Silence is a wilderness to be filled and subdued

 

Today the reading from the handbook was concerned with the issues of silence and speech. In order to complement the insights found in that reading, let’s spend a few moments reflecting on silence and speech in our lives as Christians, and especially in the service of God.

We live in a culture that often confuses silence with reverence. In times of national tragedy, for example, any secular Western nation is going to instruct its people to observe “a moment of silence.” There is nothing that is more solemn to the culture than the moment of silence, probably because silence simulates the finality of death, and death in this culture is still surrounded by a certain solemnity. It is worth noting that this very solemnity will eventually pass away, and is passing away, as the “death with dignity” (whatever that is) continues its triumphal march, as more and more Western nations accept the existence of programs like Canada’s MAID (the acronym for Medical Assistance In Dying).

No, silence is not reverence. In fact, in many ways, silence is terrible in the original meaning of the word, “full of terror.” The first generations of Christian monks who departed to the desert knew this. The desert was silent, devoid of life, because it was the haunt of the demons. These fervent Christians went out into the desert to do single combat with those enemies of God, following the example of their Master, Who had gone out to the desert to engage in similar combat. We need only read the apothegms from those first generations to know how truly terrible the demonic manifestations were in that silence. Was the desert also a place of great concentration for prayer? Certainly, but only eventually, once the monks had succeeded in evicting the desert’s native spiritual inhabitants.

Why is silence, in one aspect, so terrible, so demonic? Because it symbolizes the destruction of existing things. It is result when everything has been successfully laid waste. Connected to this idea is the well-known story about Karl Marx related for posterity by his maid. Marx suffered at various times from terrible headaches. During these attacks, he would seal himself in his room, tie a belt tightly around his head and repeat like a mantra a line from Goethe’s Faust. In that line, the demon Mephistopheles says, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

Throughout human history and probably under demonic influence, the most severe punishment that could be inflicted on enemies was silence. Certain cultures raised the practice of damnatio memoriae to an art. In ancient Egypt, for example, a ruler would frequently damn the memory of his predecessor to the oblivion of silence. The name of that person would be removed from monuments, his grave destroyed and his very remains crushed to powder and scattered by the wind, so that he could not be remembered by any future generation.

Then too, we have the example of a Persian girl, Golinduc, the niece of the Sassanian Emperor Shapur II. She fell in love with the Lord Jesus and decided to become a Christian, taking the name Maria in baptism. Her enraged uncle sentenced her to the most severe punishment practiced in the Persian Empire. She was thrown headfirst into the Oblivion, a pit, in fact an old, empty cistern, filled with snakes and rats. It was called the Oblivion, because those who were thrown in were completely forgotten in that place of terrible silence. None ever returned. Golinduc entered into that silence and filled it with prayer. It was eventually due to the faint sound of the chanting of psalms that her extraordinary continued life in the Oblivion became known. Strengthened by grace, Golinduc survived thirteen years in the Oblivion and was drawn up out of it after the Emperor’s death.

Silence is not an ideal. It is rather the wilderness into which God sends us with the command to fill and subdue. We should always rebuke ourselves if we find ourselves yearning for silence. We are, in that case, of the same spirit with Marx, desiring the destruction of existent things, just like James and John in the well-known Gospel story. The Lord Jesus had to rebuke them. “You do not know of what spirit you are.” No, rather, we yearn for the presence of God, the only Source of true peace. The presence of God is full of praise and thanksgiving. Indeed, our interior life amounts to entering the Oblivion of our hearts and filling that emptiness with praise. To God be glory in the Church through all the ages of ages! Amen.