Listening to My Silence
Listening to My Silence
Abi Benke
On Living with Career-Altering Vocal Damage & Finding True Vocation
“If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.” — C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time
“…what we do with our imaginations—how we face the despair of present darkness but rename that experience toward the future—is critical in how a culture is to find its liberation.” — Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty
The last few years have shocked and stripped us as if we’re in a time of war. Insidious and complex, the battle has often been difficult to locate, especially the one within ourselves. Now that literal warfare wages, the focus changes but the questions don’t. Another chapter in a very long book, the story can’t capitulate. How long must we lament our how longs? In the midst of this melee, I shrink back and question if this thing I’ve been listening for—my life’s call—matters at all.
My story begins with silence. Out of fear, I stopped listening to my body and silenced my voice. But, since nature always listens, my closed system broke down because I wasn't open to receiving rest. Injury developed in the form of a bump on my right vocal fold. I learned of the injury just two months before the world shut down. No longer could I choose silence; it now chose me.
Silence creates space that invites either shame or curiosity. It has the power to enslave or set free, to reject or forgive, which speaks to the tumult we feel when life becomes quiet. Through this struggle with silence—first from fear and then from injury—I'm learning that true silence is an illusion. We exchange one sound for another because our lives are always speaking; our Maker is always calling.
*
It’s been two years since I moved in with my parents, fleeing the first epicenter of the pandemic in America, and my rocky relationship with New York City. Now that I find myself back in my hometown, I’ve walked every inch of my parents’ neighborhood, the streets of my childhood. They sag as if they’re tired of me. I pick up my feet, and sometimes my pace, but the feeling is mutual.
I long for a scene change, and I wonder when the GPS will direct a re-route. Instead, I hear Malcolm Guite’s clarifying voice, “the map is not the landscape.” While the map can help, it knows little of the shape of things, the visceral knowing that tells our senses, “this is where you are” and “this is where you want to go.”
Just before the pandemic, my voice broke, and I’ve been on a journey to try to fix it. As a professional singer, the news came as an unspeakably difficult reality. Even though singing is athletic, and athletes get injured all the time, singers are made to feel irredeemable after such falls. Stigma prevails, but I wonder if it speaks more of the voice’s power—the inherent dignity we derive from having one.
The voice is both form and function, body and soul—how we hear directions and how we hear confessions. It holds us and it scolds us. Regardless of whether you believe in the body having energy centers (or chakras), it’s obvious that the throat is a doorway of emotional energy. We have each felt our throats shut down when emotions swell and become too intense to verbalize. Indeed, the voice isn’t the map; it’s the landscape, providing the tones and colors of a person beyond their physical outline. The voice creates passaggios, passageways, for deep-knowing—it’s no wonder that a singer’s worst fear is hearing the news that theirs has been damaged.
Indeed, I felt damaged. The one skill I’d been consistently building for over a decade proved its fragility. The one place I felt a true sense of belonging was no longer habitable for me. The one solution I never could have imagined—moving back in with the ‘rents—wasn’t merely the safe choice, it was the necessary one. Before this all became my reality, I sensed a strange voice whispering inside me: “those who lose shall find.”. I knew it was true, but I couldn’t imagine what I’d have to lose. I don’t think our imaginations were made to run wild with loss, only hope.
No matter our methods of preparation or premonition, loss comes and we have to move through it. Pre-grieving doesn’t prepare us for grief; it bars us from the faith that our stories are always unfolding. We work so hard to keep our lives wrapped up in a specific way, even when God, the Author, understands the best stories unfold and the greatest gifts get to be opened. To be opened to receive good things, despite our imperfections, is the highest form of humanity. I’ve spent so much time finishing the story with my voice, forecasting the end because I’m desperate to make sense of my life and calling. As worry distracts me, I’ve avoided listening to the hope buried underneath. Little did I know that hope has a lot to say about who I’m called to be.
*
If you consider yourself an artist, or more complicated still, a Christian artist, the word calling may spark some discomfort. We’ve all used the expression when a most likely well-intended “muggle” (Homo sapiens, non artis) presses for a reason behind why we do what we do—why we struggle, why we labor for so little, why we continue in the face of constant uncertainty. When I feel particularly proud of my work, my pre-meditated answer flows out of me without self-criticism. However, when times are tough, my mouth moves but my heart knows little of what it says, making me crazy. Surely, this struggle speaks of hope, even if deferred?
