Most of my backyard is a steep hill. Outside the back door, there is a short, flat space of maybe twenty or thirty feet, then the land climbs suddenly at a sharp angle. The hillside is covered in trees with branches that grow good, thick leaves in the summer and which hold little piles of white snow in the winter. All throughout the year, my family watches the forest, sometimes with its birds and squirrels and chipmunks, other times with the wind and rain, and still other times with the blue sky far above it and behind it.

Although it is my property, it doesn’t feel like it “belongs” to me. First off, beyond my property line is a state park, which belongs to everyone, but it’s something more than that. I think, in part, the steepness of the hill, its inaccessibility, makes the hill and the forest distant from anything like ownership. It’s wild. It doesn’t allow me to climb up into it with any ease. And those few times when I do climb the slope, I need to respect it. I need to “fear” it, in a way, like a sailor might “fear” the ocean. Sailors don’t turn their backs to the sea, they don’t whistle into the wind, they don’t disrespect the sea, because they know that it is more than they are. I know that the forest, and especially the slope, is more than I am, and so I respect it. I fear it.

A few weeks back, during the warm spell when we all thought that maybe we should put our winter clothes away and take out our spring wardrobe, my two daughters and I climbed a short way up the hill. There’s a large boulder with a flat space on top, just perfect for sitting on. My daughters, being small and sure on their feet, made it up the hill with only a few slips. I stepped in a patch of mud and fell down on a bunch of broken branches. One of the branches cut my hand so deep that I bled a little and so spent the rest of the climb nursing my wound. 

The boulder (or “rock” as we call it) is not all that far up the hill. When we sit on it next to each other, we’re above our two-storey house but still level with some of the houses in our neighborhood. Still, when my wife came out into the backyard and called up to us, my daughters laughed that she was so small. She said that she could barely see us through the branches and trunks of trees, and this made them laugh again – it was my wife, not my daughters, who were hidden in the trees. At least, from their perspective.

For a short time, my daughters played around the rock. They picked up sticks and flung them away. They found stones that fit perfectly in their palms. They broke off pieces of a nearby bush that had grown dry and brittle, and we talked about how pruning can help a plant, even though it seems like it is hurting it.

Then my daughters settled down, and they began to really listen. There was no real wind that day, but there weren’t many other sounds either. We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood, and so we only heard a car passing every now and again. What we really heard were the birds. There was a woodpecker, I remember, clinging to the side of a dead tree and calling out. We had to search a little to find it, as is usual with birds, even those like woodpeckers that have beautiful red markings that you would think you’d be able to see immediately. There were other birds, too, but I’ve never been very good at memorizing bird calls, and so we just listened to them and wondered if we’d see them like we saw the woodpecker.

Then there was silence. The birds stopped calling. My daughters and I only breathed. The trees stood straight and tall, and there was silence. It was a full silence – not because of anything that we were doing. Full silences don’t come from human activity; they’re things that we are only present to. And my daughters and I were present to that silence. 

There are some joys we have as parents that we never expect. Not that I have never hoped to sit with my children in full silence. I have. I’ve often experienced this full silence, and I’ve not just hoped but longed to share similar experiences with them. What I mean is that I never expected this sharing to be so full in itself. I thought sharing silences with my children would be like sharing silences with anybody else, even someone who is very close to me like my wife. But sharing silences with your children is completely different. 

Why? Well, it’s not that I’m simply proud of them, that they’re the types of people who enjoy sharing silence with others. It’s not a sense of passing something on to them, as I might be happy to teach them some intricate (or simple) truth about God and God’s love. No, it’s more of a participatory joy. If anything, maybe it’s that I’m present to the growth or deepening of the experiences of these two children into the world. But it’s a presence to something that I am also participating in, because I too am growing closer to the heart of the world in being with them and by living in silence with them. 

I am an introverted person, and we introverts are not always good at discovering the presence of God with other people. Usually we need an extroverted person to show us that goodness. But we introverts, on the other hand, have the ability to show others how one can be so very much alone, in the presence of others, in the fullness of silence, and in the fullness of God. I knew this to be true, and my children showed me that it was true yet again.

What grace there is in the world. What utter grace.