogden. We never truly hear silence but when we do it is spine chilling. Next time we go into silent meditation at church during prayer I would beg of you to listen. Listen and find what silence means. In the Stadium silence is at first sudden. Like breaking right before the stop light, you can feel it. Then it is somber, then empty. One of the most haunting feelings in the world is being in the middle of a silent stadium for even just a split second, it sends chills down my back that’s for sure. Then there is the silent shuffling of silence. The moment where you can hear a pen drop or a foot lift and then the announcer booms back over and life resumes.
Why do we have moments of silence? To honor the victims? Yes, but in the end we will never know the victims pains and we will never be able to comprehend how exactly to honor them. I argue this, we have moments of silence to remind us we are community. At a sporting event we are not community, we know no one, we are just there to enjoy the game and escape from our daily lives. The moment of silence creates community. Even if just for a moment. We are all in one a part of a larger family. We all have one common purpose, we all have the weight of silence on us, we all realize suddenly how together we are. Whether we realize it or not we are all one at a sporting event as well. We are bought together by the common goal of cheering for a team as in a church we are brought together in a common goal to express our faith. Moments of Silence work because of unity and in the end they may create it as well. We think of silence to much as something that divides, a sign of loneliness. In reality, moments of silence are the only thing in our lives, through faith or in the stadium, that show us we as humanity are all in this mess together.