Somewhere on the dusty shelf of books I read to my children when they were young is a little volume called A Hole Is to Dig. Each charmingly illustrated page declares the purpose of something: "A pile of leaves is to jump in." "A mud puddle is to slide in and go 'Oodlee-oddlee-oo!'" And so on.

The reasoning is sound, if you're a child. The world is made for our general entertainment; it gives us things to do and pleasures to revel in. There's something rather poignant about reading the book as an adult, having developed a much more pragmatic sense of the purposes of things like holes (to fill in before someone trips and sues you) or piles of leaves (to put into plastic bags before the Thursday pickup) or mud (to be scraped off boots before stepping on the carpet).

The same pragmatism that turns a tired and jaundiced eye toward holes and mud seems to inform the liturgical sensibility, reflected in churches I've attended of late, on the purpose of silence. Silence, it seems, is to be filled….

Perhaps it would help us to hear more regularly the story of Elijah on Mount Horeb, waiting for the Lord to pass by. The Lord, you remember, was not in the great wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but, as the NRSV translates it, in the "sound of sheer silence." The church's long history of contemplative practice seems to suggest that there is some knowledge of God that can come only in stillness—silence large and long and intentional enough to open a sacred space for the Holy One to enter.