We are a religion of the word and, boy, do we hear a lot of words. Many of them even make sense and enrich our understanding of our faith. Although I’ve written about how essential it is to listen to those words, I find that it is most often in silence that I sense God is near.
We’re not used to silence in the way that our forebears were, just as we’re not used to seeing the stars through the city’s lights and smog. Walking a downtown street on the way to church, a driver honks his horn, a bus rumbles past, a couple argues, bells chime. As insurance against silence, half of us seem to have iPods stuck in our ears.
Even when I find a quiet place, there’s no silence in my head. Gotta pay that bill; what’s for lunch? I wish I could play golf today; who was that pretty girl at the party on Friday? Don’t forget to send that e-mail; what was I trying to think about? Oh, yeah. God.
Monasteries and cloisters often impose silence, although if you Google the phrase you’ll find that “vow of silence” has been taken over by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network to protest harassment. There’s probably a lesson there for our society but I’m not sure what it is.
As Karen Armstrong teaches in The Case for God, silence as a religious practice recedes far into the distant past, to the Aryans settling the Indian subcontinent a thousand years before Christ. Their priests defined the ultimate reality and all existence beyond the grasp of the human mind as Brahman. With complex verbal games and demanding yogic exercises they pushed past the limits of thought and language and sensed Brahman in the silence.
The concept re-emerged with the bishop Gregory in the fourth century AD; he interpreted Moses’ encounter with “I Am” on Mount Sinai as one who entered “the silent nothingness” beyond reason. Gregory’s brother Basil refined the idea, pointing out that our human minds could only seize concepts of space and time but lost its way when confronted with nothingness. “For thought,” he wrote, “cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning.”
He meditated upon the mystery of the Trinity in something resembling a Hindu mantra to reach the peace at the core of being. Armstrong thinks that “the whole point of the doctrine was to stop … thinking about God in rational terms … It was a mythos that spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos, and … made sense only when you translated it into practical action.”
The anonymous ninth century Greek writer who called himself Denys propounded a somewhat similar approach: a series of demanding spiritual exercises that lead to a point at which “one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.” Sounds like Socrates!
I’ve spent my working life in radio, a world where silence is the enemy. The story is told of the 1950’s all-night rock jock in Toronto who, when distracted, allowed 10 seconds of “dead air” before he could slap another record on a turntable one morning at three o’clock. The light on the private phone line immediately began to flash. With trepidation, he answered to hear the blast of the volcanic station owner: “I coulda sold that time!”
Selling time? There’s a concept. I think I’ll buy a few years.
Silence? There’s a concept we may have lost along the way, as useful to us as the equally alien concept of humility before a God who, those ancients tell us, we can only know in the stillness beyond knowledge, beyond words. As Augustine knew, He’s not out there, he’s in here. I ought to shut up and listen.
