The Power of Silence

by Robert Cardinal Sarah,

  These were my frequent thoughts. For as I myself was held in bonds by the innumerable errors of my previous life, from which I did not believe that I could possibly be delivered, so I was disposed to acquiesce in my clinging vices; and because I despaired of better things, I used to indulge my sins as if they were actually parts of me, and indigenous to me.” (Ad Donatum, 3-4)

  Man must make a choice: God or nothing, silence or noise.

  112. Without the moorings of silence, life is depressing movement, a puny little boat ceaselessly tossed by the violence of the waves. Silence is the outer wall that we must build in order to protect an interior edifice.

  113. Indeed, God himself is the one who builds the dike that protects us from the turmoil, from external attacks, and from the storms of this world. This is the assurance that the prophet Isaiah gives us: “In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: ‘We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks’ ” (Is 26:1). Sheltered by this wall, we live in silence and the heart of God, and our attention is constantly directed toward him, because we want to see God.

  Why talk about “walls and bulwarks”? Because originally man was destined to live with God. But by giving in to sin, he was not only driven out of paradise but also out of himself and was abandoned in exteriority and darkness. Through the Incarnation, God came to abolish the consequences of original sin and to restore man’s original destiny and vocation. By becoming incarnate and taking on our human condition, Jesus enabled mankind to set out again on the path of interiority. So it is that Saint Gregory the Great applies to the Incarnation and redemption the notions of interiority and exteriority. Christ is the one who, by coming down to earth, wins back for fallen man the joys of contemplation, of the lux interna [internal light]. Christ is in a way the wall that protects the spiritual edifice that is the Church. But he is also the outer wall that protects our interior edifice. Saint Gregory says:

  It must be noted that this wall of the spiritual edifice is called exterior. Indeed, the wall built to protect an edifice is ordinarily placed not inside but outside. Why therefore was it necessary to say that it is exterior, since ordinarily this wall is never placed in the interior? Because it is indispensable if we want the wall placed outside to defend what is inside. But what else does he designate by this term but the very Incarnation of the Lord? For if God is an interior wall for us, the God-made-man is an exterior wall. This is why a prophet says to him: “You went forth for the salvation of your people, for the salvation of your anointed” (Hab 3:13). And indeed, this wall, namely, the Incarnate Lord, would not be a wall for us unless he were outside, for he would not protect us inside if he did not appear outside.

  114. Similarly, in his book Silence cartusien, Dom Augustin Guillerand writes these magnificent lines: “For us Carthusians, the words that we do not say become prayers. That is our strength, and we can do some good only by this great method of silence. We speak to God about those to whom we do not speak.” He continues: “It is necessary for us to have no more fear of ourselves or of others. It is necessary to look real life in the face. This profound, prolonged look is what God will give us, for God is at the basis of everything. This desire (or this love) is what we seek. This is where God calls us. One arrives at this point only after a long journey that separates us from creatures and from ourselves. . . . The great science and the great light here below is silent love.” And he concludes: “In silence, sadness is looking at oneself; joy is looking at God. This is why we have silence: it is necessary to get out of oneself, to think of God instead of thinking about self.”

  115. Infallibly, silence leads to God, provided man stops looking at himself. For even in the experience of silence, there is a snare: narcissism and egotism.

  116. Contemplative silence is a silence of adoration and listening by a person who stands in the presence of God. To stand silently in God’s presence is to pray. Prayer demands that we successfully keep quiet so as to hear and listen to God.

  Silence requires absolutely availability with respect to God’s will. Man must be completely turned toward God and toward his brethren. Silence is a quest and a form of charity, in which God’s eyes become our eyes and God’s heart is grafted onto our heart. We cannot stay in the presence of the fire of divine silence without being burned.

  The friends and the lovers of God are irradiated by him. The more they remain in silence, the more they love God. The more empty of self they are, the more full of God they are. The more they converse with God, face to face, the more their faces beam with the light and splendor of God, like Moses coming out of the meeting tent (Ex 34:29-35).

  117. There are souls who claim solitude so as to find themselves, and others who seek it in order to give themselves to God and to others.

  118. In silence, God’s joy becomes our joy. Being silent in the presence of God is almost being like God.

  119. Dom Guillerand put it neatly: “Life is a few minutes spent together while waiting for the definitive great reunion in the fatherland where there is only one minute. . . but an eternal minute. And by practicing a little, we will be able to begin living that minute here below through silence and solitude.”

  Silence and solitude are a small anticipation of eternity, when we will be in God’s presence permanently, irradiated by him, the great Silent One, because he is the great lover.

  120. Silence and solitude are very simple things, just as God himself is infinitely simple. In The Prayer of Love and Silence, Dom Jean-Baptiste Porion wrote:

  It is Our Lord himself who gives us the invitation: Be ye simple as doves [Mt 10:16]. Man is a complex being, but it would be a pity if he introduced his complications into his relations with God. God, on the contrary, is simplicity itself. The more complicated we are, therefore, the farther we stray from him; the simpler we are, on the other hand, the closer we come to him.

