A Meditation on Silence
There are two kinds of people – those who know the value of silence and those who do not.
The silent man may be moved to speak, to shout, and even perhaps to bellow in righteous indignation if the circumstances require. He may do so reluctantly or even with fear, but when he is roused he is terrible and, because of the contrast of his current speech with his customary silence, much more effective than the man who cannot help but speak at every opportunity.
By contrast, the man who does not know the value of silence cannot adopt silence in the moments that require it. His mind is restless, and his tongue must wag with every stray thought. Indeed, his tongue is not even stilled in those unfortunate moments when his mind has not thought at all – he will bray like an ass about the first shiny object on which his eyes alight and, where there is nothing at all, he will bray about nothing at all.
My grandmother said that they love the sound of their own voice, but I don’t think this is necessarily the case. There is something deeper here.
I am reminded that the very first word of Saint Benedict’s “Little Rule for Beginners” is Listen. The man who does not know the value of silence cannot still himself long enough to listen, and unable to listen he cannot begin to hear the small, still voice of God in the gentle breeze (1 Kings 19:11-12). The man who does not know the value of silence cannot hear the voice of God. He may be a religious man or not; he may pray with loud protestations or song or he may eschew the spiritual life altogether; but he cannot hear the whispers of the Divine and so cannot know the Divine will.
Certainly God may shout so loudly that only the most foolish cannot hear Him – one has only to ask Pharaoh’s charioteers – but the God of judgment prefers to be the God of mercy (Wisdom 12:2). Most often, He whispers to us as a lover, and the man of the restless mind and tongue – the man who does not know the value of silence – may indeed have surrounded himself in so much noise and confusion that he cannot hear his lover’s whisper. He does not know how to listen.
Saint Augustine famously says “our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you”, but the restless heart of the man who does not know the value of silence becomes one more spur to goad his restless tongue. In our modern day, of course, we also have recourse to various forms electronic noise – radio, television, video games, the internet, and the ever-present ear buds pumping noise into the heads of almost every commuter.
I am, I fear, as guilty as anyone of indulging in this culture of noise.
This electronic cocoon is designed to entertain us, to fill every moment of possible boredom with some amusement to divert our minds from… what? This is the crux of the issue, and it touches on something profound about our modern culture. We are taught from our youth that ours is a culture of proud individuals.
We idolize the lone action hero who saves the day, often through the thunder of firearms and ear-splitting explosions. We are taught to value independence and individuality, to “be unique”, to not “go with the herd”. But this “independence” is just another word for “isolation”, if not purely physical then certainly spiritual.
As armour for our fragile emotional cores, now unsupported by the structures of large families or parishes or even clubs, all of which we have as a society largely rejected in favour of our proud individuality, as a distraction from our restless hearts laid bare, we cocoon ourselves in our culture of noise. We become a society that does not know the value of silence.
Why have we created this culture of distraction and noise? Why have we in the post-Christian west become the society that does not know the value of silence? The reason is the same, I think, as the reason why individual men do not know the value of silence. They are, consciously or unconsciously, afraid of what the silence may reveal to them.
Listen. Here, in the silence, we are stripped of our armour, stripped of our comfortable cocoon, and the very core of our beings are laid bare before the Infinite. We have as a society turned away from God in our pride and egotism; we tremble in fear before Him.
It is not that God ever failed to see us, of course, or to know us or love us, but it was we who failed to heed Him. We fear the silence, and we try and fail to fill it with noise and distraction, because in the silence we will hear the lover’s whisper and know that we are not alone, not proud individuals, but only creatures of pride.
We fear the silence because we know that eternity dwells there, and we are terrified of being swallowed up into infinity and seeing ourselves as what we truly are, the merest nothing screaming against the darkness.
But this is only half a truth.
The man who understands the value of silence will tell you, if you ask him and if you listen, that eternity is not darkness and infinity is not empty. For it shines with God’s glory and is filled with His inexhaustible mercy and love.