NICOLAS DIAT: What might be the connection between silence and continual prayer?
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: The expression “continual prayer” should not mislead us: it does mean saying prayers without stopping. Actually, this expression refers to a way of being with God ceaselessly, of letting him dwell within us, of consciously experiencing this indwelling. A woman who was acquainted with this experience testifies: “My superficial self ‘sees’ my interior self in adoration. And although the ‘surface’ wants to get involved and join in the deep adoration through a spoken prayer, that stops everything. I can join in with this interior self only through silence, ‘looking’ at the adoration in me and keeping quiet” (Cahiers sur l’oraison, no. 211, January—February 1987). This woman lives in the world, which means that this experience is not reserved to consecrated religious.
Can we consider silence to be a way to continual prayer, or, rather, continual prayer to be a way to silence? Framed in this way, the question would be too simplistic, because both are true. I would prefer to combine two aspects that I have already mentioned: the more one enters into the mystery, the more one enters into silence. Similarly, the more one enters into intimacy with a person, the more room is taken up by silence and a simple look. Continual prayer contains both: a habitual intimacy with God that makes his mystery more fascinating than ever. The monk then receives what Saint Bruno mentioned: “A peace that the world does not know and joy in the Holy Spirit”. The joy of intimate union does not need a lot of words. Silence does not demand more efforts at this stage; rather, it would take an effort to emerge from it.
Such a state is not habitual. A Carthusian brother who has experienced continual prayer told me: “We are not the master.” This means that the choice belongs to the interior guest, to the Holy Spirit, who draws the soul into a world where you can hardly do anything but keep quiet, as when you are seized by an intense emotion. In everyday life, prayer will take the form mentioned a moment ago: the ordinary activity continues, but something inside remains silently united to the one whom we love and who loves us, a loving presence that is enough to fill the heart. When we no longer live “with” but rather one in the other, since the person praying is not in control of the work that God is doing in him, he simply unites himself to this mystery without needing to know the contours of it. He does not ask for explanations. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”, says the Song of Songs (6:3).
ROBERT SARAH: If our heart succeeds in escaping from the world and its seductions so as to be with the Lord, we will have the grace of silence. All the most degrading or most vulgar noises will never be able to cover up a soul that has chosen Christ. A person who truly loves God can be in a continual relationship with the Transcendent. A person who lives in silence with God will be able to help draw souls toward the contemplation of the Creator of the world.
Saint Augustine was strongly attracted by monastic life. In De moribus ecclesiae catholicae [On the Morals of the Catholic Church], he writes:
Who can but admire and commend those who, slighting and discarding the pleasures of this world, living together in a most chaste and holy society, unite in passing their time in prayers, in readings, in discussions, without any swelling of pride, or noise of contention, or sullenness of envy; but quiet, modest, peaceful, their life is one of perfect harmony and devotion to God, an offering most acceptable to Him from whom the power to do those things is obtained? No one possesses anything of his own; no one is a burden to another. They work with their hands in such occupations as may feed their bodies without distracting their minds from God.
Plotinus himself had clearly seen the conditions essential for contemplation. So he was able to reflect in the Enneads that “in order to be elevated to contemplate the Universal Soul, the soul must be worthy by its nobility, free of error and detached from the things that bewitch common souls; it must be immersed in quietude. Let not only the agitation of the enveloping body and the turmoil of the sensations be stilled, but all that lies around: earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens.”
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: Let everything be quiet so that God can make himself heard. And as you like to say, he makes himself heard in silence. Is this the reason why monks have always loved nocturnal prayer? Saint Antony spent whole nights in prayer. The night office is a central time in Carthusian life that we will never abandon.
In the middle of sleep, this time is completely devoted to prayer, which gives it a special dimension: the night office is a gratuitous gift for God alone. As watchers in the night, we offer our poverty, which we know well, and at the same time the poverty of the world. These beautiful words from our Statutes make more sense than ever: “Apart from all, to all we are united, so that it is in the name of all that we stand before the living God” (Statues, chapter 34.2). I have always loved this statement from the chapter entitled “The Function of Our Order in the Life of the Church”. While the world sleeps, we choose to rise to unite our praise and intercession to Christ’s, so that the prayer of mankind, this vital bond between heaven and earth, may not cease. Then, when we go to bed, others, Benedictines or Cistercians, will take up the relay.
NICOLAS DIAT: The night office is the soul of the Carthusian Order, is it not? The prayer that runs through its entire history?
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: I hesitate to answer yes, in the sense that the Eucharist, through the mystery that is accomplished in it, naturally remains the center of our days. And yet no one doubts that the night office has a very special place in our life. Because of its duration, two to three hours every night; because of this very special moment, between two periods of sleep, nocturnal prayer will always remain an irreplaceable time. Whether we are distracted or recollected, this moment shapes us. It is a prayer of the body as much as of the mind, because of the chant, but also simply because we are there.
