Silence.  Do we live in a silent world?  Do we live in a noiseless world, a world without sound, absent of speech?
     Of course not.  The world is a cacophony of sound.  For some of us, however, it is a thoroughly silent world, a world in which we, and only we speak, a world totally void of any revelations or intimations of God.  This is the world of Ingmar Bergman's Silence, a film I watched recently.  Silence tells the story of two women, two sisters, and the young boy who belongs to one of them.  It has very little action, barely any dialogue.  The plot is tragic, the outcome heartbreaking.
     But that's the point.  If God is not there, all of us live in a world of silence, a world of our own furtive making, a world devoid of anything other than our own broodings on the joy and fleetingness of existence.  It's a world of bravery in the face of absurdity, a landscape of magnificent ardor amidst certain futility.  Like Jean Paul Sartre, Bergman understands that if there is no God, we live in a lonely world, a world spinning through a universe that cares nothing about it a world whose creatures mean, in one moment, greatness, and yet the next, nothing.
     In his novel Silence, Japanese novelist Shusako Endo paints a world of similar proportions.  At one point in his narrative, however, he presents the notion of God.  God, he suggests, is like an onion, an onion whose layers we peel one at a time, carefully unfolding each nuance of who he is to us.  Though God does not speak immediately, though God does not display his totality at any point, he is there.  We just need to find him.
     Even if I do not always see and hear God in this silent world, I know he is there.  I know I have purpose, I know I have point.  All of us do.  As Bergman asserts, however, in a silent world, we have neither one.