Interrupted by Silence

…Reading Howard Reid’s ‘Dad’s War’. In 1943 Ian Reid was wounded and captured in North Africa and taken to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped and survived… Nearly sixty years later his son Howard followed his father’s footsteps across Italy…

Howard’s writing from a farm in Tuscany, ‘A wonderful calm place’. I read: ‘The raucous screech of a jay – nature’s ‘Man from Porlock’ – shatters a delicately spun line…’

…Asking Mr Google: ‘Man from Porlock’? I’ve not heard that expression before.

…In 1797 poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was living in a remote Somerset farmhouse. In a vivid, possibly opium-induced, dream he conceived the poem ‘Kubla Khan’. He began writing but was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock. Coleridge was detained for over an hour. He started to write again, but most of the poem had vanished from his memory. The poem remained unfinished.

A “Man of Porlock” is an unwelcome visitor, a noisy interruption.

…Collecting nearly-thirteen-year-old Grandson-Luca from school… Every Tuesday afternoon at 4.30… home to change… on to his 5.00 dance club. Yesterday I arrived at school at 4.25 and waited… and waited. No Luca.

I looked at my phone. It was switched off. There were missed calls from Luca. I phoned him. He was already home. His ability to make it to his dance club on time was interrupted not by my noise, my conversation, my excuses, but by my silence.

…Reading …King Saul’s leading Israel, fighting against the Philistines: ‘So Saul asked God, “Should we go after the Philistines? Will you help us defeat them?” But God made no reply…’

I was taught that there are three answers to prayer, ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Wait’… like traffic lights – green, red, amber… Perhaps when we receive the ‘No’ answer, God is a ‘Man of Porlock’, interrupting our desires with some unwelcome alternative divine priority…

But here’s a fourth response: God made no reply. The traffic lights are switched off… He’s interrupting Saul’s proposed actions with silence…

Musing… The God who may interrupt my life with HIs silence.