Our forefathers insisted so much on nocturnal prayer that until the French Revolution they used to chant from memory the whole psalmody of the night office in complete darkness. This has a particular dynamic. We are together, and we are alone. The equilibrium of our life, made up of solitude and communal life, is brought about at the heart of our prayer, in a profound unity; singing in choir is a collective work in which we need one another. But at night, the invisible choir leaves us alone in an atmosphere of intimacy that facilitates the heart-to-heart conversation with God. His mystery seems closer and more incomprehensible.
We unite our prayer with Christ’s according to the beautiful remark of Saint Augustine: “When we speak to God in prayer. . . , [Christ] prays for us, as our Priest; He prays in us, as our Head. . . . Let us therefore recognize in Him our words, and His words in us” (In Ps 85, PL 37, 1081). Only the light of Christ burns intensely in the church.
The Eucharist still has the first place; it unites us to the whole Church. The night office is rather a mark of our particularity, distinguishing us from our brethren who are present at the Divine Office but generally do not sing, praying in silence in the darkest part of the church. The balances that characterize Carthusian life are thus present: solitary life and common work, silent prayer and prayer in choir, lay monks and cloistered monks, and, I must add, monks and nuns.
This is a little-known fact, but almost since the origin, the Carthusian vocation has been lived out by men and by women. The Carthusian nuns were born only fifty years after the death of Saint Bruno, and they are still very much alive today, discreet and self-effacing, but no less essential to the fullness of the charism of Saint Bruno. They, too, pray as we do in the middle of the night.
The soul of the order is the thirst for God. We bear within us the expectation of mankind that, without knowing it, thirsts for God when it aspires to peace, justice, and love.
We would like to respond to God, who desires so much a loving relationship with men. “I thirst”, Jesus said on the Cross.
In the silence of the night, that of the cell and the one in the hearts of Carthusians, we present to him the unquenc
hable thirst of men, and to mankind we present the thirst of God, thus participating in the work of Jesus in whom these two urges met, forever.
This has been, for two millennia, the great and humble ambition of the Grande Chartreuse and of all the children of Saint Bruno.
CONCLUSION
How does one conclude a discourse on God and silence? I must humbly acknowledge that I have been stammering in the presence of a great mystery. Who can really speak about silence, and above all about God, in an adequate way? It is a steep, smooth rock. It is impossible for us to climb it. It slips through our hands, and our intellect, in focusing on it, is overcome by vertigo. Indeed, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false” (Ps 24:3-4). God is incomprehensible, inaccessible, invisible. How can we dare to speak about a person whom we have not met or touched when our hearts are impure?
Before the mystery of God, I experience the same feelings as Saint Gregory of Nyssa when he writes in his Homily on the Beatitudes:
Consider the feelings of a man who looks down into the depths of the sea from the top of a mountain. This is similar what my mind experiences, when from the heights of the Word of the Lord, as from a mountaintop, it peers into unfathomable depths of the divine counsels. Along the seacoast, you may often see mountains facing the sea. . . with a sheer drop from top to bottom. At the top a projection forms a ledge overhanging the depths below. . . . My soul grows dizzy when it hears the great voice of the Lord saying: Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. The vision of God is offered to those who have purified their hearts. Yet, no man has seen God at any time. These are the words of the great Saint John and they are confirmed by Saint Paul’s lofty thought, in the words: God is he whom no one has seen or can see.
Nevertheless, we can attempt to speak about God based on our own experience of silence. For God drapes himself in silence and reveals himself in the interior silence of our heart. In this book I have tried to show that silence is one of the chief means that enable us to enter into the spirit of prayer; silence disposes us to establish vital, ongoing relations with God. It is difficult to find a pious person who, at the same time, talks a lot. On the contrary, those who possess the spirit of prayer love silence.
Since time immemorial, silence has been considered the rampart of innocence, the shield against temptations, and the fertile source of recollection. Silence fosters prayer because it awakens good thoughts in our heart. According to Saint Bernard, it enables the soul to think better about God and about the realities of heaven. For this simple reason, all the saints have ardently loved silence.
God’s first language is silence. In her book, In the Heart of the World, Saint Teresa of Calcutta declares that:
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noises and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. . . . The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. Jesus is always waiting for us in silence. In this silence he listens to us and speaks to our souls. And there, we will hear his voice. . . . In this silence we find a new energy and a real unity. God’s energy becomes ours, allowing us to perform things well. There is unity of our thoughts with his thoughts, of our prayers with his prayers, of our actions with his actions, of our life with his life.
In these pages, in answering the fine questions from Nicolas Diat, I hope to have succeeded in showing that silence and prayer are inseparable and mutually fructifying.
Excessive, presumptuous, slanderous, and immoderate chatter often has disastrous consequences. Silence fosters recollection; it is always compromised by facile words and demagoguery. A person can recollect himself, but if he is not capable of holding his tongue, his meditation will not help him to enter into the mystery of God or to prostrate himself silently at the foot of his throne.
