Unelected Silence: An Essay
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by Mark DelCogliano
Mark DelCogliano is an assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas. He specializes in early Christianity, particularly in doctrinal debates during that period. He lived as a monk for seven years at a Trappist community in Massachusetts before earning his Ph.D. at Emory University. The title of his essay is a play on Elected Silence, the title given by Evelyn Waugh to the British version of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. The Book of Revelation does not make much sense to me, with its arcane symbolism and bizarre depiction of eschatological conflict. And yet its thrilling vision of God’s ultimate victory has often provided me with a sense of hope, particularly in periods of mundane gloom. Indeed, several passages of Revelation’s |
soaring hymnody and fantastical imagery have long gripped my mind and stirred my heart. I find myself turning to these favorites again and again. Chapter 7, for instance, ends with exhilarating promises to the faithful multitude that hascome out of the great ordeal, promises that echo the Christ-yearning language of the Psalms and the Old Testament prophets:
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They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Rev. 7:16-17) |
If only this eschatological vision of ultimate salvation could be realized now in this vale of tears! It is, however, the verse that immediately follows these that, out of all the passages of Revelation, has most captured my attention: When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Rev. 8:1).
Scripture scholars will have much to say on the significance of this last seal’s opening, the meaning of the silence, and the symbolism of its vague duration. Let them debate it. As for me, I prefer the interpretation of St. Gregory the Great, the statesman turned monk and exegete who spent the last fourteen years of his life as Pope (+604). In his exposition of the book of Job, he writes:
Scripture scholars will have much to say on the significance of this last seal’s opening, the meaning of the silence, and the symbolism of its vague duration. Let them debate it. As for me, I prefer the interpretation of St. Gregory the Great, the statesman turned monk and exegete who spent the last fourteen years of his life as Pope (+604). In his exposition of the book of Job, he writes:
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Solitude of mind is first granted to those of good conduct, that they may keep down the din of earthly desires rising within; that they may restrain by the grace of heavenly love the troubles of heart which bubble up from the depths; and that they may swat away from the eyes of the mind with the hand of seriousness all motions of trivial thoughts which importunely present themselves, as if they were flies flitting around; in order that they may seek for themselves some secret abode with the Lord within themselves where they may, once the exterior clamor has ceased, speak silently with him by their inward desires. It is said of this secret abode of the heart: There was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Rev 8:1). For the church of the elect is called ‘heaven,’ which, as she stretches toward the eternal heights through the elevation of contemplation, keeps down the tumult of thoughts surging up from the depths and makes a kind of silent abode for God within herself. Since indeed this silence of contemplation cannot be perfect in this life, it is said to last for about half an hour. For since the tumultuous clamor of thoughts forces itself into the soul against its will, even when stretching toward the heights, it violently drags the eye of the heart back down to the consideration of earthly things. And so, it is written: The body that is corruptible weighs down the soul and the earthly habitation burdens the mind thinking many things (Wis 9:15). So then, this silence is well described as lasting not for a whole but for a half hour, because contemplation is never perfected here, however ardently it be begun. (Moralia 30.16).
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Here, Gregory speaks of a “secret abode,” an interior heaven, deep within the mind or soul, deep within our heart, a reality that is created, or perhaps remembered or recovered, when the clamor of all distracting earthly desires, troubles, and trivial thoughts is repressed, repelled, and shut out. In this place of interior silence, solitude, and stillness, one has immediate and intimate converse with God, being able to attune the secret internal ear to God, and speak voicelessly through inward desires. Yet, stresses Gregory, this is a fleeting experience; it lasts neither a whole hour, nor even an exact half hour, for in this life, the silence of contemplation cannot be perfect. It was a truth he knew well, thrust into the active ministry of the papacy when all he wanted was the contemplative repose of the monastery.
Gregory’s words resonate with me because this contemplative silence has been for my entire adult life a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery that is at once terrifying, inducing dread and trembling, and yet also ineluctably alluring and attractive. I have pursued it as much as I have fled it. With dedicated seriousness, I pursued it as a Trappist monk—as a monk of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OSCO)—for seven years, from ages 26 to 33. I still remember well how profoundly I experienced the silence of the monastery during my initial visits before entering, once in the autumn in a newly harvested cornfield surrounded by rolling hills pied with flaming color, another time when the mournful chants of the Good Friday liturgy suddenly came to halt. It is finished (John 19:13). It was finished. Christ died upon the cross. The eternal Word became silent. All was silent. All was silence. And I was there in the silence, with the silent, the dead but living, Christ. So appealing was this silence that I signed up for life—or so I thought.