While we are called to love God and love our neighbor, the way that works itself out is anything but generic. Calling is different than merely being led to make a certain decision, it’s the overarching theme of our lives, a pull in one direction, a cross to bear. We suffer for it, because we hope for it—waiting and working for that which we do not see. While calling can materialize into a job, it doesn’t have to because it’s not bound by this world; it moves beyond it. Gloriously, our calling can’t be lost because it’s who we’ll always be—the song sung over us for eternity.
To lose is to find, so loss always plays a part in this grand adventure of learning to listen in the perceived silence. As a perfectionist, accepting that God uses broken instruments, and loves them all the same, is a loss in and of itself.
*
Before my injury, the awareness of my brokenness was distant and abstract—weak in spirit but not in body. But to deny the body is to deny the place where God meets our soul. Thankfully, even if it takes a breakdown to show us that, that’s never the end. Throughout my treatment, I’ve reached toward wholeness. Little did I know I needed beauty; little did I know where to find it.
As my story goes, I found it in the most unimaginable and unimaginative of spaces—prisons and adult rehabilitation centers. Cinder-blocked walls and fluorescent lights leave everything within a person wanting. I toured with a composer, bringing beauty and hope to what he calls the “forgotten places.” Part of healing requires discomfort, pushing ourselves into situations that stretch us. As far as I could see, it was an opportunity for me to test drive my voice and gather information, but the power of beauty had more to heal.
Every performance changed me, and it wasn’t because I rocked. In fact, my voice sang all its struggles, but the power of beauty on the human soul sang stronger. One person struggling with addiction shared after our concert, “Your music makes me feel higher than any substance I’ve ever used.” Right there, lump in my throat in more ways than one, I found the voice of truth because I remembered I had one.
*
In The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, Martin Schleske vividly uses his profession as a luthier—a maker of violins—as a metaphor for living as Christ’s beloved. The entire process, from tree to song, paints the picture of a God who loves us more than we’re ready to handle. And, oh, how this Master violinmaker and Divine musician handles us! We all follow the same shape—these time-tested curves lead to a more beautiful violin, both musically and visually—and yet, there’s so much artistic freedom the Creator engages in, joining with our grown wood grain to make the most resonant sound.
When tragedy strikes, we aren’t suddenly fools. Tragedies happen and we lose, but we don’t have to lose ourselves. Let these times ask their questions—they will anyway—but know your grain never eludes God’s craftsmanship.
Schleske writes, “The wood does not get in the way of the instrument’s sound; indeed, it is what makes the sound possible. I will only become a good violin maker if I am willing to embrace and work with the ‘despites': despite this particular flaw, despite this tapering, despite this odd structure, despite this damage, I will give this wood its voice. I will set it free so that it can sing.”
Even though circumstances will confuse us, and callings are hard to hear, what’s fascinating is that call originates from the same Latin root for voice and vocation. Thus, it is both what we bring, and what is brought to us. Within us and without us, our calling sings. Psalm 19 echoes God’s creativity to speak through beauty: “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord.” Beyond words, beauty is that which is higher, the heavens, and that which reaches for it—the Christ that is out there, and also the Christ that is within us. Nothing can separate us from God’s love because our voices and our very selves exist because of it.
From the prisoner to the mute, no one’s life is silent. Circumstances can powerfully muffle our singing, but where there is life, there is sound; where there is sound, there is calling—a call to experience beauty and hope for more. Even though I don’t know my next steps, I’m beginning to understand the grain of my violin—how a broken vocal fold could be part of my story’s unfolding, and how hope is a trustworthy compass. Even in the perceived, illusory silence, beauty may be unspeakable, but it’s always making a sound.
Abi Benke
Singer & Storyteller
Abi has developed her lyric soprano voice for a decade. After graduate school, she made her New York City debut with New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players in the fall of 2018. Though she holds two classical music degrees in voice (B.M. from Samford University; M.M. from Westminster Choir College), she has a background singing jazz, musical theatre, choral, CCM, and sacred music. Beyond her work on stage, she is developing her writing abilities and poetic sensibilities into tidbits that spur the human soul forward in faith, courage, and reflection.
Photography by Louis Zhang