NICOLAS DIAT: What is the connection between silence and humility?
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: As soon as we talk about God, mystery is everywhere. Man himself is a mystery because he is in the image of God. Creation is a mystery since God is all and nothing can exist apart from him. We can affirm the creation of the world by God, according to the first verse of the Bible, but we cannot explain it.
Facing the mystery, facing what is too large and too beautiful for us to be able to grasp, we can remain in an astonished silence. In his book Face à Dieu: La prière selon un chartreux [Facing God: Prayer according to a Carthusian], Augustin Guillerand correctly wrote: “In order to find humility, it is better to look at him than to look at oneself.”
I can find no more fitting answer to your question.
ROBERT SARAH: In the presence of God, we can only be humble and silent. He is, in fact, the great mystery on which to meditate. In the presence of God, we are like well-diggers. We dig ceaselessly, trying to find water. As we go down toward the divine source, we will find the wellsprings from which flow our dignity and our own mystery. But we will be able to penetrate the secret of our consciences only in a state of radical perfection. Saint Augustine had this magnificent experience. Maurice Zundel quotes Augustine as saying: “We ourselves are outside, strangers to ourselves, and we can reach ourselves only in total openness to God.” We must deepen our quest for silence by following the paths of humility. Thus Saint Peter exhorts us, saying: “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God” (1 Pet 5:5-6).
The humility of Carthusians shows that silence is a school of meekness, wisdom, and self-surrender. They remain humble and confident in God’s hands. The sons of Saint Bruno are an exceptional model. “If you seek [wisdom] like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures” (Prov 2:4), then clothe yourself in humility and silence, like the well-digger who climbs down into his well and like the miners who descend into the mine in work clothes. We find ourselves only by returning humbly to the humus, the soil of our origins. This is also the meaning of our profound prostration when, casting down to earth the crowns of our pride and pretentions, we fall on our knees before the throne of the Lamb to adore him (Rev 4:1-11; 5:6-14; 7:9-17; 8:1-5; 11:15-18; 14:1-5; 19:1-4).
NICOLAS DIAT: What place can silence have in the liturgy?
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: Adoration must be the heart of the liturgy. This attitude of the heart is scarcely expressed by words, but rather by our posture, gestures, or silence. A genuflection speaks for itself if it is well done. If you take away all the signs that express adoration, the attitude itself will disappear, and then the sense of the sacred. Kneeling down, kissing the ground, as we do in the charterhouse at the Angelus, bringing the chalice at the offertory with the humeral veil—which is a distinctive characteristic of our liturgy—all these gestures bear within themselves their meaning.
In our monasteries we have a beautiful sign in prostration. Before Mass, the priest prostrates himself in the sanctuary; he stretches out on the ground, slightly bent over his elbows. After the consecration, the whole community does the same. Finally, during the thanksgiving, which lasts for several minutes in silence, we are free to prostrate ourselves or to remain seated. Carthusians thus show the complete submission of their beings in the presence of the holy mysteries.
Prostration is worth all the rhetoric in the world to express faith in the mystery of the Real Presence of Jesus, the Eternal Word, in the Eucharist.
ROBERT SARAH: If I may say so, it seems to me to be fundamentally important for the Carthusians to keep this magnificent gesture of submission to God and of docility, humility, and silent adoration. The liturgy today exhibits a sort of secularization that aims to ban the liturgical sign par excellence: silence. Some seek to eliminate by all possible means the gestures of prostration or genuflection before the divine Majesty; nevertheless, these are Christian gestures of adoration, of holy fear of God, of veneration and respectful love. These are the gestures of the heavenly liturgy: “And all the angels stood round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God” (Rev 7:11); “Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool!” (Ps 132:7); “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God” (Ps 95:6-7).
I find it regrettable that some bishops’ conferences or priests decide, for reasons of inculturation, to eliminate these heavenly gestures so as to replace them with courteous gestures or cultural habits. Why do we always resist God’s intentions and ways so as to cling to our customs?
I am an African. Allow me to say it clearly: the liturgy is not the place to promote my culture. Rather, it is the place where my culture is baptized, where my culture is raised to the height of the divine. Through the Church’s liturgy (which the missionaries brought everywhere in the world), God speaks to us, he changes us and grants us a share in his divine life. When someone becomes a Christian, when someone returns to full communion with the Catholic Church, he receives something more, something that changes him. Certainly, the cultures and the new Christians bring riches into the Church: the liturgy of the Ordinariates for Anglicans who are now in full communion with the Catholic Church is a fine example of this. But they bring these riches with humility, and the Church, in her maternal wisdom, utilizes them if she deems it appropriate.
