Some of you are old enough to remember Simon and Garfunkel. And one of their verses goes like this, according to the internet…
“And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said:
“The words of the prophets are
Written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence.”
…this seems to take its cue from the Hebrew scriptures, for instance as the above website points out, the book of Daniel; and also from one of the Old Testament options in Sunday’s Lectionary, at 1 Kings 19:12. The Lord was not in the noise and fuss, but in the awe-inspiring silence. It’s a bizarre quirk of my lifetime that the ‘silent majority’ is anything but. The real silence is of the disenfranchised poor, women silenced by their husbands, people silenced because of their faith or skin colour.
It’s raining a bit. Not much, but a bit.