All of us are in “those trains or boats that go by”. Often we enter chapels and churches with the trains and boats. It can even happen that we are not very aware of the noise that we drag behind us into the house of God.
154. I know that it is very difficult to get rid of the manifold problems that can assail us and trouble our silence. How can we ask a mother whose child is seriously ill to hold at bay all the painful thoughts that constantly assail her? How can we ask a man who has just lost his wife, carried off by a long illness, to set aside the veil of sadness that is breaking his heart so as to rediscover a certain quality of silence?
Yet even if daily life is as difficult as it can be, God nevertheless remains present in each one of us. He is a patient, faithful, and merciful God, who waits untiringly. The most difficult thing is probably to come to our senses, to be quiet, to turn toward the Father, to repent and say: “ ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” ’ And he arose and came to his father” (Lk 15:17-20). The journey toward heaven consists of rediscovering our silent interior life in which God dwells and waits for us, watching the horizon.
155. In a conference dealing with “The Sound of Silence in the Holy Desert”, Carmelite Brother Jean-Gabriel de l’Enfant-Jésus rightly commented:
Reading the Desert Fathers in this way, you would be tempted to believe that life in the Desert is full of sweet conversations with God, with no other care but this “holy laziness” whose loving contemplation John of the Cross describes in his Spiritual Canticle. . . . Most often, however, the hermit is confronted with the darkness of his sinful soul. Silence and solitude are the place of a spiritual battle against his three enemies: the world, the devil, and the old man (or “the flesh”, in the Pauline sense), which is the most stubborn of the three, if we are to believe John of the Cross.
It is necessary to protect precious silence from all parasitical noise. The noise of our “ego”, which never stops claiming its rights, plunging us into an excessive preoccupation with ourselves. The noise of our memory, which draws us toward the past, that of our recollections or of our sins. The noise of temptations or of acedia, the spirit of gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sadness, vanity, pride—in short: everything that makes up the spiritual combat that man must wage every day. In order to silence these parasitical noises, in order to consume everything in the sweet flame of the Holy Spirit, silence is the supreme antidote.
156. There is a sort of glory of silence. Saint Ignatius of Loyola did not hesitate to write in his Spiritual Exercises: “The more the soul is in solitude and seclusion, the more fit it renders itself to approach and be united with its Creator and Lord.”
157. Silence never makes a display of splendor or grandeur. Silence is simply in the image of God. Silence never blinds us like flashy, gaudy noises, because it is the simple reflection of divine love.
158. In his book For Self-Examination, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard summed up the problem explicitly and brilliantly:
If, in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say. . .: It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me “What do you think should be done?” I would answer, “. . . The very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God’s Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence! Ah, everything is noisy; and just as a strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than—rubbish! O, create silence!”
159. The most difficult thing for man is to seek God in silence. This silent light is not a human word but a humble and poor light.
II
GOD DOES NOT SPEAK,
BUT HIS VOICE IS QUITE CLEAR
Oh, happy and most happy is the soul that merits to be drawn to God and by God, so that, through the unity of the Spirit in God, it loves God alone and not some personal good, and loves itself only in God. . . . “That they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11)! This is the goal, this is the consummation, the perfection: peace, the joy of the Lord, joy in the Holy Spirit, this is the Silence in Heaven (cf. Rev 8:1).
—William of Saint Thierry
Letter to the Brethren of Mont-Dieu
NICOLAS DIAT: Thomas Merton rightly considers in The Sign of Jonas that “the problem of language is the problem of sin. The problem of silence is also a problem of love. How can a man really know whether to write or not, whether to speak or not, whether his words and his silence are for good or for evil, for life or for death, unless he understands the two divisions of tongues—the division of Babel, where men were scattered in their speech because of pride, and the division of Pentecost when the Holy Ghost sent out men of one dialect to speak all the languages of the earth and bring all men to unity: ‘that they may be one, Father, Thou in Me and I in Thee that they may be one in us!’ (cf. Jn 17:21-22). The apostles and disciples come downstairs and tumble into the street like an avalanche, talking in every language. . . . [God] manifested Himself through them. That is the only possible reason for speaking—but it justifies speaking without end, as long as the speech grows up from silence and brings your soul to silence once again.”
How then can we understand the mystery of God’s silence, which so many men through the ages have found so difficult to accept?
ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH:
160. Many of our contemporaries cannot accept God’s silence. They do not admit that it is possible to enter into communication other than by words, gestures, or concrete, visible actions. Yet God speaks through his silence. The silence of God is a form of speech. His Word is solitude.
The solitude of God is not an absence, it is his very being, his silent transcendence.