But it seems to me timely to specify what we mean by inculturation. If we really understand the meaning of the term “knowledge”as penetration of the Mystery of Jesus Christ, we then possess the key to inculturation, which is not to be presented as a quest or a claim for the legitimacy of an Africanization or Latin-Americanization or Asianization of Christianity instead of a Westernization. Inculturation is not the canonization of a local culture or the decision to settle in that culture at the risk of absolutizing it. Inculturation is an epiphany of the Lord, who breaks into the most intimate recesses of our being. And this irruption of the Lord into a life causes in man a destabilization that wrenches him away from what is familiar with a view to journeying according to new landmarks that create a new culture that bears Good News for man and his dignity as a child of God. When the Gospel enters a life, it destabilizes it and transforms it. It gives it a new orientation, new moral and ethical points of reference. It turns the person’s heart toward God and toward neighbor to love and serve them absolutely, without selfish calculation. When Jesus comes into a life, he transfigures it, divinizes it by the blazing light of his face, just as Saint Paul was transfigured on the road to Damascus (cf. Acts 9:5-6). Inculturation is truly a silent kenosis, a kind of destitution, an obedient, humble submission to the will of the Father and to the Holy Christian mysteries that we celebrate through Jesus Christ, with him and in him.
Indeed, just as through the Incarnation the Word of God became just like men, except for sin (cf. Heb 4:15), so too the Gospel takes up all human and cultural values, but refuses to take shape in the structures of sin. This means that the more abundant individual and collective sin is in a human or an ecclesial community, the less room there is in it for inculturation. Conversely, the more a Christian community shines with sanctity and radiates Gospel values, the more opportunities it has to inculturate the Christian message successfully. The inculturation of the faith is therefore a challenge to holiness. It allows us to determine the degree of sanctity and the level of the penetration of the Gospel and of faith in Jesus Christ in a Christian community. Inculturation is therefore not a type of religious folklore.
It is not essentially accomplished by the utilization of local languages, Latin American instruments and music, African dances or African or Asian rites and symbols in the liturgy and the sacraments. Inculturation is God descending and entering into the life, the moral conduct, the cultures and customs of men so as to free them from sin and to introduce them into the Trin
itarian life. Certainly the faith needs a culture in order to be communicated. That is why Saint John Paul II affirmed that a faith that does not become a culture is a dying faith. “Properly applied, inculturation must be guided by two principles: compatibility with the Gospel and communion with the universal Church” (encyclical Redemptoris missio, December 7, 1990, no. 54).
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: We have preserved silence during the Eucharistic Prayer because it was in keeping with our life. Silence is a liturgical sign. Independently of Carthusian life, the consecration is the great moment of mystery, and the Roman Missal emphasizes this by asking that the faithful kneel at this precise moment. In a charterhouse, the long silence that surrounds the consecration invites us to enter into adoration, the strongest expression of which will be prostration. Silence is for us the best way of touching the ineffable.
I agree with Your Eminence when you say that mystery expresses the center of human life and of the Christian faith: the encounter of the Infinite and the finite that alone can fill our heart and fascinates our mind. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 Jn 3:1). In these words, “and so we are”, there is an astonishment that will never end.
I cannot help thinking that this astonishment has faded terribly. Several times I have asked retreatants this question: Have you ever heard about the four last things and eternal life discussed in a homily? The answer was always: “Never.” If I had added, “What about divine filiation?” I probably would have received the same answer. Why do preachers never speak about the object of our hope? Moreover, if we look more closely, we understand that this hope is inscribed on the heart of every person: hope for a boundless love that will never end.
May the Church ceaselessly recall, therefore, the importance of the mystery of divine filiation. May priests not hesitate to speak about the last things and about eternal life. Then adoration will appear to modern man, not as a humiliation, but as the natural attitude of someone who discovers that he has received everything. Along with adoration, silence will regain its natural place.
NICOLAS DIAT: How would you characterize what I could call the illnesses that come from noise? To what sort of problem does an excess of noise lead?
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: My experience of the charterhouse necessarily influences the way in which I will respond to your question. Since I am rarely exposed to outside noise, particularly in the city, and possess neither mobile phone nor television nor radio—the latter two have always been excluded from our monasteries—my comments will be a bit outdated.
If there is an illness that comes from noise, we would have to call it the suffocation syndrome. I notice it through the experience of candidates who come on retreat. Memories, desires, hurts, and fears of which they are unaware and that lie at the bottom of their souls resurface. In their everyday routine, the constant influx of news, meetings, and various activities have ceaselessly covered up these voices in the depths of their being and allowed them no opportunity to reemerge into consciousness. Silence and solitude reveal them. Since the discovery is not always pleasant, and the one concerned is rather at a loss, he tries to keep them outside the field of consciousness by maintaining the permanent noise that prevents them from becoming manifest.
In this area, modern man has never had to confront so many and such strong temptations.
