True welcome is silent. It is not diplomatic, theatrical, or sentimental.
61. Nowadays, in a similar way, when we acclaim Christ during the major liturgical feasts, we must insistently make sure that our joy is not merely artificial. Often we do not give the Son of God the opportunity to dwell in our hearts.
In The Imitation of Christ, we find these extraordinary lines:
Up with you, then, faithful soul, get your heart ready for the coming of this true Lover, or he will never consent to come and make his dwelling in you; that is his own way of putting it, If a man has any love for me, he will be true to my word; and we will come to him, and make our abode with him [John 14:23]. You must make room for Christ, then. . . .
If Christ is yours, then wealth is yours; he satisfies all your wants. He will look after you, manage all your affairs for you most dutifully; you will need no human support to rely on. . . .
Put all your trust in God, centre in him all your fear and all your love; he will make himself responsible for you, and all will go well as he sees best. . . .
Nothing will ever bring you rest, except being closely united to Jesus. . . .
All your thoughts must be at home with God, all your prayer make its way up to Christ continually.
Ah, but it is above your reach (you complain), such high contemplation of heavenly things. Why then, let your mind come to rest in Christ’s Passion, and find in his sacred wounds the home it longs for. . . .
You must hold out with him, and for love of him, before you can share his kingdom.
If you’d ever really got inside the mind of Jesus, ever had a single taste of his burning love, considerations of your own loss or gain would mean nothing to you; you would be glad to have insults heaped on you—the love of Jesus fills us with self-contempt.
After our first efforts, however, we may also notice that silence does not entirely belong to us. For once we have passed through the door of prayer, we discover an agitated crowd of thoughts, feelings, and aversions that we have great difficulty in quieting.
These noisy, stubborn multitudes bog down our soul. We can decide to pray and realize that it is impossible to remain concentrated on our interior life. We are distracted by a thousand disturbing things. The interior racket makes all silence impossible. The slightest of passions that has troubled our heart before a prayer can ruin that moment of silence. Noise triumphs, and silence flees. . . .
62. How can we come to master our own interior silence? The only answer lies in asceticism, self-renunciation, and humility. If man does not mortify himself, if he stays as he is, he remains outside of God.
63. When they want to look at God, Oriental peoples kneel down and prostrate themselves, with their face to the ground, as a sign of voluntary humiliation and respectful reverence. Without a strong desire to be rid of oneself, to make oneself small in the presence of the Eternal, no conversation with God is possible. Similarly, without mastery of one’s own silence, no encounter with the other person is possible. If we remain ourselves, we are full of noise, conceit, and anger.
64. Reading should help us to pray by concentrating our attention. Let us not forget the vital connection between prayer and the Word of God. How can we “imagine the Lord at our side” if we do not seek him where he reveals himself? Meditation consists of imagining in silence the earthly, everyday life of Jesus. It is not necessary to recall a historical event; rather, we must seek to bring the Son of God silently into our heart.
Thus it is important to stay in the presence of the Lord so that he can find us available and introduce us into the great silence within that enables him to become incarnate in us, to transform us into himself. And in this silence, which is not emptiness but is filled with the Holy Spirit, the soul will be able to hear rising from his heart, like a murmur: “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15). Prayer is successfully being quiet, listening to God, and being able to hear the ineffable moaning of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in us and cries out silently.
65. Our contemporaries have the feeling that prayer consists of saying things to God, shouting and fidgeting in his presence, but prayer is simpler than that. It consists of listening to God speak silently within us. But why, then, do we not watch Jesus pray? Why do we not, like the Apostles, ask him, beg him: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples” (Lk 11:1)? Why do we seek elsewhere models and examples of prayer, trying to convince ourselves that excitement, noise, and disorder are signs of effusiveness and of the presence of the Spirit of Jesus? Christ is the one Master who can teach us to pray, and to pray is to love and to stay with Jesus in silence and interior solitude.
66. In his Ascetical Homilies, Isaac the Syrian wrote:
Love silence above all things, because it brings you near to fruit that the tongue cannot express. First let us force ourselves to be silent, and then from out of this silence something is born that leads us into silence itself. . . . If you begin with this discipline, I know not how much light will dawn on you from it. . . . Great is the man who by the patience of his members achieves wondrous habits in his soul! When you put all the works of this discipline on one side and silence on the other, you will find the latter to be greater in weight.
