From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, Cruciform (2022); Debie Thomas, My Broken Hosanna (2019); Dan Clendenin, New Ways of Being Alive (2016).

This Week's Essay

A guest essay by Amy Frykholm, who will contribute six essays between now and June 30. Amy is an award-winning writer, Fulbright scholar, and journalist. For seventeen years she was a senior editor for The Christian Century magazine, and host of the podcast In Search Of. She received her PhD in Literature from Duke University, and has published eight books, most recently the novel High Hawk (2024), which has been long-listed for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel, and the spiritual guidebook Journey to the Wild Heart: Four Invitations to Contemplative Living (2025). Amy lives in Colorado, and is cofounder of Sage Mountain Institute, a spirituality and creativity center in the Rocky Mountains.

Luke 19:40, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out!”

While we cooked the community meal together, Linda had been telling me the painful story of her life. “I was raised by a Satanic sex-trafficking cult,” she’d begun some hours before. Then suddenly, she asked me, “Have you heard the version of ‘The Sounds of Silence’ by a heavy metal band? If you’ve heard that and not gotten goosebumps, I don’t think you are alive.”

So I put it on my phone, and we stood among the dirty pots and pans, and the remnants of the green bean casserole and baked chicken that we’d made for lunch. For a moment, we let everything go still. 

The gravely — one might even say rocky — voice of the band Disturbed’s lead singer, David Draiman, brings out new tones in the classic song, one I had known all the words to since I was about seven years old. (I wasn’t raised by a Satanic sex-trafficking cult, but there was a cult-likeness in my family’s approach to folk music and Paul Simon in particular.)

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

No one dared disturb the sounds of silence. 

I did get goosebumps. I must be alive, as per Linda’s definition. It sounded a lot like a stone might sing if the volume were turned up so that we could hear it. 

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that if the people stop singing, the stones will start, it sounds a little like a joke. A stone is an inert thing. It can’t sing. In Annie Dillard’s essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” Dillard hints that her reclusive neighbor, who is trying to teach a stone to talk, is engaging in a futile operation. However much she admires it and finds it meaningful, she doesn’t think it will work. His work is a ritual, she says, that “involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well.” She wishes him well, but not because she thinks he’ll be successful. In fact, the rest of the essay is about respectful silences.

But Jesus seems to have a different perspective. The world is not what we think it is. Rocks are not what we think they are. All through the Gospel of Luke, the Pharisees have been worried. They worry about who is clean and unclean, who belongs at the table, who does what on the Sabbath, who has power and who doesn’t. In almost every chapter of Luke, the Pharisees have served as useful foils for Jesus’ alternative perception of reality, for his tendency to blur the categories the Pharisees take for granted, for his radical hope.

As he’s gone to their houses, eaten lunch with them, and had rich conversations, he has expressed an inner freedom that they find baffling. Here they seem to be worried on his behalf. Not so loud, they say. Tell the people to tone it down, presumably because those in power will hear them and react badly. 

Jesus answers by challenging one of our most basic binaries: living and non-living. 

If you are going to learn the language of rocks — how to hear a stone speak in its own language instead of teach it to speak in ours — you have to understand that however still and silent a stone appears on the surface, it is always in motion. In his book The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli defines a stone as a “complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust…”

"Dusty Road" by Day Schildkret.

Key to understanding this, he says, is understanding that nothing is; everything happens. "The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.” The world is made up of a network of events. A stone is an event, just like a song is an event. As permanent and unchanging as a rock looks, this is an illusion. 

As far as rocks singing, there are places in the world where you can go to hear stone songs. In the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument in Utah, there are stones known as shaman stones, iron-oxide concretions that ring when they are tapped together like nature’s own musical instruments.

The tall, thin spires in Bryce Canyon, known as hoodoos, also sing as the wind moves around and through them.

At a deeper level, scientists put a seismometer on top of Castleton Tower near Moab, Utah so they could listen to the hum of the rock as it absorbed vibrations from the faraway ocean, from deep within the earth, even from human traffic.

Indigenous peoples the world over know that, as Hugh Raffles reports learning from a member of the Lenape people in his book The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, “all things have spirit, are innately alive and can exert influences on the things around them.” 

So if stones sing, what are they singing? 

What if Jesus had said, “I tell you, if these become silent, the flowers will cry out!” We know from the Sermon on the Mount and from his deep engagement with the prophets and the psalms, that Jesus was not unresponsive to flowers. But I wonder if this formulation would have drawn our minds to impermanence, to the quick passing of flowers, to blooms appearing briefly and then fading.

"Holy Week Celebration at Seminary of the Southwest 2020." Photo by Christine Brunson.

We would hear perhaps the resonance of the prophet Isaiah, “The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever.” So if it is a rock that Jesus calls our attention to, maybe it is to another kind of being, an almost-forever kind of thing (ephemerality in very slow motion). The passage calls our attention to a kind of song that is more lasting than human songs, more permanent than human power and the threats of government. Jesus’ words draw our attention to deeper vibrations. 

In Braiding Sweetgrass, biologist, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Kimmerer, tells us something else that rocks sing about. “We are all bound,” she writes, “by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.” This is the song of rocks: making, unmaking, and making again the earth. A way of being that is always already in process. 

So what was happening on that cloak-strewn road into Jerusalem, down from the Mount of Olives? I think Jesus’ reference to the stones suggests that becoming was happening. The making, unmaking, and remaking of the world. The stones know that better than anyone else. For a moment, the crowd is tuned in and has joined the song of covenant reciprocity and praise that has been sung down through the ages.

Weekly Prayer 

Nicholas Samaras

The Unpronounceable Psalm 

I couldn’t wrap my mouth around the vowel of your name.
Your name, a cave of blue wind that burrows and delves
endlessly, that rings off the walls of my drumming, lilting heart,
through the tiny pulsations of my wrists, the blood in my neck.
I couldn’t hold the energy of your name in my mouth;
that was like trying to utter the crackle of lightning,
as if my teeth would break from its pronunciation.
I am dwarfed in the face of your magnitude,
O you whom I can’t articulate. O you of fluency
and eloquence whom I can’t fully express, my words
are only the echo of you that rings within my soul, my soul
a cave of blue wind that houses the draft of you,
the eternal vowel of you I can’t wrap my mouth around.
Lord, Lord, as close as I may gather, as close as I may say.

Amy Frykholm: afrykholm@gmail.com

Image credits: (1) PxHere.com; (2) Morning Altars; and (3) The Christian Century.