161. Thomas Merton thinks that “The silence of God should teach us when to speak and when not to speak. But we cannot bear the thought of that silence, lest it cost us the trust and respect of men.”
We are anxious to respond to so many difficulties, sufferings, and disasters that afflict mankind. We forget that the source of our troubles comes from the illusion that we are something other than mere dust. The man who makes himself God no longer wants to know that he is mortal. Psalm 103 says that God himself “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Ps 103:14-16).
We should recognize that God is our joy, and in him our dust can become splendor. The love of Christ changes the immense sorrow of mankind into joy; the secret of happiness is to see all our sufferings in the light of Christ’s victory over death. All suffering contributes in one way or another to our happiness.
162. Creation itself is a silent word of God. The wordless beauty of nature displays before our eyes the manifold riches of a Father who is ceaselessly present among men. This divine speech is not audible to ears that are too human; nevertheless, it is the most profound speech of all. The sun, the moon, and the stars are absolutely silent to our ears, but th
ey are a word and a message essential to our earthly existence. There is a language of the stars that we can neither know nor comprehend but that God understands perfectly.
The Canticle of the Three Young Men, the Hymn of the Universe, that we sing every Sunday at Morning Prayer, taken from the Book of Daniel, attests that the sun and the moon, nights and days, the stars, the mountains and the hills, the springs and the fountains, the oceans and the rivers, the beasts of the sea and the birds of the air bless the Lord and sing his praise: “He who is of God hears the words of God” (Jn 8:47).
Why can men not hear the voice of God when he speaks through creation? Indeed, we think that we are the only ones capable of speaking to him and hearing him! In To Leave Before Dawn / The Green Paradise, Julien Green writes:
God speaks to children with extreme gentleness, and what He has to say to them He often says without words. Creation provides Him with the vocabulary He needs, leaves, clouds, running water, a patch of light. It is the secret language that books cannot teach you and which children know very well. . . . Children can be compared to a vast multitude who have received an uncommunicable secret and who gradually forget the secret, the multitude’s fate being taken in hand by so-called civilized nations. . . . As for me, I have known what children know, and all the reasoning in the world has not been able to tear away from me that unutterable something. Words cannot describe it. It stands on the threshold of speech and, on this earth, remains mute.
163. I am certain that God gives to each believer a heart capable of hearing the language of creation. According to the expression of Ben Sirach the Sage, the Father has “set His eye on [men’s] hearts” (Sir 17:8, Douay-Rheims), so that the believer may look at God, his neighbor, and the whole of creation with God’s eyes. God has sealed my heart in his heart. God dwells in my heart. From now on, man and God are in league, because they have the same heart and the same eyes: what God sees and hears, the believer can also see and hear. I dare to say that such a love exists.
164. Christ approached from his descent from the Mount of Olives when, joyfully, the whole multitude of his disciples began to praise God in a loud voice for the miracles that they had seen. They said: “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Some Pharisees in the crowd said to him: “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” Christ’s response to the Pharisees is particularly eloquent, because it confirms that creation is also capable of singing the praise of God. He said: “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19:38-40). As we have heard, the Bible exhorts creation to praise God. The rivers, the birds, the reptiles, the sun, and the moon praise the Lord. The language of God, like that of nature, is not immediately perceptible to our intellect; nevertheless, it still has a great power that wishes to communicate itself to men. By language I mean all merely human expressions that bind men to each other. But I do not renounce entirely the mute language of beauty, of the mountain, of the sea, of the stone, of thunder, of fire, and of all creatures that show forth God and sing his praises.
165. The silence of God is understood by faith, in meditation on the communion that can exist between him and men.
The divine silence is a mysterious revelation. God is not insensitive to evil. At first, we may think that God allows evil to destroy men. But if God remains silent, he nonetheless suffers with us from the evil that tears apart and disfigures the earth. If we seek to be with God in silence, we will understand his presence and his love.
166. God’s silence can also be a reproach. We often pretend not to want to listen to this language. Conversely, if there is an earthquake or a major natural disaster, associated with immeasurable human tragedies, we accuse God of not speaking. God’s silence questions mankind on its ability to enter into the mystery of life and hope at the very heart of suffering and hardships. The more we refuse to understand this silence, the more we move away from him. I am convinced that the problem of contemporary atheism lies first of all in a wrong interpretation of God’s silence about catastrophes and human sufferings. If man sees in the divine silence only a form of God’s abandonment, indifference, or powerlessness, it will be difficult to enter into his ineffable and inaccessible mystery. The more man rejects the silence of God, the more he will rebel against him.