  Silence is a paradise, but man does not see this right away. He is full of contradictions. We ought to be like children in God’s presence. But we try in so many ways to make our relationship to God difficult and obscure or even nonexistent. Man has lost the simplicity of childhood. That is why silence is so difficult for him. And man rejects silence even more because he wants to become God himself.

  In silence he cannot be a false god but can merely stand in a luminous face-to-face encounter with God.

  In The Confessions, Saint Augustine confides his own experience through these magnificent lines: “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness: and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness: Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee: I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee: Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.” Ultimately, where are the dwelling places of solitude and silence?

  121. Jesus himself points out to men the beautiful dwelling places of solitude and silence. First of all, there is the privacy of our room when we have closed the doors to be alone, in the secrecy of an intimate conversation with God. There is also the chiaroscuro of a chapel, a place of solitude, silence, and intimacy, where the Presence of all presences awaits us, Jesus in the Eucharist. There are also shrines, holy places, and monasteries that have been established to enable us to devote a few days to the Lord. Finally, there are the houses of God that are our churches, if the priests and the faithful take care to respect their sacred character, so that they do not become museums, theaters, or concert halls, but remain places reserved for prayer and God alone.

  122. Let us not hesitate to give pride of place to silent daily prayer in the solitude of our room. In a perfect symbiosis with the cloister
s of monasteries, it is necessary to experience an intimate relationship with God in the sanctuary of our room and to fight the good fight of faith through prayer and silence. Today, in this pagan world besotted with idols that boasts of the most abominable sins, God himself demands through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah that we go into our rooms to keep ourselves safe from all contamination and all slavery of sin, but especially to pray intensely with a view to our conversion: “Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while. . . . For behold, the Lord is coming forth out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth. . . . Or let them lay hold of my protection, let them make peace with me, let them make peace with me” (Is 26:20-21; 27:5). We can become true contemplatives by living in peace with God if our houses become temples of God.

  123. The distance that must be traveled in order to go to the farthest limits of our interior territory is so vast and so arduous that it needs stopping places that consist of houses where silence and solitude are inviolable pillars. The sacred intimacy of a chapel, a room, or the cloister of a monastery symbolizes the purity of paradise. In that blessed place, solitude and silence attain a form of aesthetic and spiritual perfection.

  124. If we walk toward God, there comes a moment when speech is useless and uninteresting because contemplation alone has any importance. And so, more than any other reality, monastic life enables souls to contemplate God. The silence of the monasteries provides the best earthly setting for the person who wants to ascend toward the One who awaits him.

  Dom Jean-Baptiste Porion very rightly reflected in The Prayer of Love and Silence:

  All life is mysterious in its principle and its operation. Contemplative life is the most profound life of all, and the truest. This is why it is also the most secret as well as the most inexplicable. Too simple and too spiritual for human words to be able to express it completely. . . . To enter the cloister is to convert, in other words, to turn away from the world and toward God. This is the beginning of Carthusian life and of all religious life as well. Those whom a divine calling leads into solitude have heard the Gospel verse: “Poenitentiam agite. Vade, vende quod habes.” (Repent. Go, sell what you possess.) Therefore, above all, they have made an effort to be detached from creatures, to break the chains of our servitude. These acts of renunciation and submission will never cease to be necessary. We will always have to struggle against our fallen nature. “Militia est vita hominis super terram.” (Man’s life on earth is a combat.)

  125. The cloister makes the fuga mundi a reality: the flight from the world to find solitude and silence. It means an end of the turmoil, the artificial lights, the sad drugs of noise and the hankering to possess more and more goods, so as to look to heaven. A man who enters the monastery seeks silence in order to find God. He wants to love God above all else, as his sole good and his only wealth. In his Homily for the Christmas Novena, Saint Alphonsus Liguori said:

  In order to be able to love God much in Heaven, it is necessary first to love him much on earth. The degree of our love for God at the end of our life will be the measure of our love for God during eternity. Do we want to gain certitude that we will no longer be separated from this Supreme Good in the present life? Let us embrace him more and more by the bonds of our love, while saying to him with the Bride in Song of Songs: “I found him whom my soul loves: I held him, and would not let him go.” How did the sacred Bride hold her Beloved? “One holds God with the arms of charity”, Saint Ambrose replies. Happy, then, the one who can exclaim with Saint Paulinus: “Let the rich own their riches, let Kings possess their kingdoms: as for us, our glory, our wealth, and our kingdom is Christ!” And with Saint Ignatius [of Loyola]: “Only give me your love and your grace, and I am rich enough.” Make me love you, and may I be loved by you; I do not desire and do not have to desire anything else.

  Benedict XVI expressed better than any other pope this beautiful mystery of contemplative life in his speech at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris on September 12, 2008: “We set out from the premise that the basic attitude of monks in the face of the collapse of the old order and its certainties was quaerere Deum—setting out in search of God. We could describe this as the truly philosophical attitude: looking beyond the penultimate, and setting out in search of the ultimate and the true.”