As far as I know, no monastic order has ever required a vow of silence, and the Trappists are no exception. Rather, in line with the teaching of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict—followed by Benedictines and Cistercians alike—silence is observed at certain times and in certain places. The “great silence,” for example, descends upon the monastery each night, during which talking is prohibited unless absolutely necessary: in my monastery this lasted from the end of Compline until after morning Mass (roughly 8pm until 7am). As for the dormitories and chapels, the same prohibition was always in force. In the Rule of St. Benedict, silence is understood as an interior disposition to be diligently cultivated at all times, so as to avoid sin, to acquire self-discipline, and, above all, to foster listening, that monastic trait so central to the life envisioned by the Rule (especially in chapters 6 and 42). As the prologue of the Rule states, we are alienated from God because of disobedience—not listening to God; and so, it is through obedience—listening to God—that we return to God. Accordingly, silence is not an end itself, but a primary means of removing barriers to God and fostering the habit of openness to the divine presence.
As a young monk, I was smitten with the desert fathers of the ancient east, those earliest practitioners of this new radical form of Christian living—the monastic life—in the fourth and fifth centuries: Antony the Great, Arsenius, Pambo, the two Macarii, the whole gang. And not only with them in general, but in particular with the two greatest systematizers of their thought and spirituality, Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian. Their concept of silence—best captured by transliterating the Greek term, hēsychia—was more fully developed than one finds in the Rule of St. Benedict. It was not simply the absence of noise and external distractions, but even more so an interior silence, a profound calm, a deep peace, an inner tranquility that put the monk into God’s presence, enabling him (or her) without any impediment to avoid all temptation and vice and sin, to cultivate virtue and the habit of love, and to rest the heart in God in continual prayer. Thus hēsychia, when practiced along with the other monastic disciplines, is, for Evagrius, Cassian, and the rest of the desert fathers, an essential means to intimacy with God.
The silence of the monastery that had so appealed to me before entering became real after I entered, at least in an inchoate way. I pursued hēsychia with assiduity and once in while even found what I sought for a few fleeting moments, lasting, maybe, if I was lucky, about half an hour. Even before becoming a monk, I had practiced a meditative form of contemplative prayer, and now I did so every day with my monastic brothers in the dark and quiet church after Vigils. Practicing it now with regularity and mutual fraternal support, I plunged deeper into the silence of God. I also was introduced to the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina, the contemplative rumination upon the scriptures, famously described by a twelfth-century prior of the Carthusian Grande Chartreuse monastery, Guigo II, as the “the ladder of monks” (scala claustralium). He envisioned lectio divina as a process of four stages, or rather of four moments: lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio. One’s reading (lectio) of the sacred text is meant to lead to reflection (meditatio) upon its meaning, not in the objective, academic sense, but its meaning in the sense of its significance for you, how the scriptural passage is God’s word for you. This in turn is meant to segue into a response to God in prayer (oratio) and may culminate in contemplatio, a quiet contemplative resting--hēsychia—in the silent presence of God who has been manifested to the reader through the scriptures. To this day, I treasure the formation in lectio divina that I obtained in the monastery. As a junior monk, I also had the regular opportunity to spend a day or two in one of the hermitages on the grounds of the monastery. One time, I even spent a week in the hermitage. All of these were profound experiences for me, however imperfect and fleeting the true moments of hēsychia were.
