The Way of Silence

by David Steindl-rast

  For this reason sacramental life always unfolds in community, together. It is never a private affair, though it is deeply personal. Sacramentality is the secret that in our great Earth Household all communicate to all, in a myriad different ways, the life of the Holy One in the midst of us. The many communities, churches, communes, are merely pointers toward that one great family of God, more or less successful models and partial realizations of it. Their celebrations of life are somehow sacraments, because life itself is sacramental.

  Rightly understood the sacraments of the Christian churches are not self-contained boxes conveying divine grace. They are focal points of that divine fire which makes all life sacramental. It is hard to imagine someone truly understanding the Lord’s Supper, for instance, without having learned to look with the eyes of the heart at the robin gulping down an earthworm to feed her young in the nest. The universal law that life must give its life to feed new life simply mirrors the surpassing mystery that through God’s love we have life—God’s life—by the very death of God. This mystery of the Eucharist comes into focus whenever a community shares a meal mindfully, gratefully.

  Biblical tradition (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) sees with particular clarity that sacramental life is realized in time, in history. This is how the Rabbis put it: unless Moses had been taking care of the sheep, he never would have come upon the Burning Bush. Unless we serve life, in the give and take which this involves on all levels, we shall never discover its sacramental power. That togetherness in which sacramental life is rooted includes the dimensions of time, of history, of struggle, of suffering, of service. Moses not only came upon the Burning Bush in the midst of his daily work as a shepherd, but this vision compelled him to struggle for the liberation of his people.

  There is only one condition for seeing life sacramentally: “Take off your shoes!” Realize that the ground on which we stand is holy ground. The act of taking off our shoes is a gesture of thanksgiving and it is through thanksgiving that we enter into sacramental life.

  Going barefoot actually helps! There is no more immediate way of getting in touch with reality than direct physical contact. To feel the difference between walking on sand, on grass, on smooth granite warmed by the sun, on the forest floor; to let the pebbles hurt us for a while; to squeeze the mud between our toes. There are so many ways of gratefully touching God’s healing power through the earth. Whenever we take off the dullness of being-used-to it, of taking things for granted, life in all its freshness touches us and we see that all life is sacramental. If we could measure our aliveness, surely it is the degree to which we are in touch with the Holy One as the inexhaustible fire in the midst of all things.

  3. Don Johnson, The Protean Body: A Rolfer’s View of Human Flexibility (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129.

  4. C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner’s, 2003), 176.

  5. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 146.

  Chapter Nine: Our Quest for Ultimate Meaning

  Our religious experience begins and ends with the heart. It begins with the insight that our heart is restless. A world of things can never fully satisfy its restless quest. Only that no-thing beyond all things that we call meaning gives us rest when we glimpse it. The quest of the human heart for meaning is the heartbeat of every religion.

  —From Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer

  Happiness and a meaningful life are inseparable. You may know people who appear to have whatever good fortune can give and are nevertheless desperately unhappy. And there are others who in the midst of raw misery are deeply at peace and—well, genuinely happy. See if you can find where the difference lies.

  When we go deep enough, we find that the happy ones have found the one thing which the others are lacking: meaning in life. But we should not call meaning a “thing.” It is, in fact, the one reality in our life which is nothing. Nor should we say that someone has found meaning, as if, once found, meaning could be safely kept for darker days. Meaning must be constantly received, like the light to which we must open our eyes here and now, if we want to see.

  An image can help us see how meaning can be nothing, or “no thing.” We point, in the West, to a vase or an ash tray and ask: “What is this?” No matter how manifold the answers we receive, they will generally conceive of the thing as a certain material formed in a particular way: glass pressed or blown into a certain shape, clay shaped on a potter’s wheel, fired and glazed. Of course. It never occurs to us that someone’s bent of mind could be so different that the answer centers with the same directness on the empty space of our vase or dish. Surprise. “Empty space? Is that all?” Well, of course, the emptiness has to be defined by this shape or that. But this is less important. What really matters is the emptiness of the vessel. Isn’t this what makes it a vessel? We must admit it, strange as this approach may seem to us; as strange as the “sound of no-sound,” to which it is closely related.

  Silence too, in this sense, is not the absence of word or sound. It is not characterized by absence but by presence, a presence too great for words. When we have some little joy or pain we are apt to talk about it. When joy or pain grows strong we rejoice or cry. But when bliss or suffering become overpowering—we are silent. Any encounter with mystery is hidden in silence. The very term “mystery” comes from the Greek word, muein: “to keep silent” or “close the mouth.” Mystery is not an empty emptiness but the incomprehensible Presence that touches us and renders us speechless as it imparts to us meaning.

  Only by the tension between word and silence is meaning upheld. (Both “word” and “silence” are taken here in the most comprehensive sense, as two dimensions of all reality.) The moment we relax this tension meaning escapes us: the moment we break the tension meaning is broken. Failing to see the distinction between word and silence—a distinction greater and more basic than any other—would mean relaxing the tension. Yet, pushing the distinction to the point of separation would break the tension. The point is that silence and word are distinguished as well as united by the third dimension of meaning we discussed earlier: that of understanding.

