The truest thing about a person, that person’s real story, is just as often the thing withheld—the silent thing—as the thing offered.” —Vinson Cunninhgham
People are waking up to the power of narrative in so many spheres of life. As Vinson Cunningham writes in a pointed critique of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York (HONY) project, “story” has evolved into an instrument deployed by corporations and hopeful civic changemakers alike.
The “narrative turn” has turned some of our expectations over. It has taught us to inquire about narrators’ positioning, brand characters, developmental arcs, and meanings. Whether we’re reading texts or reading situations, the emphasis on story encourages us to look for heroes, villains, conflict, and resolution. This now means that “What’s your story?” is a question one might reasonably hear in a contemporary church as much as in a coffee shop, and it’s earnestly asked in both contexts.
But the complexity of silences hasn’t changed.
The silence of unprogrammed Quakers can be a full, ripe silence. It’s a quiet that, in the best case, is broken only with intention, only when one feels the conviction that a spoken word adds greater value than saying nothing at all. I find this kind of silence restorative.
At the other end of the spectrum is the silence of a community denying its internal diversity. It’s the silence of an empty jar, a silence that seeps into the spaces substance leaves behind. I find this kind of silence corrosive.
Attending to silences in stories, narratives, and collective tales is a way to better understand overt communications, because what an organization fails to state explicitly can be just as full of meaning as the surface texts it produces. Don’t focus so much on what’s obvious that you can no longer recognize the implicit grounds that an overt address rests on.