The Power of Silence
Page 18
The Church is a faithful, loving mother. She is a mother before she is a hospital facility. She is the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ. She represents the roof under which God’s family gathers. She educates, teaches, and nourishes, concerned about the physical and moral health of the faithful: this, incidentally, is the area covered by the image of the Church as a field hospital. She is the Mystical Body of Christ and the family of God on earth. Mater et Magistra: the Church teaches with certainty the divine truths to a world that thirsts for the Son of God, the way, the truth, the life, and the redeemer of our souls. She is an assembly of prayer, praise, and adoration, as in the Upper Room: “All. . . with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren” (Acts 1:14). Mary is therefore a “pre-eminent and singular member of the Church,. . . its type and excellent exemplar in faith and charity” (LG 53). Finally, she is the mother of priests, who must continue Christ’s work for the salvation of souls. This work consists essentially in sanctifying themselves and sanctifying the people of God, praying intensely and incessantly to bring people to God so as to live abundantly every day in him in the Eucharist.
Without the Eucharist, we can neither live nor give God the first place in our lives and activities. The priests and the faithful must respond to the silence of indifference with the silence of prayer. The sickness of apathy is treated by the sacraments, the teaching, and the witness of the saints.
304. The social mission is fundamental, but the salvation of souls is more important than any other work. Saving souls entails not only caring for them but above all drawing them to God, converting them, so as to bring the prodigal children back to the house of the Father of mercies. The primary and fundamental role of the Church today remains the salvation of souls.
305. In a secularized, decadent world, if the Church allows herself to be lured by materialistic, media-savvy, and relativistic sirens, she runs the risk of making Christ’s death on the Cross for the salvation of souls futile. The Church’s mission is not to solve all the social problems of the world; she must repeat tirelessly the first words of Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry in Galilee: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk 1:15).
306. I do not think that the Church can fail to take an interest in issues that concern the lives and existence of men. Through her schools and universities, her clinics and hospitals, her institutes of professional formation, her manifold works of charity, the Church actively participates in the fight against poverty. She works to avoid the scandal of having “some countries with a majority of citizens who are counted as Christians have an abundance of wealth, whereas others are deprived of the necessities of life and are tormented by hunger, disease, and every kind of misery. The spirit of poverty and charity [is] the glory and witness of the Church of Christ” (GS 88).
307. The absence of God in modern societies has dug a pit of darkness and injustice. All that God expects of us is our consent, our loving response to his redeeming love.
308. Indifference toward God is the root of one form of noisy rebellion. The latter is an illusion that consists of thinking that we can do without God so as to live better here below. Hence, God’s silence becomes an almost objective ally, the tangible proof of humanity without a Creator. In postulating that he is autonomous with respect to the divinity, modern man has reached the point where he no longer tolerates even God’s silence.
In this rebellion there is no place for silence; I fear that the media interpretation of the vision of the “field hospital” is part of this sort of rebellion.
309. Before accusing others, it is important to look at oneself. We have a limitless capacity for throwing stones at our neighbor’s face. We would do better to admit our own faults. In prayer and silence, our heart gleams much more than in the blind, autistic frenzy of rebellion.
How can one not rebel, given the bloody wars that ravage humanity? Faced with so many crimes, why is God so silent? Why this deafening silence when children are pitilessly massacred in conflicts?
310. War is always an enterprise of unacceptable destruction, elimination, and annihilation. The other is no longer worth anything. He becomes mere matter doomed to death. When a country, a government, or a coalition tries to subject and annihilate men or nations, barbarism is never far off. Hatred, jealous interests, the bulimic compulsion of the rich and powerful nations to seize the natural resources of weak, poor nations by military violence, the will to dominate and avenge are at the origin of so many wars. The other no longer has the right to life. Indeed, war is an enterprise of evil, because the devil, who detests pity, triumphs with delight. How can we not be scandalized and horrified by the action of American and Western governments in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria? Countries and peoples are destroyed, heads of state are assassinated, for the sake of purely economic interests. In the name of the goddess Democracy, or of a will to geopolitical or military hegemony, they do not hesitate to start a war so as to disorganize and create chaos, especially in the weakest regions, thus sending out onto the roads endless troops of refugees who have neither resources nor a future.
How many families are displaced, reduced to inhumane poverty, exile, and cultural uprooting? How many sufferings in these lives of continuous wandering and flight, how many atrocious deaths in the name of Liberty, another Western goddess? How much blood is shed for a hypothetical liberation of peoples from the chains that supposedly keep them in the yoke of oppression? How many families are decimated in order to impose a Western concept of society?