In silence, man conquers his nobility and his grandeur only if he is on his knees in order to hear and adore God. It is in the silence of humiliation and self-mortification, by quieting the turmoil of the flesh, by successfully taming the noisy images, by keeping at a distance the dreams, imaginations, and roaring of a world that is always in a whirl, in order to purify himself of all that ruins the soul and separates it from contemplation, that man makes himself capable of looking at God and loving him. Plotinus already wrote in his Enneads about how a soul can ascend to the contemplation of the “universal soul”: “a soul [must] become worthy to look, emancipate[d] from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens.”
67. In Un autre regard sur l’homme [Another look at man], Maurice Zundel seems to develop Plotinus’ thought in greater depth when he writes:
Our whole life is comprised in this alternative: either I am in myself or I am in God. There is no middle way. When I stop encountering myself, that is when God is really present. When I lose sight of myself, that is when I look at him. When I no longer hear myself, that is when I listen to him, and God, at all levels, consists precisely in losing myself in him. The program is simple, but implementing it is difficult, because we cannot decree an encounter or set the hour in which love will spring forth. There is no path that infallibly ends with an exchange of intimacies. Nothing is freer, more unforeseen, or more gratuitous. All you can do is to remove the obstacles that make such an exchange impossible, and they are all summed up in the noise that one makes with oneself and around oneself. The only chance we have of leaving ourselves is to neutralize our attention, peacefully to withdraw our attention from this whole confused mix of appetites and claims, and to shut off the psychological current that feeds this turmoil; in this recollection, the emptiness that makes us available grows ever wider and deeper. When total silence is established, it is already an announcement of the Presence who fills up the space resulting from the retreat of myself.
68. Silence is difficult, but it enables man to let himself be led by God. From silence is born silence. Through God the silent, we can attain silence. And man is unceasingly surprised by the light that pours forth then.
Silence is more important than any other human work. Because it expresses God. The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and others so as to place us humbly and generously at their service.
In his Écrits monastiques [Monastic writings], Father Jérôme wrote: “Silence makes you think of a great wave on the ocean that, after pushing the skiff toward an unknown land, leaves it on a shore that is still feared, where the presence of
the Infinite would reign alone.” How do you describe contemplative silence?
69. Contemplative silence can frighten us. It is like a big wave that carries us, without being able to drown us, and causes us to end up on fearsome shores. For man then finds himself facing the terrifying immensity of the mystery. I do not think it is possible to approach God’s majesty without trembling in dread and astonishment. Our ancestors were often physically moved by a great fear that simultaneously expressed admiration, respect, and a religious fear of the blazing furnace of God’s transcendence.
70. God’s silence is a glowing burn for the man who approaches him. Through this divine silence, man becomes a bit estranged from this world. He is separated from the earth and from himself. Silence impels us toward an unknown land that is God. And this land becomes our true homeland. Through silence, we return to our heavenly origin, where there is nothing but calm, peace, repose, silent contemplation, and adoration of the radiant face of God.
71. All the great saints were familiar with this incomparable experience. When their prayers led them to the threshold of the Eternal One’s silence, they sensed how close and immense God became. They remained wordlessly in the presence of the Father. The more they ascended toward God, the more silent they became. Saint Philip Neri and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux were confronted with a reality they could not comprehend, but they saw with their own eyes the Infinite and the splendor of love. This immensity came to draw them into a grand silence of adoration and interior peace.
72. Contemplative silence is silence with God. This silence is clinging to God, appearing before God, and placing oneself in his presence, offering oneself to him, mortifying oneself in him, adoring, loving, and hearing him, listening to him and resting in him. This is the silence of eternity, the union of the soul with God.
73. In one of his sermons, John Tauler, a theologian, mystic, and disciple of Master Eckhart, wrote:
Mary lived retired, and so must the soul espoused to God be in retirement, if it will experience the interior regeneration. But not [only] from those wanderings after temporal things which appear to be faulty, but even from the sensible devotion attached to the practice of virtue, must the soul refrain. It must establish rest and stillness as an enclosure in which to dwell, hiding from and cutting off nature and the senses, guarding quiet and interior peace, rest and repose. It is of this state of the soul that we shall sing next Sunday in the introit of the mass: “While all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thine Almighty Word, O Lord, came down from Heaven, out of Thy royal throne” (Wisdom xviii, 14-15). That was the Eternal Word going forth from the Father’s heart. It is amid this silence, when all things are hushed in even eternal silence, that in very truth we hear this Word; for when God would speak thou must be silent.