167. The silence of God is elusive and inaccessible. But the person who prays knows that God hears him in the same way that he understood the last words of Christ on the Cross. Mankind speaks, and God responds by his silence.
168. How can we understand these long years of the Shoah [Holocaust] and the abominable procession of extermination camps, like the one in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where so many innocent Jews perished? How can we understand God’s silence? Why did God choose not to intervene when his people were being massacred? Hans Jonas, the German Jewish philosopher, has attempted to respond to such a painful question in his book The Concept of God after Auschwitz: “What did Auschwitz add to that which one could always have known about the extent of the terrible and horrendous things that humans can do to humans and from times immemorial have done?” Hans Jonas naturally calls God into question: “God let it happen. What God could let it happen?” The Almighty God did not intervene to prevent the barbaric massacre of his people. And why did he allow it? Hans Jonas responds: “In order that the world might be, and be for itself, God renounced His being.” What does that mean? “To make room for the world, the En-Sof (Infinite; literally, No-End) of the beginning had to contract Himself so that, vacated by Him, empty space could expand outside of Him: the ‘Nothing’ in which and from which God could then create the world. Without this retreat into Himself, there could be no ‘other’ outside God.” We can guess his conclusion: In deciding on this withdrawal into himself so that man can exist, God becomes by that very fact a suffering God, because he will have to suffer because of man and be disappointed in him. God will also be a concerned God, because he will entrust the world to agents other than himself, to free agents. In short, this is a God at risk, a God who incurs a proper risk. But then, that God is not an almighty God. In order for the goodness of God to be compatible with the existence of evil, he must not be almighty. More exactly, it is necessary for this God to have renounced power. In the simple fact of allowing human freedom lies a renunciation of power.
169. But if God is not powerful, then he is not God. He is the Almighty, but, at the same time, he wants to permit man to be truly free. Because the omnipotence of God is the omnipotence of love; and the omnipotence of love is death. The infinity of God is not an infinity in space, a bottomless, shoreless ocean; it is a love that has no limits. Creation is an act of infinite love. For Hans Jonas, the act of creation is a kind of divine “self-restraint”. By dint of this, God’s silence and his allowing things to happen can receive an initial explanation. Human suffering mysteriously becomes suffering for God. In the divine nature, suffering is not synonymous with imperfection. This problem reminds me of a letter from a mother of a family touched by the idea of vulnerability in God:
When my children were little and I thought for them and made decisions for them, everything was easy: my freedom alone was in question. But the time came when I realized that my role was gradually to get them used to making choices, and as soon as I agreed to do that, I felt worried. While allowing my children to make decisions, and therefore to take risks, I at the same time took the risk of seeing freedoms other than mine arise. If, too often, I continued to make choices in place of my children, it was, I must admit, to spare them from suffering the consequences of a choice that they might have to regret. Yet there was another reason at least as important, if not more so: in order not to risk a disagreement between their choice and the one I would have liked to see them make. It was a lack of love on my part, therefore, since by acting that way I essentially tried to shield myself from possible suffering, the pain I felt each time my children committed themselves to a way different from the one that to me seemed best for them. This way I man
age to glimpse the fact that God the “Father” can suffer. We are his children. He wants us to be free to build our own lives, and the infinity of his love makes any constraint on his part impossible. Perfect love, without a trace of self-interest but that implies the acceptance from the outset of some suffering inherent in this total freedom that he wants for us.
To believe in a silent God who “suffers” is to make the mystery of God’s silence more mysterious and more luminous, too; it is to dispel a false clarity so as to replace it with a “shining darkness”. Because I do not forget the words of the Psalm:“ ‘Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you, the night is bright as the day” (Ps 139:11-12). This psalm could strengthen man when his darkest demons besiege him and when he is tempted to revolt against God.
The silence of God is an invitation to maintain silence ourselves in order to examine thoroughly the great mystery of man in his joys, pains, suffering, and death.
How can we respond to people who tell themselves more or less vaguely: “God is not interested in me. He is always silent!”?
170. It is not easy to find adequate language to speak respectfully and fruitfully to those who feel abandoned by God. It is necessary to be armed with fraternal compassion and a prudent pedagogy and to allow oneself to be supported by prayer, the work of the Spirit who opens the heart to the Word of God. With friendship and tact, the important thing is to ask these people to accept the mystery of the divine silence by making an act of surrender and of faith in the salvific dimension of suffering. If man remains fixed on materialistic and rationalist certainties, he always bets on this hypothetical abandonment of God. Love, by its essence, implies a leap into the unknown. Modernity likes to see in the silence of God an easy proof of his non-existence: if evil and suffering exist, there can be no God.
The Power of Silence Page 10