In these antechambers of horror, the Church is not spared. She must disappear or change her doctrine and her teaching so as to allow for the emergence of a religion without borders and a new global ethics that is said to be consensual, cut off from all the foundational references of revealed truth and yet itself ambivalent and devoid of content.
311. Why is God silent about so many sufferings that are intended, planned, and executed by men themselves? In Africa I was able to witness the most indescribable atrocities. In my archdiocese I sheltered missionaries and religious who were fleeing from Sierra Leone and Liberia, countries prey to conflicts of unprecedented violence. They were horrified to have seen hands cut off, bodies torn apart by land mines, faces lacerated by torturers who no longer had any humanity. For several months I hosted in my residence Archbishop Joseph Ganda of Freetown, the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Lucibello, and his secretary. They had had to flee Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, after having abandoned Monrovia. Those are indelible memories. But no one thought even for an instant to attribute those crimes to God by declaring the criminals innocent and accusing God’s silence.
312. I think that it is always necessary to cry out to God. It is good to ask for help and aid from heaven, while expressing the confusion, distress, and sadness that fill our hearts. Christians should know that there is no other way of reaching God. When I traveled in countries that were going through violent, profound crises, I observed how much prayer could help those who no longer had anything. Silence was the last trench that no one could enter, the only room in which to remain in peace, the state in which suffering lowered its weapons for a moment. Silence strengthens our weakness. Silence arms us with patience. Silence in God restores our courage.
When we are ruined, humiliated, belittled, slandered, let us keep silence. Let us hide in the holy sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ, far from the world.
Then the power of the torturers no longer matters. The criminals can destroy everything in their fury, but it is impossible to break into the silence, the heart and the conscience of a man. The beating of a silent heart, hope, faith, and trust in God remain unsinkable. Outside, the world becomes a field of ruins, but inside our soul, in the greatest silence, God keeps watch. War, barbarism, and the parades of horrors will never get the better of God, who is present in us.
The poison of war comes to an e
nd in the silence of prayer, in the silence of trust, in the silence of hope. At the heart of all the barbarities, it is necessary to plant the mystery of the Cross.
I am thinking also of the wars waged by gossip and slanders. Speech can assassinate, a word can kill, but God educates us in the school of forgiveness. He teaches us to pray for our enemies. He surrounds our heart with an enclosure of tenderness so that it may not be sullied by rancor. And he constantly murmurs: “The disciples of my beloved Son have no enemies. Your heart must not have enemies, either.” I speak from personal experience. I painfully experienced assassination by gossip, slander, and public humiliation, and I learned that when a person has decided to destroy you, he has no lack of words, spite, and hypocrisy; falsehood has an immense capacity for constructing arguments, proofs, and truths out of sand. When this is the behavior of men of the Church, and in particular of ambitious, duplicitous bishops, the pain is still deeper. But men look at outward appearances, and God sees the heart (1 Sam 16:7). Relying on his view alone, we must remain calm and silent, asking for the grace never to give in to rancor, hatred, and feelings of worthlessness. Let us stand firm in our love for God and for his Church, in humility.
The key to a treasure is not the treasure. But if we give away the key, we also hand over the treasure. The Cross is an exceptionally precious key, even when it appears to be folly, the subject of ridicule, and a scandal; it is repugnant to our mentalities and our search for easy solutions. We would like to be happy and live in a peaceful world without paying the price. The Cross is an astonishing mystery. It is the sign of Christ’s infinite love for us. In a sermon by Saint Leo the Great on the Passion, we find this extraordinary passage:
Christ being lifted up upon the cross, let the eyes of your mind not dwell only on that sight which those wicked sinners saw, to whom it was said by the mouth of Moses, “And thy life shall be hanging before thine eyes, and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt not be assured of thy life” [Deut 28:66]. . . . But let our understandings, illumined by the Spirit of Truth, foster with pure and free heart the glory of the cross which irradiates heaven and earth, and see with the inner sight what the Lord meant when He spoke of His coming Passion: “. . . Now is the world’s judgment, now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things unto Me.” O wondrous power of the Cross! O ineffable glory of the Passion!
313. Through the Cross, Jesus reconciled us with God; he destroyed the barrier that separated us from one another, and he overcame the obstacles that closed off the road to eternal happiness. Christ suffered for us; he leaves us an example so that we might follow in his footsteps. By contemplating the Cross and by making this prayer our own, all dialogue, all forgiveness, and all reconciliation will be possible for us.
