Is silence the exile of speech? At times in your life have you thought that words were becoming too cumbersome, too heavy, too noisy?
134. We need to cultivate silence and to surround it with an interior dike.
In my prayer and in my interior life, I have always felt the need for a deeper, more complete silence. I am talking about a kind of discretion that amounts to not even thinking about myself but, rather, turning my attention, my being, and my soul toward God. The days of solitude, silence, and absolute fasting have been a great support. They have been an unprecedented grace, a slow purification, and a personal encounter with a God who wanted to draw me gradually toward a more substantial interior life so as to maintain an intimate relationship with him. Days of solitude, silence, and fasting, nourished by the Word of God alone, allow man to base his life on what is essential.
Thus I knew that I could acquire a spiritual vigor and freshness like those of a tree planted beside running waters, which stretches out its roots toward the stream. This tree fears nothing when hot weather arrives; its foliage stays green; during years of drought, it is carefree and does not cease to bear fruit (Jer 17:7-8). Silence and the development of my interior life are absolutely necessary; consecrated souls and priests must never forget it.
135. In The Way of the Heart, Henri Nouwen bitterly rebukes priests when he writes:
Silence guards the inner heat of religious emotions. This inner heat is the life of the Holy Spirit within us. Thus, silence is the discipline by which the inner fire of God is tended and kept alive. . . . What needs to be guarded is the life of the Spirit within us. Especially we who want to witness to the presence of God’s Spirit in the world need to tend the fire within with utmost care. It is not so strange that many ministers have become burnt-out cases, people say many words and share many experiences, but in whom the fire of God’s Spirit has died and from whom not much more comes forth than their own boring, petty ideas and feelings. Sometimes it seems that our many words are more an expression of our doubt than of our faith. It is as if we are not sure that God’s Spirit can touch the hearts of people: we have to help him out and, with many words, convince others of his power. But it is precisely this wordy unbelief that quenches the fire. . . .
As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. Silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.
St. John is particularly clear on this subject: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you” (Jn 14:15-18).
After the Ascension, Christ did not leave mankind orphaned. As at the beginning of creation, like a gentle breeze, “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters”; so the Son of God entrusted humanity into the hands of the Holy Spirit, who spreads the love of the Father and silently distributes his light and wisdom. This is why it is scarcely possible to let oneself be guided by the Holy Spirit in the noise and agitation of the world.
Christ is certainly distressed to see and to hear priests and bishops, who ought to be protecting the integrity of the teaching of the Gospel and of doctrine, multiply words and writings that weaken the rigor of the Gospel by their deliberately ambiguous, confused statements. It is not inopportune to remind these priests and prelates, who give the impression of saying the opposite of the Church’s traditional teaching in matters of doctrine and morality, of Christ’s severe words: “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” “[He] is guilty of an eternal sin”, Mark adds (Mt 12:31-32; Lk 12:10; Mk 3:29).
Of course we have the duty to seek new pastoral approaches. But in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Saint Thomas Aquinas warns us:
If then, you ask which way to go, accept Christ, for he is the way: “This is the way, walk in it” (Is 30:21). And Augustine says: “Walk like this human being and you will come to God. It is better to limp along on the way than to walk briskly off the way.” For one who limps on the way, even though he makes just a little progress, is approaching his destination; but if one walks off the way, the faster he goes the further he gets from his destination. If you ask where to go, cling to Christ, for he is the truth which we desire to reach.
Nouwen’s remarks about priests who have misappropriated the Word of God, the sacraments, and the liturgy clearly demonstrate that there is a very close connection between silence and fidelity to the Holy Spirit. Without the asceticism of silence, pastors become rather uninteresting men, prisoners of their boring, pathetic torrents of words. Without the life of the Holy Spirit and without silence, a priest’s teaching is nothing but confused chatter devoid of substance. A priest’s speech must be an expression [une forme] of his soul and the sign of the divine Presence.
Nouwen’s reflection is valid for everyone. The closer we are to the Holy Spirit, the more silent we are; and the farther we are from the Spirit, the more garrulous we are.
Every priest and every bishop ought to be able to say, like Saint Augustine: “Voce Ecclesiae loquor (I speak with the voice of the Church)” (Serm. 129, 4) and, therefore, with the voice of Jesus Christ; thus, with subtlety and efficacy, he should take upon himself the full responsibility of pastor and guide. Every priest, every bishop will keep in mind that on the terrible Day of Judgment he himself will have to answer before God for the sins of those whom he was unable to reform because of his own negligence.