The proliferation of information on demand, of sounds and images in the last century or so is stupefying. Man’s sonic and visual landscape no longer has anything in common with that of our grandparents. I imagine that it must take a certain spiritual fortitude to protect oneself from this invasion, not by a wholesale rejection, but by a proper asceticism. Solzhenitsyn rightly remarked that although there is a right to information, there is also a right not to be informed.
As Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, I am responsible for transmitting to the community important news concerning the life of the Church, of France, and of the world, and therefore I must read the newspaper. How many interesting but useless things, and what a risk of letting them occupy the imagination and provide it with weapons against interior silence! A sort of triage becomes necessary, especially since journalists emphasize above all the exceptional events. They talk about an airplane that crashed; no one will write an article saying that all the airplanes landed today without incident or that mothers of families are caring for their children. And yet, is that less important?
One final aspect deserves to be emphasized: I am not responsible for the war in Syria, and I have nothing to contribute to resolve that tragedy. In contrast, I am responsible for my neighbor down the hall if I learn that he is sick or alone. But because the first tragedy is bigger than the second, there is a danger that it will obscure my view of it.
The temptations have multiplied; discernment and renunciation have become more necessary than ever. We have chosen to dedicate our life to the search for God in silence and solitude. Both things must be defended by clear choices, otherwise soon not much of either will be left. Our vocation is very uncommon, but does not every person need a bit of silence and solitude if he wants to be able to stay in contact with his heart? We have a cloister and a Rule that protect us. Someone who lives in the world must find his own cloister and his own rule; this is not something obvious!
Finally, I wonder whether the voice that the modern world seeks to stifle with incessant noise and movement might not be the one that tells us: “Remember that you are dust and that you will return to dust.” It is a well-known fact that our society characteristically ignores death. It is understandable: Without God, without eternal life, without Christ, and without redemption, how can anyone bear the thought of death? Let us eat and drink because tomorrow we will die. The memory of our precarious state is only too insistent; therefore we seek to silence it.
What are the remedies for illnesses that come from noise? They follow from what I just said. The major remedy, as always, will be the discovery of God’s love, of his call to eternal life, of Christ’s victory over death, which makes the latter a friend, the door that opens onto Life. And the Divine Mercy that heals the fear of the evil that we find in ourselves. In a word: hope.
ROBERT SARAH: For someone who is far from God, silence is a difficult confrontation with his own self and with the rather dismal realities that are at the bottom of our soul. Hence, man enters a mentality that resembles a denial of reality. He gets drunk on all sorts of noises so as to forget who he is. Postmodern man seeks to anesthetize his own atheism.
Noises are screens that betray a fear of the divine, a fear of real life and of death. But “what man can live and never see death? Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?” (Ps 89:48). The Western world ends up disguising death so as to make it acceptable and joyful. The moment of demise becomes a noisy moment in which true silence is lost in weak, useless words expressing compassion.
This anxious response to something that makes no noise is a telling trait of fluid societies that have developed neurotic fears of silence.
A Christian cannot fear silence because he is never alone. He is with God. He is in God. He is for God. In the silence, God gives me his eyes so as to contemplate him better. Christian hope is the foundation of the true silent search of the believer. Silence is not frightening; on the contrary, it is the assurance of meeting God.
The children of God are called to live eternally with the Father. Through silence they must become accustomed to being with God. Here below, the silent prayer of the citizens of the earth is an apprenticeship in what the citizens of heaven will experience eternally. In the silence of the church in Ars, the peasant was already participating in the heavenly liturgy: “I look at him, and he looks at me!” Seated silently at the feet of Jesus, we learn to pray without ceasing and to become fearless witnesses to the Gospel.
We must beware of the racket of contemporary life. This noise imposed on us is an insidious danger for the soul. The difficulties encountered today in finding silence are more fo
rmidable than ever. This is a diabolical situation. But Christ himself had to tear himself away from the crowd so as to go off into the desert. In those immense spaces, he experienced the most intimate, the most sublime face-to-face conversations!
This reminds me of the strong words of Saint John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris missio:
The renewed impulse to the mission ad gentes demands holy missionaries. It is not enough to update pastoral techniques, organize and coordinate ecclesial resources, or delve more deeply into the biblical and theological foundations of faith. What is needed is the encouragement of a new “ardor for holiness” among missionaries and throughout the Christian community, especially among those who work most closely with missionaries.
John Paul II concluded:
The missionary must be a “contemplative in action”. . . . My contact with representatives of the non-Christian spiritual traditions, particularly those of Asia, has confirmed me in the view that the future of mission depends to a great extent on contemplation. Unless the missionary is a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way. He is a witness to the experience of God, and must be able to say with the apostles: “that which we have looked upon. . . concerning the word of life,. . . we proclaim also to you” (1 Jn 1:1-3).
Today the Church has one central mission. It consists of offering silence to the priests and to the faithful. The world rejects solitude with God repeatedly and violently. Well, then, let the world keep quiet, and let silence return. . .
The Power of Silence Page 26