Soon and very soon, I learned, too, that true hēsychia is not blissed-out, undistracted leisurely relaxation in the divine presence. Rather, hēsychia is the stilling of turbulent, cloudy waters so that the bottom of the interior depth could finally be seen. Or, to use another metaphor, it is the slow-but-steady uncorking of a bottle whose contents have for too long been under extreme pressure. The silence of the monastery, the hēsychia, that was so alluring was, I learned, as equally excruciating—and I use “excruciating” in full awareness of its etymological root: crux. Hēsychia can be a spiritual crucifixion. Thus, for me, contemplative silence was a mysterium as fascinans as it was tremendum. Every experienced monk I’ve ever come to know has confirmed that you enter the monastery to find God, but you wind up finding yourself. The silence of the monastery strips away all the distractions with which you preoccupied yourself in secular life and, for the first time, you are confronted with yourself, your true self, in all your messy brokenness. Of course, the desert fathers realized this, too. One elder said: “when [a monk] practices hēsychia, especially in the desert, then he sees his own shortcomings” (Wortley translation). And an ambiguous saying of Abba Moses, as I see it, suggests something similar: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”—that is, everything about yourself (Ward translation). So then, in the monastery, hēsychia provides the necessary context, the essential “space,” for that ultimate encounter with yourself, an encounter in which you experience your own weakness, damagedness, and humility. In the silence, you are brought down low, to that very deepest secret place within your own heart that you’ve managed all through life to keep hidden from everyone else, that you’ve mostly managed to keep hidden even from yourself, barely acknowledging it, for fear that to admit to yourself, or even worse, to reveal it to another, would be nothing less than annihilation of your very being. So hēsychia could be terrible, even terrifying. Truly, tremendum.
Even in a monastery, however, there are plenty of ways to avoid the silence, in spite of every aspect of the life being designed for its cultivation. Though I was in the monastery in the days before the internet broke big, there were newspapers and magazines, and plenty of “unedifying” books. Everyone knew which brothers were chatty, and I sought them out when the silence got to be too much. When I entered the monastery, I had smuggled in a few cassette tapes of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, and the like. There was no better way, I found, to destroy the monastic silence than by cranking up the volume on my walkman with John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s thumping riffs in “Hey Bulldog,” Brian Wilson’s dulcet harmonies in “In Your Room,” and Jimmy Page’s barrage of guitar in “The Ocean.” At times, the temptation to shut out the silence, to shield myself from myself, proved to be too great.
But such self-distraction is ultimately futile, for monastic silence is inescapable and, sooner or later, having been shunned, it comes back with a vengeance. The regular, relentless, and even brutal regimen of the monastic life, even if lived with woefully imperfect fidelity, forces the monk into silence, to peer down to the bottom of the inner sea with eyes no longer shut, to be drenched with that interior swill now uncorked and flowing abundantly. If one perseveres—and no more common word of encouragement is heard in a monastery than “Persevere!”—breakthrough happens. In spite of yourself, you come to realize that you are no different than any other person who has ever lived, or is alive now, or who will someday live: all have sinned, all bear the marks of sin, all have been crushed and scattered by sinfulness, and all fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). But as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ (I Corinthians 15:22). The words of the Exsultet sung at the Easter Vigil ring so true for me, “O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The knowledge of yourself, of your deep-down secrets and shames, of your common lot with all humanity, that is gained through monastic silence does not, should not, cause us to drown in wallowing, isolation, and embarrassment. It is a kind of death, a kind of cross. But in that very deepest, secret place within your heart in which all your fears have tenaciously rooted themselves, Jesus comes and shouts those words he said to his disciples in their terror in the midst of the storm on the sea: It is I; do not be afraid! (John 6:20). Then, having come out of the great ordeal, there is overwhelming silence in heaven for about half an hour, when the Lamb opens the seventh seal and guides us to springs of the water of life, and God wipes away every tear from our eyes. What relief, what healing, what resurrection, what salvation it is to admit your deepest, darkest secrets to Jesus, to confess the seat of all your fears and pain to Jesus, and wondrously not to be annihilated, but on the contrary to have the power of such things diminished forever, to learn that such things don’t really matter much to God, indeed, to have them become the means whereby we are made whole again, made alive again! What relief, what healing, what resurrection, what salvation it is, to be no longer afraid, boosted in confidence by the immutability and excessiveness of divine love, and to speak of such things to a fellow monk! We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him (Romans 6:9). So too it is with us.