In a letter, Saint Augustine writes seriously: “The glory of this age passes; on Judgment Day all these honors will be good for nothing. It is not my intention to waste my life on the vanity of ecclesiastical honors. I think of the day when I will have to render an accounting for the flock that has been entrusted to me by the Prince of pastors. Understand my fears, because my fears are great.”
136. Lack of respect for silence is a form of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. If he returns to a discipline of silence, a priest can subject himself to the Holy Spirit. If God’s spokesmen do not let the Holy Spirit speak in them, they unfailingly change divine grace into mere, despicable human cleverness.
137. The priest is a man of silence. He must always be listening for God. True pastoral and missionary depth can come only from silent prayer. Without silence, the priesthood is ruined. A priest must be in the hands of the Holy Spirit. If he strays from the Spirit, he will be doomed to carry out a merely human work.
138. It is true that the Holy Spirit is still the “unknown God”, according to the title of a little book by Father Victor Dillard, a Jesuit priest who died in Dachau on January 12, 1945. In Au Dieu inconnu, he introduced his reflection with this magnificent prayer, which is a supplication and a cry to the Holy Spirit, asking him to let himself be known, understood, touched, and even to reveal his face. For our desire to see him is intense:
Lord, make me see. . . . I do not even know how to call on you, what to say: Holy Spirit, O Holy Ghost. . . . I try to understand you, to isolate you in the divine sea into which I plunge. But my outstretched hand brings me nothing, and imperceptibly I drift away and kneel before the Father or lean over my more familiar interior Christ. My body stops. The senses want their ration of images so as to enable the soul to fly toward you. And you give them only strange material foods: a dove, tongues of fire, breath. Nothing that allows the warm intimacy of a familial human prayer for two. The trouble is that you are too close to me. I would need a bit of distance in order to look at you, to demarcate you, and to demarcate me, too, with respect to you, to satisfy my need for precise contours in order to understand our union.
Father Vict
or Dillard’s prayer expresses the believer’s difficulty in picturing the uniqueness of the Divine Person named the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, he is invoked extensively at the heart of the Eucharistic celebration in prayers that he might sanctify the people of God and all things and come to accomplish the transubstantiation, in other words, the transformation of the substance of the bread and wine into that of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
139. Christ gave us the great silence of the Holy Spirit. How can we forget him? If people wander away from the devouring fire of the Spirit’s silence, they always end up adoring idols. It is necessary to tend the silent fire of Pentecost. Without the Spirit’s silence, men are empty husks.
140. Silence is not the exile of speech. It is the love of the one Word. Conversely, the abundance of words is the symptom of doubt. Incredulity is always talkative.
141. We often forget that Christ loved to be silent. He set out for the desert, not to go into exile, but to encounter God. And at the most crucial moment in his life, when there was screaming on all sides, covering him with all sorts of lies and calumnies, when the high priest asked him: “Have you no answer to make?” Jesus preferred silence.
It is a case of true amnesia: Catholics no longer know that silence is sacred because it is God’s dwelling place. How can we rediscover the sense of silence as the manifestation of God? This is the tragedy of the modern world: man separates himself from God because he no longer believes in the value of silence.
142. Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.
Does the silence of listening exist? Might there be a paradox in trying to understand the other by remaining silent?
143. In order to listen, it is necessary to keep quiet. I do not mean merely a sort of constraint to be physically silent and not to interrupt what someone else is saying, but rather an interior silence, in other words, a silence that not only is directed toward receiving the other person’s words but also reflects a heart overflowing with a humble love, capable of full attention, friendly welcome and voluntary self-denial, and strong with the awareness of our poverty.
The silence of listening is a form of attention, a gift of self to the other, and a mark of moral generosity. It should manifest an awareness of our humility so as to agree to receive from another person a gift that God is giving us. For the other person is always a treasure and a precious gift that God offers to help us grow in humility, humanity, and nobility.
I think that the most defective human relationship is precisely one in which the silence of attention is absent.
144. It is necessary to impose silence on the labor of thought, calm the agitation of the heart, the turmoil of cares and worries, and eliminate all artificial distraction. Nothing makes us understand listening better than the correlation between silence and listening, attention and the gift. Thus, Saint John writes in the Prologue to his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1:5). The silence of listening is a silent heart-to-heart conversation.
How else can a heart fully receive the other person but in silence? The latter can be explained, not by the intellect, but by the soul.
145. By analogy, music is fully listened to when everything falls silent around us and within us, in the most perfect way, with our eyes closed. The best way I can express this silence of listening is by evoking the magic of the organ when it fills the church with its song. One hears it then, without seeing anything of what is going on high up in the choir loft where it is situated; a sound emerges from a maternal darkness and, beneath the motionless, shadowy vaulted ceiling, envelops us like a winding sheet.
