What has been growing on us in our family is that simple is best. In the “old days,” they didn’t have all the fancy bells-and-whistles curricula that are available now and they produced Shakespeare, Jane Austen, John Wesley, and Thomas Jefferson. How did they do it?
With simple lessons.
Fred Rogers — yes: Mr. Rogers — told his documentarian, Benjamin Wagner, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is so much more essential than shallow and complex.” He went on to say, “Spread the message.”
The first lesson is Silence.
Depth does not come in noise. Simplicity is scattered by trivia like tossing a handful of pea gravel into a pond when the daily auditory clutter is swirling around us through voices, earbuds, and the sound of household machinery. Our current houses are rarely quiet. The heat or air conditioning comes on, the refrigerator hums, the computer hums, the light on the television NEVER goes off, and the video game console seems impossible to turn off without unplugging it. I have to go looking for silence in my own house.
But God speaks in silence: in Elijah’s cave, in Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, in Moses’ isolation near the burning bush “at the back of the wilderness,” in Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch in the desert, in the WWII concentration camp inmate who cleared the drain to the cesspool — no one came near him for two years, not even the guards. He said he got to know God in the cesspool.
My K-8 public school instituted Uninterrupted Silent Reading when I was in fifth grade. The entire school, janitor and secretary included, read from 1:05 to 1:25 every day. There was Silence, a hush over the entire school, a moment of blessed peace. In her video series, The Peaceful Home, Elisabeth Eliot told us about Quiet Time. For an hour every day, each of her eight grandchildren were in their beds, not talking. We adopted this and, to this day, almost 30 years later, we still have quiet time after lunch. It is when we do our reading assignments. There is no music, no talking, no interrupting for one hour.
In Silence is where we think. We nap. We cogitate. We daydream. The thoughts we have received in our reading and math and Bible and family talking get sorted out and applied during that time. My second son, Mick has had major experiences with Silence.
As a four year old, he could decode words, but didn’t know he could actually read until he was forced to sit for one hour with nothing but books to entertain him.
He took unbelievably long showers and worked calculus problems in his head to design a new style of compound bow. That bow is still in his head, but you know what I’m talking about.
He spent hours and hours out in the woods. His Bible is actually a waterproof Bible that has special paper that won’t wrinkle when it gets wet because he spent so much time hunting — which means, sitting in the woods. It was there that he learned who God was as he overcame his fear of the dark, thought about what he had learned at Discipleship Jiu Jitsu, read through the entire Bible, and prayed.
Depth of learning only comes when a person has had time to absorb what he has learned and to fit it into his world view. That absorption only happens if there is nothing to distract. Only Silence allows that.
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