Christ often recommends that we withdraw if we want to pray. It may be a remote place, in solitude, so as to be alone with the Alone. But the question of the external setting cannot avoid the problem of interiority. It is important to create the interior room where man finds God in a genuine face-to-face encounter. This spiritual work demands effort in order to avoid all distraction, which presupposes interior asceticism. The search for interior silence is a path to perfection that demands repeated attempts. So often, we have a hazardous kind of excitement and imagination inside us. It is necessary to hide in the Spirit in order to divert and escape the senses. The Holy Spirit is the first condition for silence.
74. Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies.
When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God.
75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil?
Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.
76. Too few Christians today are willing to go back inside themselves so as to look at themselves and to let God look at them. I insist: too few are willing to confront God in silence, by coming to be burned in that great face-to-face encounter.
In killing silence, man assassinates God. But who will help man to be quiet? His mobile phone is continually ringing; his fingers and mind are always busy sending messages. . . . Developing a taste for prayer is probably the first and foremost battle of our age. Stationed in garrisons of the most pitiful noises, is man prepared to return to silence? The death of silence is apparent. God will always help us to rediscover it.
Saint John of the Cross, in his Spiritual Canticle, speaks to us about the musica callada, the “silent music” produced by the Beloved in the soul that is united to him. How can we attempt to describe the sound of silence?
77. How can we express in concrete words a “silent music”? This musical phenomenon is necessarily a faint, humble sound heard by God alone. It consists of the notes produced by the harp of our heart when it is consumed with love.
78. It is important to let the Holy Spirit penetrate the innermost regions of the soul. For in that secret space God lives and acts. He works so as to achieve our union with him. As long as man has not come to recognize the great silence of God in the depths of his heart and to understand this mysterious place of the Eternal in his flesh, he cannot get to a true spiritual and human transformation. The true sound of silence is here: we cannot hear the Word if we have not been previously transformed by God’s silence.
79. The soul must listen to the voice of silence. It must agree to be united with silence so as to allow God to enter into it. How do we let God enter into us? That is the question and the true grace of silence.
80. In silence there is collaboration between man and God. The depth of the human soul is God’s house. We will be able to let God act by keeping the most perfect interior silence. And it is possible for us to find this silence by being attentive to the voice of silence. Even in a hostile environment, we can find God in ourselves if we seek to listen to the silence that he impresses on our soul.
81. A heart in silence is a melody for the heart of God. The lamp is consumed noiselessly before the tabernacle, and incense ascends in silence to the throne of God: such is the sound of the silence of love.
82. The sound of the silence in God allows us to learn the first note of this canticle which is the song of the heavens. “The language [God] best hears is silent love”, John of the Cross says magnif
icently in his Maxims on Love.
83. Silent love, which burns without being consumed and says nothing, is the greatest love. If we remain noiseless while seeking him, God is pleased to hear this availability. What is the silence that God wants to hear? What are the voice and the music that please God? It is silent love that says nothing and consents. It is like the offering and the smoke of the incense that rise before God, together with the prayers of the saints (Rev 8:1-4).
84. The concrete life of monks is a silent love, a self-giving love, a love that is consumed. God receives this silent burnt offering. A burnt offering makes no noise. It burns silently for a long time before the divine majesty, and its fragrance gladdens the heart of God.
God hears nothing else but this silent, humble, meek love.
85. In the school of the Holy Spirit, we learn to listen to God, in the silence that is the language of true love, which he alone can hear: “For even though that music is silent to the natural senses and faculties, it is sounding solitude for the spiritual faculties. When these spiritual faculties are alone and empty of all natural forms and apprehensions, they can receive in a most sonorous way the spiritual sound of the excellence of God, in Himself and in His creatures”, John of the Cross writes in his Spiritual Canticle.
86. In his sermon on the birth of Saint John the Baptist, which is dedicated to the voice and the Word, echoing his humble, self-effacing attitude: “He must increase and I must decrease”, Saint Augustine does not hesitate to declare: “All voices must decrease in the measure that one advances in the knowledge of Christ. The more wisdom reveals itself to us, the less we need the voice: the voice in the depths, the voice in the Apostles, the voice in the psalms, the voice in the Gospel. Let him come, the Word who was at the beginning! This Word who was God! Thus let the voice gradually cease to perform its function, as the soul progresses toward Christ. For God has a secret language, in many people he addresses the heart, and it is a mighty murmur in the great silence of the heart when he says: I am your salvation.”
The Power of Silence Page 6