The Moon Is Not a Pastoral Visit

On Silence, Suspicion, and the Long Wait for Answers

It’s newly July, and the heat in London has settled in that clingy, silent way it does before a thunderstorm. The pavements hold onto sunlight like memory. Everything feels slow. Suspended. The year turning its corner.

I was up late last night because the air wouldn’t settle and neither would I. From my room in Teddington, I watched the moon hang low above the garden. A thin waning crescent. Silent and sure.

And for some reason — maybe because I’d been re-reading Bonhoeffer, maybe because I’d just come from Vespers where the prayers had felt flatter than usual — I found myself whispering, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

But there was no thunder. No voice. Only the moon.

We don’t talk enough about the suspicion that grows in long seasons of divine quiet. Not doubt in the abstract, but something quieter and more socially inconvenient: the fear that maybe God isn’t listening. Or worse, that maybe He is — and simply has nothing to say.

In the Church, silence is often romanticised. “Be still and know,” we say. But that’s easier to preach than to live, especially when silence doesn’t feel sacred — just empty. Especially when the stillness isn’t mystical but manic: stirred by the restlessness of unanswered prayer, of deferred dreams, of grief with nowhere to go.

London is noisy, but under all that, it's a city steeped in quiet tension — the hum of waiting buses, unslept flats. The paradox of summer in the city is that it’s full of light but not always full of clarity.

I wonder: when did we start equating God’s love with His willingness to be legible?

I have no great fondness for moon metaphors — they’re too easy, too often gendered, too poetically soft. But the moon last night refused to be dismissed. Not a symbol; an interruption. A bodily reminder that even reflected light can hold gravity.

The moon pulls tides. Shapes the rhythm of oceans. Moves in and out of visibility without ceasing to exist. It does not explain herself. It does not apologise.

Watching it, I thought of how we expect God to behave like clergy. Prompt. Pastoral. Responsive. To visit when called upon. To ring ahead and confirm His attendance. To give good reasons for absence.

But the God of scripture — and the God of experience — is not always that tidy. This is the God who made Job sit in the ashes for thirty-eight chapters before replying — and then replied with a whirlwind. The God who let Israel wait four hundred years in silence between the prophets and the Incarnation.

We are formed, it seems, not only by God’s presence but by the ways in which He withholds.

In Silence, Scorsese (echoing Endō) explores the horror of a God who does not intervene. Endō’s Christ figure is present in suffering but not vocal. The silence is not denial — but nor is it deliverance. It is presence that refuses performance.

Similarly, in Coakley’s theological method of ascetic contemplation, silence becomes a site of kenotic unknowing — where the self is undone not by the certainty of doctrine but by the yielding to mystery. Coakley writes that in the deepest silence, God begins to reorder our desires — not by answering our questions, but by re-asking them.

In that framework, divine silence is not divine absence. It is the holding open of space for transfiguration.

Too often, the Church treats silence like a problem to be solved. We create noise. We fill in the blanks. We prescribe answers — theodicies, platitudes, even more liturgy — rather than learning to wait with people, in the same way the moon waits with the sea. Drawing something out that we didn’t even know was within us.

For those of us in vocations of care — clergy, chaplains, ministers, theologians — this is uncomfortable. We're trained to speak, to guide, to pastor. But there is a time for closing the breviary and simply letting the moonlight fall.

So I offer no conclusions here. Only this confession: I am still learning to live with a God who sometimes says nothing back.

Not out of cruelty, I think — but perhaps out of a desire that I might come to hear Him differently.

Maybe this, too, is revelation: a God who shapes me in the dark. A God who doesn’t arrive like an ambulance, but like the moon — hidden some nights, but always moving. Always pulling. Always drawing my soul to deeper waters.

And so, like the psalmist, I keep watch. Not because I am certain. But because somewhere in the hush of early July, under the London sky, I still believe the silence is alive.

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in His word I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning.”
— Psalm 130:5–6