The summit of the silence of listening is surely reached when even the word is presented in silence, without losing any of its vitality, in reading, which is an encounter between a word deprived of sound and an addressee who is totally turned toward his own interior in a perfect solitude of welcome.
What can be said about the silence of memory? We are not speaking here about the silence of sickness, when a person loses his memories and points of reference.
146. Memory is a word made fruitful by the Holy Spirit. It is a tomb, a tilled soil in which man deposits the seed of the word, and the latter takes root and springs up silently, developing a new, more abundant life that bears hope within it.
Having died in the silence of listening, the word flourishes again under the sun of the Spirit that reawakens it to life. Assimilated and made fruitful through meditation, it appears as a new being laden with many fruits: if the grain of wheat does not die, it bears no fruit. The death of the seed is the life of the plant. And the plant, the only being in all nature that is simultaneously silent and animated, is offered to us precisely as the most perfect image of what occurs during the moments that follow silent listening.
Thus the speculative tradition of lectio divina, which has run through Christianity from Origen to our day, says that meditatio follows lectio [reading], and oratio [prayer] follows meditatio. The reading of the lectio divina is by its nature reserved for a situation in which one addresses God, and thus it reflects perfectly the riches of silence.
147. The silence of memory is peace of soul and heart. The silence of memory is a free, upright man.
In his Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos writes: “Keeping silent—what a strange expression! Silence keeps us.” How are we to understand this sort of human irrationality with respect to silence?
148. Father Jérôme, a Trappist monk, tried to answer this question. In his Écrits monastiques, he wrote:
Silence is a mystery; or, more exactly, people’s attitude toward silence poses a quasi-mysterious problem. All sensible people admire silence; they are all persuaded of its usefulness; but they are almost never willing to make progress in it. . . . In order to practice charity: we should take upon ourselves the sorts of “noises” that trouble minds, stop them right there and not let them run along to others. And we should do so simply, because trouble turns people away from God.
Noise surrounds us and assaults us. The noise of our ceaselessly active cities, the noise of automobiles, airplanes, machines outside and inside our houses. Besides this noise that is imposed on us, there are the noises that we ourselves produce or choose. Such is the soundtrack of our everyday routine. This noise, unconsciously, often has a function that we do not dare admit: it masks and stifles another sound, the one that occupies and invades our interior life. How can we not be astonished by the efforts that we constantly make to stifle God’s silences?
149. Noise is a desecration of the soul, noise is the “silent” ruin of the interior life. Man always has the tendency to remain outside himself. But we must ceaselessly come back to the interior castle.
150. We discover this noise painfully when we decide to stop what we are doing to enter into prayer. Often the great din colonizes our interior temple. The modern world has multiplied the most toxic noises, which are so many malignant enemies of peace of heart. In a secularized, materialistic, and hedonistic world, in which wars, bombs, and submachine gunfire, acts of violence and barbarism are the common currency, where assaults on the dignity of the human person, the family, and life affect people at their very core, respect for silence has become the least of humanity’s worries. And yet God hides himself in silence.
151. Carmelite Brother Philippe de Jésus-Marie writes quite accurately, in a conference on interior silence:
We sense that our soul, originally, is a space of silence, a virgin place, a sanctuary where God wants to dwell in peace with us. But when we appear on the threshold of this interior temple by making a movement of recollection, we discover odd cacophonies that turn this time of prayer into a resonating chamber where all the aspects of our lives come to echo, where all our fears and worries, our desires and our most varied emotions are manifested. The fundamental question
, then, is no longer primarily the one about external noise but, rather, the one about the silence of our thoughts.
Alas, the experience described by Brother Philippe de Jésus-Marie is widespread nowadays, particularly in the Western world, and even beyond it.
One day, beyond the invasive noise that is perversely interwoven in so many lives, it will be important to listen once again to the “still small voice”, the voice of God, which will say to us again: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:12-13).
152. In The Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila describes with particular precision this universal experience: “It seems as if there are in my head many rushing rivers and that these waters are hurtling downward, and many little birds and whistling sounds, not in the ears but in the upper part of the head where, they say, the higher part of the soul is.”
153. Carmelite Brother Philippe de Jésus-Marie also writes:
Therefore during prayer time it is absolutely necessary to resist the urge to board those trains or boats that go by. In order to do that, it is of capital importance not to identify with these thoughts but, on the contrary, to realize that they come to us, that they are not of us, that they are displayed on the backdrop of our interior silence. That is where we will encounter God. . . . All that he asks of us in his presence is to remain in this silence, which is the most beautiful of all praises that we could offer him.
The Power of Silence Page 9