After seven years in the monastery, I discerned that my vocation lay elsewhere. I have no regrets. The person who I am today has been deeply shaped by my transformative monastic experience. What about contemplative silence? In one sense, the decision to leave the monastery was a choice for non-silence. In another sense, it was an acknowledgement that I had received from the mysterium of silence all that I needed. It was a realization that I needed to replace my primary metaphor for God with another, still to be determined. So while silence still remains for me a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, it is no longer as central for me as it once was. It no longer supplies me with the meaning and the life that it once did at a time when I, apparently, needed to be given meaning and life through it. After leaving the monastery, I went to graduate school, earned a Ph.D. in patristics, became a professor of theology, and started to publish scholarly studies about and translations of early and late-antique Christian texts. I also met my true love, married her, and now we have two more true loves in our life, both under the age of six. So there is not a whole lot of silence in my life anymore, external or internal. When home, I delight in the joyful sounds of small, energetic children. Indeed, as any parent knows, sudden quiet in the midst of playing usually means the kids are up to no good! When in the classroom, I chatter away, trying to help students see the relevance and importance of theology; when in my office, my mind is preoccupied with class preparation, research, writing, and the host of other responsibilities that are part of academic life today. When I have a few minutes of silence, my mind turns to my many cares and concerns, my duties and obligations and, above all, my three true loves. This is as it should be.
And yet, once in a while, there is still silence in heaven for about half an hour. Usually it catches me unawares. It is like bumping into an old friend with whom you had a fraught relationship of sorts. I remember only the good times, not the bad. It happens, sometimes, in the early hours of the morning in the chilly, quiet house, when I get up for my morning devotions before any of my family wakes. Usually, my mind wanders to a thousand things, but sometimes I find myself pausing in my recitation of the divine office and simply resting in God’s presence. On rare occasions, I find myself alone in the house in the morning, in the middle of day, or even at night, and I find a few moments to sit and be still. There is also the silence of watching your child asleep in bed, or even better, curled up asleep next to you: it is hard to fathom the love you have for these small, amazing persons who just a few years ago were yet to be born. At times like these, I think I finally gain some inkling of God’s love for us, of God’s love for me. I am grateful for these fleeting moments of contemplative silence, these experiences of silence in heaven for about half an hour, reminders of past graces and, at the same time, new gifts from God, moments of comfort and consolation, in the midst of this—my life of unelected silence.
Photo credit: Charles O’Connor, ctoconnorjr@gmail.com.
Gregory’s words resonate with me because this contemplative silence has been for my entire adult life a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery that is at once terrifying, inducing dread and trembling, and yet also ineluctably alluring and attractive. I have pursued it as much as I have fled it. With dedicated seriousness, I pursued it as a Trappist monk—as a monk of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OSCO)—for seven years, from ages 26 to 33. I still remember well how profoundly I experienced the silence of the monastery during my initial visits before entering, once in the autumn in a newly harvested cornfield surrounded by rolling hills pied with flaming color, another time when the mournful chants of the Good Friday liturgy suddenly came to halt. It is finished (John 19:13). It was finished. Christ died upon the cross. The eternal Word became silent. All was silent. All was silence. And I was there in the silence, with the silent, the dead but living, Christ. So appealing was this silence that I signed up for life—or so I thought.
As far as I know, no monastic order has ever required a vow of silence, and the Trappists are no exception. Rather, in line with the teaching of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict—followed by Benedictines and Cistercians alike—silence is observed at certain times and in certain places. The “great silence,” for example, descends upon the monastery each night, during which talking is prohibited unless absolutely necessary: in my monastery this lasted from the end of Compline until after morning Mass (roughly 8pm until 7am). As for the dormitories and chapels, the same prohibition was always in force. In the Rule of St. Benedict, silence is understood as an interior disposition to be diligently cultivated at all times, so as to avoid sin, to acquire self-discipline, and, above all, to foster listening, that monastic trait so central to the life envisioned by the Rule (especially in chapters 6 and 42). As the prologue of the Rule states, we are alienated from God because of disobedience—not listening to God; and so, it is through obedience—listening to God—that we return to God. Accordingly, silence is not an end itself, but a primary means of removing barriers to God and fostering the habit of openness to the divine presence.
As a young monk, I was smitten with the desert fathers of the ancient east, those earliest practitioners of this new radical form of Christian living—the monastic life—in the fourth and fifth centuries: Antony the Great, Arsenius, Pambo, the two Macarii, the whole gang. And not only with them in general, but in particular with the two greatest systematizers of their thought and spirituality, Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian. Their concept of silence—best captured by transliterating the Greek term, hēsychia—was more fully developed than one finds in the Rule of St. Benedict. It was not simply the absence of noise and external distractions, but even more so an interior silence, a profound calm, a deep peace, an inner tranquility that put the monk into God’s presence, enabling him (or her) without any impediment to avoid all temptation and vice and sin, to cultivate virtue and the habit of love, and to rest the heart in God in continual prayer. Thus hēsychia, when practiced along with the other monastic disciplines, is, for Evagrius, Cassian, and the rest of the desert fathers, an essential means to intimacy with God.