If you open the door of a furnace, the heat will escape from it. “Beware of gossip,” says Saint Dorotheus, “because it causes pious thoughts and meditation on God to flee.” It is certain that a person who speaks incessantly to creatures will have difficulty speaking with God, and, for his part, God will speak little to him. Thus says the Lord: “I will. . . bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hos 2:14). The Book of Proverbs says: “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is prudent” (Prov 10:19). Saint James is unequivocal: “The tongue is an unrighteous world” (Jas 3:6).
“Interior noise makes it impossible to welcome anyone or anything”, Pope Francis recalls wisely and authoritatively in the Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei quaerere [On Women’s Contemplative Life].
Yes, a multitude of sins are due to chattering or listening complacently to the chatter of others. How many souls will be lost on the day of the Last Judgment because they did not keep watch over their tongue? The Psalmist says that the gossip wanders without a guide (cf. Ps 140), and that is why he goes down a thousand and one paths without hope of return. “He who guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov 13:3). And Saint James writes: “If any one makes no mistakes in what he says he is a perfect man” (Jas 3:2). Someone who keeps silence for the love of God will take to meditation, spiritual reading, and prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Saint Mary Magdalene de Pazzi thinks that someone who does not love silence cannot appreciate the things of God; very quickly he will throw himself into the great furnace of the pleasures of the world.
The virtue of silence does not mean that we must never speak. It invites us to remain mute when there are no good reasons to speak up. Ecclesiastes says: “There is. . . a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Eccles 3:7). Referring to these words, Saint Gregory of Nyssa remarks: “The time to keep silence is mentioned first, because by silence we learn the art of speaking well.” When, therefore, should a Christian who desires to become holy be silent, and when should he speak? He should be silent when it is not necessary to speak, and he should speak when necessity or charity requires it. Saint Chrysostom gives the following rule: “Speak only when it is more useful to speak than to be silent.”
Saint Arsenius acknowledges that he often regretted having spoken, but never regretted having kept silence. Saint Ephrem says: “Speak much with God but little with men.”
I encourage everybody not to forget these few bits of advice. If, in your presence, someone uses inappropriate, sinful language, leave that gathering, if possible. If circumstances oblige you to stay, at least lower your eyes and remain silent or seek to direct the conversation toward another subject. That way your silence becomes a protest against sickening chatter. When you are obliged to speak, weigh well what you intend to say. “Make balances and scales for your words”, says the Book of Sirach (28:25). As for Saint Francis de Sales, he colorfully remarks: “In order to avoid faults in speech, we should have our lips buttoned, so that while unbuttoning them we may think of what we are going to say.”
It is time to revolt against the dictatorship of noise that seeks to break our hearts and our intellects. A noisy society is like sorry-looking cardboard stage scenery, a world without substance, an immature flight. A noisy Church would become vain, unfaithful, and dangerous.
In Vultum Dei quaerere, Pope Francis reflects that we must seek “liberation from ‘worldliness’. Asceticism fosters a life in accordance with the interior logic of the Gospel, which is that of gift, especially the gift of self as the natural response to the first and only love of your life.” These forceful words of the pontiff resound like a warning.
In order to learn to keep silence and to nourish it with the presence of God, we should develop the practice of lectio divina, which is a moment of silent listening, contemplation, and profound recollection in the light of the Spirit. Lectio divina is a great river that carries all the riches accumulated over the course of
Church history by the fervent readers of God’s Word.
Lectio divina is never solely our own reading. It feeds on the interpretation of those who have preceded us. The monk, the priest, and the deacon are accustomed to it by the Divine Office itself [in the Office of Readings], which has them listen to the Holy Book and then afterward to the commentaries by the Fathers of the Church. These commentaries are sometimes very different. They can seem austere, disconcerting, and strange to our contemporary mentalities. But if we persevere in lectio divina and silent listening to what the Spirit is saying to the Churches, our effort will be rewarded by unheard-of jewels and riches.
Thus Isaac of Stella marvels at the inexhaustible resources of the sacred text. “Wisdom is aptly described as ‘a fountain bordered with gardens, a well of running water’ (Sg 4:15). It is a fountain because it never ceases to flow; its unfathomable depth makes it a well, a well of running water of ever-fresh bubbling up insights” (Sermon 16, 1). With this same hermeneutical agility, he finds in the text itself authorization for ever new commentaries: “The child of the promise not only kept the wells his Father had, but opened fresh ones (Gn 26:18ff.)” (Sermon 16, 5).
Like a living presence, the Word does not let go of us, and we do not let go of it, either. We commemorate it all day long. Our memory ruminates, and our heart meditates on it. It becomes a source of water that flows continually within us. Is this not what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman: “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn 4:14)? The Word read in silence accompanies us, enlightens us, and feeds us. “Oh, how I love your law [O Lord]! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps 119:97). This Word is loved, revisited regularly, sought out, because it is the Presence of the One who loves us eternally.
The Power of Silence Page 27