  After all, how do we understand? I would say, by allowing the word to lead us into silence until we truly hear the silence in and through the word. But more concretely, how does understanding come about in a dialogue? A true dialogue is more than an exchange of words: the “more” consists in an exchange of silence. This is where understanding comes in. For true understanding it is necessary that the silence within me should come to word and so reach out to you until it touches not only your ear and your brain but your heart, your still point, the core of silence within you. Thus, understanding is communication of silence, with silence, in and through the word.

  As soon as we reestablish understanding in its proper place, we have gained a new horizon within which to view the relationship of Christian spirituality to Buddhism and Hinduism. If we can accept that our quest for ultimate meaning is the tap root of all spirituality, and if it is true that Word, Silence, and understanding together constitute the sphere of meaning, we can see the possibility that three different traditions within humanity’s quest may focus each on a different one of these three dimensions of meaning. Of course, we are not speaking of three watertight compartments but of dimensions which, though distinguishable, can never be separated from one another. Yet, we have seen that in our own tradition the focus on the Word is so strong that Silence and understanding are almost crowded out of our field of vision: We have to make an effort to rediscover their proper place. Thus we should be able to appreciate that in other traditions Silence or understanding may hold a place of preeminence comparable to the one which the Word holds in our own.

  If we now consult the data of comparative religion, we find verified what at first sight would seem too good to be true. Jews, Christians, and Muslims find ultimate meaning in the Word. Buddhists (as we have already briefly indicated) find that ultimate meaning in Silence, in the emptiness w
hich is fullness, in the nothing that gives meaning to everything. In turn, understanding, which yokes together Word and Silence, is then the central preoccupation of Hinduism. Admittedly, this sketchy scheme allows for about as much detail as a stamp-size map of the world. The obvious danger is oversimplification. And yet there are advantages to a reduction of scale. For one thing, we shall be less apt to overlook the forest for the trees.

  Hinduism, for instance, is so vast and varied a jungle of religions and philosophies that one cannot blame anyone who despairs of finding a unifying principle behind it all. Yet, if there is one, it is the ever-repeated insight that God manifest is God unmanifest, and God unmanifest is God manifest. This is understanding in our sense, understanding that the Word is Silence—Silence comes to itself in the Word; understanding that the Silence is Word—Word brought home. “God manifest is God unmanifest” is the Hindu parallel to Jesus’s word: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Word and Silence are one and it is in and through the Spirit of Understanding that they are one. Hindus have spent five thousand years or more cultivating, not a theology of the Holy Spirit (theology belongs to the realm of the Logos, the Word), but what must take the place of theology when the Spirit is accorded the place which the Word holds in our approach. Should this not give us hope that future encounters with Hinduism may tap new springs in the depth of our Christian heritage?

  In a similar way, Buddhism concentrates on a dimension which belongs to the Word but has been somewhat neglected in Christian tradition. In what would correspond to a theology of the Father (since theo-logy can only be about the Father), Silence would have to replace the medium of the Word. Maybe Buddhists could teach us something in this field. When Buddhists speak of a door, they do not mean primarily frame, leaf, and hinges, as we do, but the empty space. When Christ says, “I am the door” (John 10:9) we are free to take this in the Western-Christian or in the Buddhist sense. Why should the latter be less Christian?

  It would fall short of the truth to claim that the great traditions of spirituality are complementary. In fact, it would be wrong to think that they could add up, as it were, to “the real thing.” They are “the real thing” each one of them. They are not complementary but interdimensional. Each contains each, though with the greatest possible differences in accentuation. Each is, therefore, unique.

  Each is, in its own way, superior. And what of the Christian claim to universality? Rightly understood, this is not some sort of colonial imperative: it points toward inner horizons. It makes demands of us Christians, not of others, challenging us to rediscover again and again the neglected dimensions of our own tradition, so as to become truly universal, truly catholic.

  Not some theory, but our own experience must be the key to an understanding of the spiritual traditions with which we are confronted. For, if our search for meaning in life is the root of spirituality, and happiness is its fruit, we should be able to gain access to all its forms from the vantage point of our own familiar and very personal moments of happiness.

  Chapter Ten: The Mystical Core of Organized Religion

  In the biblical tradition human faith is the response to divine faithfulness. What we are talking about is not restricted, however, to any particular tradition or creed. It is a universal phenomenon accessible to every human heart. All who follow their senses to the faithful heart of reality find themselves both challenged and encouraged to a faith which all the creeds in the world presuppose as their common matrix.

  —From A Listening Heart

  Mysticism has been democratized in our day. Not so long ago, “real” mystics were those who had visions, levitations, and bilocations—and, most important, were those who had lived in the past. Any contemporary mystic was surely a fake (if not a witch). Today, we realize that extraordinary mystical phenomena have little to do with the essence of mysticism. Of course, genuine mystics had told us this all along; we just wouldn’t listen. We’ve come to understand mysticism as the experience of communion with Ultimate Reality (that is, with “God,” if you feel comfortable with this time-honored, but also time-distorted, term).