The silence of the monastery that had so appealed to me before entering became real after I entered, at least in an inchoate way. I pursued hēsychia with assiduity and once in while even found what I sought for a few fleeting moments, lasting, maybe, if I was lucky, about half an hour. Even before becoming a monk, I had practiced a meditative form of contemplative prayer, and now I did so every day with my monastic brothers in the dark and quiet church after Vigils. Practicing it now with regularity and mutual fraternal support, I plunged deeper into the silence of God. I also was introduced to the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina, the contemplative rumination upon the scriptures, famously described by a twelfth-century prior of the Carthusian Grande Chartreuse monastery, Guigo II, as the “the ladder of monks” (scala claustralium). He envisioned lectio divina as a process of four stages, or rather of four moments: lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio. One’s reading (lectio) of the sacred text is meant to lead to reflection (meditatio) upon its meaning, not in the objective, academic sense, but its meaning in the sense of its significance for you, how the scriptural passage is God’s word for you. This in turn is meant to segue into a response to God in prayer (oratio) and may culminate in contemplatio, a quiet contemplative resting--hēsychia—in the silent presence of God who has been manifested to the reader through the scriptures. To this day, I treasure the formation in lectio divina that I obtained in the monastery. As a junior monk, I also had the regular opportunity to spend a day or two in one of the hermitages on the grounds of the monastery. One time, I even spent a week in the hermitage. All of these were profound experiences for me, however imperfect and fleeting the true moments of hēsychia were.
Soon and very soon, I learned, too, that true hēsychia is not blissed-out, undistracted leisurely relaxation in the divine presence. Rather, hēsychia is the stilling of turbulent, cloudy waters so that the bottom of the interior depth could finally be seen. Or, to use another metaphor, it is the slow-but-steady uncorking of a bottle whose contents have for too long been under extreme pressure. The silence of the monastery, the hēsychia, that was so alluring was, I learned, as equally excruciating—and I use “excruciating” in full awareness of its etymological root: crux. Hēsychia can be a spiritual crucifixion. Thus, for me, contemplative silence was a mysterium as fascinans as it was tremendum. Every experienced monk I’ve ever come to know has confirmed that you enter the monastery to find God, but you wind up finding yourself. The silence of the monastery strips away all the distractions with which you preoccupied yourself in secular life and, for the first time, you are confronted with yourself, your true self, in all your messy brokenness. Of course, the desert fathers realized this, too. One elder said: “when [a monk] practices hēsychia, especially in the desert, then he sees his own shortcomings” (Wortley translation). And an ambiguous saying of Abba Moses, as I see it, suggests something similar: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”—that is, everything about yourself (Ward translation). So then, in the monastery, hēsychia provides the necessary context, the essential “space,” for that ultimate encounter with yourself, an encounter in which you experience your own weakness, damagedness, and humility. In the silence, you are brought down low, to that very deepest secret place within your own heart that you’ve managed all through life to keep hidden from everyone else, that you’ve mostly managed to keep hidden even from yourself, barely acknowledging it, for fear that to admit to yourself, or even worse, to reveal it to another, would be nothing less than annihilation of your very being. So hēsychia could be terrible, even terrifying. Truly, tremendum.
Even in a monastery, however, there are plenty of ways to avoid the silence, in spite of every aspect of the life being designed for its cultivation. Though I was in the monastery in the days before the internet broke big, there were newspapers and magazines, and plenty of “unedifying” books. Everyone knew which brothers were chatty, and I sought them out when the silence got to be too much. When I entered the monastery, I had smuggled in a few cassette tapes of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, and the like. There was no better way, I found, to destroy the monastic silence than by cranking up the volume on my walkman with John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s thumping riffs in “Hey Bulldog,” Brian Wilson’s dulcet harmonies in “In Your Room,” and Jimmy Page’s barrage of guitar in “The Ocean.” At times, the temptation to shut out the silence, to shield myself from myself, proved to be too great.
