Silence is a Virtue

Spiritual Diaries

To free myself from the infamous writer’s block, I’ll be posting these brief (~500 word) ‘Spiritual Diaries’ weekly, reflecting on my week and what I have been pondering. Welcome, to those who are new here, and thank you to all those that have hung around. This is On Love and Longing, a series of essays on theology, the good life, and ascending heavenwards. Happy reading.

Woman Reading a Letter (Brieflezende vrouw). Johannes Vermeer, c. 1663. Oil on canvas.

Once before, I have publicly speculated on Silence. I used to be, and sometimes still am, embarrassed to be silent. Maybe that is self evident, considering that I have not once, but twice now have been unable to withhold my silence and speak on it to you all. Silence, at times, seems to be synonymous with ‘ignorance’ or ‘awkwardness.”¹ To be silent in the face of someone’s moral failings is to be unloving; to be silent in the face of ethical tragedy is to be complicit—even violent. So are the fables I keep telling myself.

There is one thing about Silence that I think I have gotten right—silence is certainly synonymous with participation. Not in so negative a sense as ‘complicit,’ silence as participation emphasizes instead ‘being-in’ or ‘being-with.’ My first mature enlightenment to this sort of silence occured in the stillness of my wife’s labor with our first son. No stirring, no speaking, no verbal consoling occurred between those roaring moments of a woman in labor.² Only silence, stillness, soft breaths and heart beats filled our bedroom. I’ve begun chasing those sacred moment of silence everywhere I can find it, but principally in the Psalms.

In the Benedictine Tradition, monks and cantors have maintained what the Jewish cantors called a ‘selah,’ a pause of contemplative thought within a line of chanted psaltery. I get the sense as I chant the Psalms that the lines were not first written for the words to be uttered but for the silence incurred in between these lines. No wonder St. Benedict begins his rule with ‘obsculta’ (i.e. listen) and not ‘oratio’ (i.e. speak). The point of the exterior disciplines for Benedict and for the Psalmist is to cultivate the silence of the interior life. In one place, the Psalmist writes, “Out of the deep have I called unto thee.” From what deep? Could it be any other deep than those primal waters? The very depths of which the Spirit of the Lord brooded over in the beginning? It is this same abyss which the demons beg Christ to spare them from, and for what reason?³ Many Mediterranean cultures, including the Jews, considered the waters to be Chaos, not the tranquility of an alpine lake we wade in during the summers. I might pose that this Chaos, though, if it is to be thought of as a metaphor of hell, is not loud and bustling but silent, deafeningly silent. Perhaps, this is one meaning of St. Silouan’s famous counsel, “Keep your mind in hell and despair not.”

One of my favorite composers, Arvo Pärt, accentuates silence another way, “When we speak of silence, we must keep in mind that it has two different wings, so to speak—silence can be both that which is outside of us and that which is inside a person. The silence of our soul, which isn’t affected by external distractions, is actually more crucial but more difficult to achieve.” Funny enough, I am writing this first diary from my summer job at a roadside peach stand which is hardly silent. Not only are my eyes and ears assailed by the predictable sirens, flashy cars, barking dogs, and convivial sounds of the neighboring ice cream parlor but also arguing couples, crying children, and raging drivers. How can I cultivate this more crucial silence of the soul in such an environment? Sure, many flee to the desert, but they face a new and altogether sort of noise.⁴ What then, are we lost? “Keep your mind in hell and despair not.”

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Reading

• The Bride of the Lamb (Chapter 3, “Evil”) by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov

• A Secular Age (“The Age of Mobilization”) by Charles Taylor

• A Tale of Two Cities (Book the Second, Chapter 3) by Charles Dickens

Listening

• Arvo Pärt & Alexander Malter, “Für Alina”

• John Fahey, The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites

• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina & Quartom, “Adoramaus te”

Watching

• Andrei Rublev (1966), Andrei Tarkovsky

• “The Spirit and the Text: Assessing Biblical Inerrancy,” Stephen HAuse

1. Curiously, on this note, the word ‘dumb’ can mean both silent and stupid. Perhaps this problem with silence isn’t all in my head.

2. One of my favorite poems gently nudged me to think this way; “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry:

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

3. “Darkness was upon the abyss.” What is “the abyss”? That place, of course, where “the devil and his angels” will be. This indeed is most clearly designated also in the Gospel when it is said of the Savior: “And the demons which he was casting out were asking him that he not command them to go into the abyss.” Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Ronald E. Heine, vol. 71, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 47–48.

4. One of my favorite stories from the lives of the saints comes from the Life of St. Anthony, wherein disciples come to the desert where Anthony is living the ascetic life (presumably seeking out silence in addition to the elder’s teaching) and on the first night are awoken by hordes of demons, quite noisily, attacking Anthony in his small hermitage.