  126. A monk commits himself to a journey that is noble and long; nevertheless, he already has guidance: the word of the Bible in which he hears God. Hence he must strive to understand him in order to be able to go to him. Thus the progress of monks, while remaining impossible to measure as it advances, is realized at the heart of the Word that is received and meditated on through the liturgy. In this search for God, the monk is intensely gripped by the silence of Christ during his Passion, and he is the one who attracts him.

  Renunciation really does play a role, but it is a form of being stripped naked in God, a predisposition to silent listening and adoration. It is a long march toward God in light of the Word of the Bible. Silence is always the enemy of futile prospects, small talk, and affectations.

  127. The world can pursue man anywhere he may go to hide, even in the solitude and silence of a cloister. Pride, the passions, and hypocrisy seek to reassert their worst rights over the soul. When that happens, nestling in silence against the heart of God, with the open Bible over our head like the wings of the Holy Spirit, is still the best antidote, the one thing necessary to chase away from our interior territory all that is useless, superfluous, worldly, and even our own self.

  128. The monastic tradition calls “Great Silence” the nocturnal atmosphere of peace that is supposed to reign in the communal areas, as well as in each cell, generally from Compline until Prime, so that each one can be alone with God. But each person ought to create and build for himself an interior cloister, “a wall and a bulwark”, a private desert, so as to meet God there in solitude and silence.

  129. For Father Jérôme, in his Ecrits monastiques, it is rather obvious: “What a privilege it is to have this right—an acknowledged right, because it is a religious right—to take refuge in silence! Moreover, it is a privilege only if one has the courage to make use of it.” Silence is the privilege of courageous persons. They may fall and lose hope; silence will unceasingly be able to lift them up again because it bears within it a divine presence and a divine origin. Silence is a conversion that is never accomplished easily.

  130. In his book Silence cartusien, Dom Guillerand also wrote: “I want to become accustomed to looking in the darkness where the light filters through in order to arrive without injuring myself, to listen to this silence in which a voice speaks that says everything without words, to love this love that gives itself by enlightening me and speaking to me in this form that is higher than myself and closer to the light and the truth.”

  131. Physically, the faces of men of silence are different from those that are disfigured by the noises and pleasures and stratagems of a godless world. Their features, their gazes, and their smiles are lined by the power of silence. Great monks are accustomed to looking in the dark and can ceaselessly find the light that is God. For God is hidden, Deus absconditus, wrapped in a veil that silence alone can open partway. The shadow of silence allows a man to fix his attention on God. Silence is mystery; and the greatest mystery, God, remains silent. I love to recall this remark by the poet Patrice de la Tour du Pin: “In every life, silence says God. Everything that exists thrills to belong to him! Be the voice of silence at work. Cherish life; for it praises God.”

  132. Monastic life, the life of men of solitude and silence, is an ascent toward the heights, not a rest on the heights. Monks climb higher every day because God is ceaselessly greater. On this earth, we will never be able to reach God. But nothing can accompany our earthly journey toward God better than solitude and silence.

  133. Cloisters are not the only places where we can seek God. . . . Saint Augustine was abruptly snatched from his monastery to be consecrated the Bishop of Hippo
. Overwhelmed by an exhausting episcopal office, crushed by the multiplicity of his pastoral duties, Saint Augustine often considered his episcopal activity to be a sarcina episcopalis. This popular term from military language refers to the soldier’s baggage, his barda. The Bishop of Hippo had to load a particularly heavy barda on his shoulders every day. Despite his demanding ministry, and although he often had to deal with secular matters, Augustine found the time for silence and solitude in order to read, study, meditate on Sacred Scripture, pray for long hours, compose his dogmatic works, provide catechesis and teaching. Augustine’s example is situated in the Church, not an abstract, ideal Church, but in the community in Hippo, whose care-lined faces, miseries, and heartbreaks were well known to him. With that community he prayed, fasted, suffered, and journeyed toward the daily conversion that is indispensable in order to live abundantly through God, with God, and in God. He expresses the experience of this community while commenting on the psalms, in which he finds himself again in his entirety: “From the time that the body of Christ groans being in afflictions, until the end of the world, when afflictions pass away, that man groaneth and calleth upon God: and each one of us after his measure hath his part in that cry in the whole body.”

  This God who desires him, this God who is present to his brethren, this God present in the innermost depth of his soul, is also the God whom he aspires to embrace, above and beyond all theological research, in silent prayer. Toward him he stretches out his whole being, which is now aflame with love. How many times did he scan the horizon to see whether he was coming so that he could rest in him and rejoice in his Presence! Augustine described himself as a man under God’s tent, “delighted by the interior music, drawn by his sweetness”, his divine notes that silence the noises of flesh and blood and the slow advance toward the House of God. But he knows that ecstasy lasts but a moment. He falls back into everyday human miseries. He groans in his fragile flesh. He is now borne up by an attempt that is the very reason for his journey. “Sing and keep on walking”, he repeats. God is at the end of the road; already he feels the press of his hand. . .