The Quiet Ones

The Quiet Ones

I’d never heard of Euthydemus or Charmantides or Cleitophon. Maybe their names don’t exactly ring a bell for you, either. They each appear in Plato’s The Republic, albeit very briefly. They’re not main characters, but they’re in the crowd, listening to the dialectic. They just don’t add much in the way of words.

So why bother, Plato? Why write them in? Those were the questions my philosophy professor asked as eight of us sat around a table having a conversation about what is, and how we can know what is. “If a character has just one line, why not give it to someone else?” he asked. “Or if he has no lines, why have him there at all?”

I listened as my classmates offered their answers, but as I did a huge lump formed in my throat and tears began to run down my cheeks. I remembered a precious widowed and childless aunt, dying in a dreary nursing home in a small West Texas town. I thought of a younger friend with cerebral palsy who probably finds himself on the outside of more than a few circles of his peers. And of another friend who rarely holds the floor but whose heart is a deep, deep river. And I wept. In a graduate class. In front of everyone.

“Have we hurt you in any way?” my professor asked. I shook my head no. Then he asked if there was something I’d like to say, and for one of the few times in my adult life I simply answered no. And I meant it.

Here’s what I understood that evening from “the quiet ones”—from the guys who hardly uttered a line in The Republic, but whose names are included along with Socrates in the dramatis personae: everyone matters. Even the ones who may not speak a word. Simply by being with us, they change everything. That night I saw their faces, heard their voices, felt their weight. When I came home, I said what I might have said earlier, but did not. I said their names, voicing the gratitude I felt for them. They are the quiet ones, the wordless ones we’d be bereft without. How good of God to let us be with them.

You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

Ephesians 2:19, ESV