  Many of us experience a sense of communion with Ultimate Reality once in a while. In our best, most alive moments, we feel somehow one with that fundamental whatever-it-is that keeps us all going. Even psychological research suggests that the experience of communion with Ultimate Reality is nearly universal among humans. So we find ourselves officially recognized as bona fide mystics. Some of us even sense the challenge to translate the bliss of universal communion into the nitty-gritty of human community in daily living. That’s certainly a step forward.

  Like every step forward in life, however, the discovery of mysticism as everyone’s inalienable right brings with it a puzzling tension. Those who feel this tension most keenly are people who have long been members of an established religion, with its doctrines, ethical precepts, and rites. They may discover the mystical reality inside the religious establishment or outside of it: either in church or on a mountaintop, while listening to Bach’s B-Minor Mass, or while watching a sunset.

  In any case, but especially out in nature, those who taste mystical ecstasy may begin to sense a discrepancy between this undeniably religious experience and the forms that normally pass as religious. If the religious pursuit is essentially the human quest for meaning, then these most meaningful moments of human existence must certainly be called “religious.” They are, in fact, quickly recognized as the very heart of religion, especially by people who have the good fortune of feeling at home in a religious tradition. And yet, the body of religion doesn’t always accept its heart. This can happen in any religious tradition, Eastern or Western. To the establishment, after all, mysticism is suspect. The established religion asks: Why is there a need for absorption in the Cloud of Unknowing when we have spelled out everything so clearly? And isn’t that emphasis on personal experience a bit egocentric? Who can be sure that people standing on their own feet won’t go their own way? These suspicions gave rise to the famous saying that “myst-i-cism begins with mist, puts the I in the center, and ends in schism.”

  In every religion, there is this tension between the mystic and the religious establishment. As great a mystic as Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273) attacked his own Muslim establishment:

  When the school and the mosque and the minaret get torn down, then the dervishes can begin their community.

  Mansur al-Hallaj (c. 858–922), on the other hand, an earlier Persian mystic, was attacked by that same establishment, tortured, and crucified for his mystical lifestyle and convictions, a persecution not without political overtones. One way or the other, the same plot is acted out repeatedly on the stage of history: every religion seems to begin with mysticism and end up in politics. If we could understand the inner workings of this process, maybe we could deal with the tension between mystical religion and religious establishment in a new way. Maybe we could transform the polarization into a mutually vitalizing polarity. Understanding would certainly make us more compassionate with those caught up on both sides of the struggle.

  The question we need to tackle is this: How does one get from mystic experience to an established religion? My one-word answer is: inevitably. What makes the process inevitable is that we do with our mystical experience what we do with every experience, that is, we try to understand it; we opt for or against it; we express our feelings with regard to it. Do this with your mystical experience and you have all the makings of a religion. This can be shown.

  Moment by moment, as we experience this and that, our intellect keeps step; it interprets what we perceive. This is especially true when we have one of those deeply meaningful moments: our intellect swoops down upon that mystical experience and starts interpreting it. Religious doctrine begins at this point. There is no religion in the world that doesn’t have its doctrine. And there is no religious doctrine that could not ultimately be traced back to its roots in mystical experience—that is, if one had time and patience enough, f
or those roots can be mighty long and entangled. Even if you said, “My private religion has no doctrine, for I know that my deepest religious awareness cannot be put into words,” that would be exactly what we are talking about: an intellectual interpretation of your experience. Your “doctrine” would be a piece of so-called negative (apophatic) theology, found in most religions.

  Some of us are more intellectually inclined than others, more likely to interpret experience by thinking it through, but all of us do so to a certain extent. Yet, forming an opinion is not all we do. On the basis of that opinion, we take sides for or against; we desire or reject. Our will does that. As soon as we recognize something as good for us, we cannot help desiring it. That is why we commit ourselves willingly to go after it. The moment we taste the mystical bliss of universal belonging, we say a willing “yes” to it. In this unconditional “yes” lies the root of ethics. And all ethical systems can ultimately be reduced to acting as one acts when one feels a sense of belonging.

  It is always the whole human person that interacts with the world, but when the interaction aims at knowing, we speak of the intellect. When desire stands in the foreground, we speak of the will. The intellect sifts out what is true; the will reaches out for what is good. But there is a third dimension to reality: beauty. Our whole being resonates with what is beautiful, like a crystal lampshade that reverberates every time you hit a C-sharp on the piano. Where this feeling of resonance (or, in other situations, dissonance) marks our interaction with the world, we speak of the emotions. How joyfully the emotions reverberate with the beauty of our mystical experience! The more they respond, the more we will celebrate that experience. We may remember the day and the hour and celebrate it year after year. We may go back to the garden bench where the singing of that thrush swept us off our feet. We may never hear the bird again, but a ritual has been established, a kind of pilgrimage has been undertaken to a personal holy place. Ritual, too, is an element of every religion. And every ritual in the world celebrates in one form or another belonging—pointing toward that ultimate belonging we experience in moments of mystical awareness.