But such self-distraction is ultimately futile, for monastic silence is inescapable and, sooner or later, having been shunned, it comes back with a vengeance. The regular, relentless, and even brutal regimen of the monastic life, even if lived with woefully imperfect fidelity, forces the monk into silence, to peer down to the bottom of the inner sea with eyes no longer shut, to be drenched with that interior swill now uncorked and flowing abundantly. If one perseveres—and no more common word of encouragement is heard in a monastery than “Persevere!”—breakthrough happens. In spite of yourself, you come to realize that you are no different than any other person who has ever lived, or is alive now, or who will someday live: all have sinned, all bear the marks of sin, all have been crushed and scattered by sinfulness, and all fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). But as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ (I Corinthians 15:22). The words of the Exsultet sung at the Easter Vigil ring so true for me, “O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The knowledge of yourself, of your deep-down secrets and shames, of your common lot with all humanity, that is gained through monastic silence does not, should not, cause us to drown in wallowing, isolation, and embarrassment. It is a kind of death, a kind of cross. But in that very deepest, secret place within your heart in which all your fears have tenaciously rooted themselves, Jesus comes and shouts those words he said to his disciples in their terror in the midst of the storm on the sea: It is I; do not be afraid! (John 6:20). Then, having come out of the great ordeal, there is overwhelming silence in heaven for about half an hour, when the Lamb opens the seventh seal and guides us to springs of the water of life, and God wipes away every tear from our eyes. What relief, what healing, what resurrection, what salvation it is to admit your deepest, darkest secrets to Jesus, to confess the seat of all your fears and pain to Jesus, and wondrously not to be annihilated, but on the contrary to have the power of such things diminished forever, to learn that such things don’t really matter much to God, indeed, to have them become the means whereby we are made whole again, made alive again! What relief, what healing, what resurrection, what salvation it is, to be no longer afraid, boosted in confidence by the immutability and excessiveness of divine love, and to speak of such things to a fellow monk! We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him (Romans 6:9). So too it is with us.
After seven years in the monastery, I discerned that my vocation lay elsewhere. I have no regrets. The person who I am today has been deeply shaped by my transformative monastic experience. What about contemplative silence? In one sense, the decision to leave the monastery was a choice for non-silence. In another sense, it was an acknowledgement that I had received from the mysterium of silence all that I needed. It was a realization that I needed to replace my primary metaphor for God with another, still to be determined. So while silence still remains for me a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, it is no longer as central for me as it once was. It no longer supplies me with the meaning and the life that it once did at a time when I, apparently, needed to be given meaning and life through it. After leaving the monastery, I went to graduate school, earned a Ph.D. in patristics, became a professor of theology, and started to publish scholarly studies about and translations of early and late-antique Christian texts. I also met my true love, married her, and now we have two more true loves in our life, both under the age of six. So there is not a whole lot of silence in my life anymore, external or internal. When home, I delight in the joyful sounds of small, energetic children. Indeed, as any parent knows, sudden quiet in the midst of playing usually means the kids are up to no good! When in the classroom, I chatter away, trying to help students see the relevance and importance of theology; when in my office, my mind is preoccupied with class preparation, research, writing, and the host of other responsibilities that are part of academic life today. When I have a few minutes of silence, my mind turns to my many cares and concerns, my duties and obligations and, above all, my three true loves. This is as it should be.
And yet, once in a while, there is still silence in heaven for about half an hour. Usually it catches me unawares. It is like bumping into an old friend with whom you had a fraught relationship of sorts. I remember only the good times, not the bad. It happens, sometimes, in the early hours of the morning in the chilly, quiet house, when I get up for my morning devotions before any of my family wakes. Usually, my mind wanders to a thousand things, but sometimes I find myself pausing in my recitation of the divine office and simply resting in God’s presence. On rare occasions, I find myself alone in the house in the morning, in the middle of day, or even at night, and I find a few moments to sit and be still. There is also the silence of watching your child asleep in bed, or even better, curled up asleep next to you: it is hard to fathom the love you have for these small, amazing persons who just a few years ago were yet to be born. At times like these, I think I finally gain some inkling of God’s love for us, of God’s love for me. I am grateful for these fleeting moments of contemplative silence, these experiences of silence in heaven for about half an hour, reminders of past graces and, at the same time, new gifts from God, moments of comfort and consolation, in the midst of this—my life of unelected silence.
Photo credit: Charles O’Connor, ctoconnorjr@gmail.com.