"Breathe" by Amy Duncan
My great plans to travel to New York to see “Hamilton” went by the wayside this year, so I was pretty excited when the movie version was released for home streaming. For a while I was fascinated to look up background information on the production. One day I came across this quote from Renee Elise Goldsberry on her performance of “Satisfied.” She describes the need to plan her breathing and the pauses in the song: “Because sometimes you don’t breathe just because of what happened before; sometimes you need a breath to make it as you continue; sometimes you breathe for how far you have to go, how far ahead there still is. I think that’s also the bigger life lesson: recognize when you need to stop and breathe.”
Take a moment to read the quote again. I had to chew on that one for a couple of days, thinking about it both in and outside of music. I began to think about pauses in the sound, the rests that the composer builds into the piece. In music, silence is not just the absence of sound. The rests still convey rhythm and beat and meaning—even emotion and volume! The silence has intention and purpose.
Psalm 65 opens in an unusual way: “Silence is praise to you, Zion-dwelling God, And also obedience. You hear the prayer in it all.”(MSG) How can silence be praise? How can God hear it? Not all Scripture translations include the reference to silence in that verse, but those which use the original Hebrew find the word dumiyyah both there and in Psalm 62:1-2, 5: “I wait quietly before God, for my victory comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will never be shaken . . . Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him.”(NLT)
This silence is not a passive vacuum. This is an intentional pause—a meaningful break to the sound. The silence is an active prayer full of hope and full of God. Like the actress said, sometimes we pause because of what has just passed. Sometimes we pause because we are anticipating what lies ahead. The point here is that we do pause. We pause to reflect on the past with an eye to the future. We pause to rest deep in the knowledge that God is in control and answers our prayers. We pause because we trust what lies ahead.
One of the most quoted verses in Scripture is “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) I have frequently stopped in the midst of a crazy day to take a deep breath and repeat this verse to myself. However, I’m not always careful to add “be silent” to “be still.” Scripture calls us to silence as a form of worship: “But the Lord is in his holy Temple. Let all the earth be silent before him.” Habakkuk 2:20 (NLT) Quieting the noises around us and within us isn’t easy, but I am working to be more intentional in creating silence before God. Any musician will tell you that one of the greatest temptations in performance is to rush through the rests. The temptation in my prayer life is often the same.
Psalm 65 ends in verse 13 with such rejoicing that even the meadows and valleys are shouting for joy. The movement from silence to shouting in just 13 verses displays the full spectrum of our communion with God. The implication is that both extremes are not only possible but important. I leave you with the first stanza of the poem written by Gerard Moultrie that is based on the verse from Habakkuk and liturgy that dates back to at least 275 A.D. We typically associate this with Christmas, but perhaps it can be meaningful in new ways to us as we ponder silence in our lives with God.
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly-minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.