Silence [sahy-luh ns]

I’ve been listening to the audio version of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise. I’m also watching too many Presidential Primary debates. As a result —

This week’s word is silence.[1]

It begins and ends in silence. It begins and ends in the silence of God. It begins in the dark silence of God moving over the dark face of the waters. It ends in the bright silence of the empty tomb and the bright face of the angelic gardener. Then it begins again, life does, in the silent realization of Mary the Magdalene, the woozy joy rushing up the stairs from her heart to her head as she looks upon a discarded burial garment then dashes down the dusty road to tell her friends of her eureka. It ends, like Jesus’ ascended body, transformed in the singing silence and the unending praise of heaven.[2] In other words, life ends in a perpetual new beginning.

Life and prayer begin and end in silence. In life, silence is not the absence of sound any more than in prayer silence is the absence of God. Like the mystics who know the sound of silence, the potency and inadequacy of words, the impossibility of naming God, and the persistent irony of life, we must use many not few words or at least many metaphors and images to speak of silence, so simple and yet so multifarious are its meanings and ways.

For persons interested in self-understanding and participating in the liturgy of life, for those spiritual guides and pastoral ministers charged with the responsibility of accompanying others in their search for life or love or connection or meaning or God, silence is the soil of the soul, the black ground where our deepest personhood, rooted in God, gestates and grows. The poet Rilke writes:

In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry,
he can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly
transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.[3]

Silence is the dark, rich soil where awareness, attention, appreciation, and sympathetic action are awakened and nurtured. It is silence that bestows summer from a seed.

Besides being a unique, life-giving “habitat,” silence is a “habit of the heart”, a conscious choice, an intentional practice, a deliberate and daily orientation to life capable of nourishing us and teaching us how to grow into mature, caring human beings. In the life of prayer and in the prayer of life, silence is the secret language of God. Mystics from all the world’s religions seem to know this and, as with all languages, immersion is the best way to learn the language of God.

Silence is the womb of wakefulness, the place of encounter, an occasion for revelation, the dark cell where convictions come to light and are forged, the font of many deaths and many rebirths, the parlance of praise. Silence is the field that holds a hidden treasure or the mollusk in which a dense concretion becomes a pearl of great price. Pray-ers that dare to relinquish their reliance on words are plunged into the kind of poverty that exposes us both to our own duplicity and to our own belovedness. Both sobering and affirming, silence keeps us honest and elicits humility and gratefulness.

In addition to being the fertile ground for self-understanding and healthy self-care as well as the sanctuary for contemplative prayer, the silence of a listening heart is also the seedbed for reverent relationships, social compassion, and cosmic concern. Where there is no silence there is little listening. Where there is little listening there is little personal connection, loving compassion, concern for justice, or communing with the earth.

But where silence is cherished, honored, nurtured, and practiced, where silence is not just an outward behavior but an inner participation of the soul in life, where silence is a way of revering and evoking the aliveness of others, God, and the earth, then silence is full of care, oriented toward solidarity with the poor and marginalized, expressed as sympathy and concern for creation, potentially transformative and healing, and part of the listening and responsive heart of God.

Silence is not only an indispensable part of a healthy and holy life but is at the heart of vital ministry as well, whether enacted by an ordained minister, spiritual guide, lay minister, or a committed person of faith. So much that goes under the guise of Christian ministry today lacks the kind of silence necessary to ground it substantively in the contemplative Christ and guide it in the spirit of the Beatitudes. Silence that makes real listening possible deepens the soulfulness of those who minister, guarding them against the nemeses that sadly have become the hallmarks of so much ministry today in the form of egoism, presumption, and dogmatic certitude, on the one hand, or in the form of shallowness, unconscious neediness, faddish kitsch, or spiritual schlock, on the other hand. Genuine, prayerful silence, for both persons and communities, is the spiritual antidote to the contemporary twin temptations of religious flash and religious fluff.

In the words of Pablo Neruda, “Now I will count to twelve / and you keep quiet and I’ll go. ♦

[1] These reflections are from November 27-29, 2009.

[2] See Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation, 7, and Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence, See Chapter 1.

[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in “Sonnets to Orpheus,” translated by Stephen Mitchell.