This conviction is also part of the tradition of mystical Islam. I would like to tell a story taken from the golden legend of the Muslim holy men. One day the good woman Sutura went to find Tierno Bokar, the wise man of Bandiagara—a village in Mali located on the plateau by the same name, bordered by high cliffs, at the foot of which lived the Dogons, a people famous for its austere art, its complex beliefs about the origins of the universe, and its profound sense of transcendence. She told him: “Tierno, I am very quicktempered. The slightest gesture affects me severely. I would like to receive a blessing from you or a prayer that will make me gentle, affable, and patient.” No sooner had she spoken than her son, a three-year-old toddler who was waiting for her in the yard, came in, took up a small board and struck her with it violently between the shoulders. She looked at the toddler, smiled, and drew him against her and said affectionately while patting him, “Oh! What a naughty boy, mistreating his mother!” “Why did you not lose your temper at your son, when you say you are so quick-tempered?” Tierno Bokar asked her. “But Tierno,” Sutura replied, “my son is only a child; he does not know what he is doing; one does not get angry with a child of that age.” “My good Sutura,” Tierno said to her, “go back home. And when someone irritates you, think of this small board and tell yourself: Despite his age, this person is acting like a three-year-old child! Be indulgent; you can do it, because you just were with your son who struck you so hard. Go, and that way you will no longer get angry. You will live happily, cured of your ailment. The blessings that will then descend on you will be far superior to those that you could obtain from me: they will be blessings from God and from the Prophet himself. Someone who endures and forgives an offense”, he continued, “is like a large silk-cotton tree that the vultures befoul while resting on its branches. But the disgusting appearance of the tree lasts only part of the year. Every winter, God sends a series of downpours that wash it from top to bottom and clothe it in new foliage. Try to spread to God’s creatures the love that you have for your child. For God sees creatures in the way that a father looks at his children. Then you will be set at the topmost rung of the ladder, where, through love and charity, the soul sees and evaluates the offense only so as to forgive it more wholeheartedly.” Tierno’s words had such a powerful effect on her that, from that day on, Sutura considered everyone who offended her as children and responded to them only with sweetness, love, and smiling, silent patience. She corrected herself so perfectly that, in the last days of her life, they used to say: “Patient as Sutura.” Nothing could anger her. When she died, she was not far from being considered a saint.
314. The Cross is a great school of contemplation, prayer, and forgiveness. We have to learn to stand silently at the foot of the Cross while contemplating the Crucified Lord as the Virgin Mary did. The Cross is a mountain to climb; at the top, it is granted to us to look at men and the world with the very eyes of God. Faced with serious trespasses that seem unforgivable, the act of faith urges man to contemplate the mystery of Calvary. Then he can see the event of Jesus’ Passion as the greatest possible trespass but also the place of the greatest forgiveness. In the silence of his heart, he hears Jesus’ prayer, which is so difficult to reproduce in concrete actions without the help of divine grace: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).
The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is full of wars and fratricidal episodes. Silence is not compatible with such vengeful preoccupations. . .
315. The Old Testament is the most realistic, truest, and most authentic expression of the truth about the heart of man. When man is still uncouth and not very docile, far from a God of mercy and pity, when he has not yet been transformed, “born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet 1:23), he is violent, barbaric, and pitiless toward his enemy.
Even today, who dares to claim to love his adversary and work for his success? We have kept the spirit and behavior of a man of the Old Testament. For there is “nothing new under the sun”, says Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes (1:9).
So many Christians and people downtrodden by the barbaric persecution and violence of wicked men go through the experience of the Lord Jesus “in the days of his flesh”. Psalm 22, which we recite at the Office of Readings on Good Friday, expresses our own experience when faced with death:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not disappointed.
But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the people.
All who see me mock at me,
they make mouths at me, they wag their heads;
“He committed his cause to the Lord;
let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”
you kept me safe upon my mother’s breasts.
Upon you was I cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
Be not far from me,
for trouble is near and
there is none to help.
Many bulls encompass me,
strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
they open wide their mouths at me,
like a ravening and roaring lion.
I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax,
it is melted within my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Yes, dogs are round about me;
a company of evildoers encircle me;
they have pierced my hands and feet—
I can count all my bones—
they stare and gloat over me;
they divide my garments among them,
and for my clothing they cast lots.
But you, O Lord, be not far off!
O my help, hasten to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword,
my life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion,
my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild oxen!
I will tell of your name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!. . .
316. Wars, violence, and barbarity run through all the history of Israel. In those ancient times, in order to survive, it was necessary to fight and destroy the enemy. How could violence be attenuated? The law of retaliation was decreed, not only by Hebrew law, but by many nations in the Mediterranean basin. Hammurabi, King of Babylon (1792—1750 B.C.), ordered a code written in the form of a collection of court decisions, which was then engraved on a basalt stele that was discovered in Susa.