The Power of Silence Read online

  For the Cardinal, night warms a man’s heart. The one who keeps vigil at night goes out of himself, the better to find God. The silence of night is the most capable of crushing all the dictatorships of noise. When darkness descends upon the earth, the asceticism of silence can acquire more luminous dimensions. The words of the Psalmist are final: “In the night. . . I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints. You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I consider the days of old, I remember the years long ago. I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit” (Ps 77:2-6).

  Before we departed, the cardinal wanted to have a moment of recollection in the cemetery. We walked through the monastery, those long, magnificent galleries, like labyrinths carved out by prayer. The large cloister measures 709 feet from north to south, 75 feet from east to west, or a quadrilateral with a perimeter of 1,568 feet. The foundations of this Gothic complex go back to the twelfth century; since then, permanent silence has reigned. In the Carthusian deserts, the cemetery is located at the center of the cloister.

  The graves bore no names, dates, or mementos. On the one side, there were stone crosses, for the generals of the Order, and on the other—wooden crosses for the Fathers and the lay Brothers. The Carthusians are buried in the ground without a coffin, without a tombstone; no distinctive mark recalls their individual lives. I asked Dom Dysmas de Lassus the location of the crosses of the monks who had been his contemporaries and whose deaths he had witnessed. Dom Dysmas no longer knew. “The gusts of wind and the mosses have already done their work”, he declared. He could find only the grave of Dom André Poisson, one of his predecessors, who died in April 2005. The former general died at night, alone, in his cell; he departed to join all the sons of Saint Bruno, and the vast troop of hermits, in heaven.

  Since 1084, Carthusians have not wanted to leave any trace. God alone matters. Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis—the world turns and the Cross remains.

  Before leaving, in the sunshine beneath an immaculate blue sky, the cardinal blessed the tombs.

  A few moments later, we left the Grande Chartreuse. The Benedictine monk who had come to pick us up declared: “You are leaving paradise. . .”

  In the Dialogues of the Carmelites, Georges Bernanos wrote: “When wise men reach the end of their wisdom, it is advisable to listen to the children.” The Carthusians are wise men and children together.

  During this year of work, a phrase from the Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos was the reliable compass of our reflection:

  My inner quiet—blessed by God—has never really isolated me. I feel all human-kind can enter and I receive them thus only at the threshold of my home. . . . Alas, mine is but a very precarious shelter. But I imagine the quiet of some souls is like a vast refuge. Sinners at the end of their tether can creep in and rest, and leave comforted, forgetting the great invisible temple where they lay down their burden for a while.

  Similarly, in Le Silence comme introduction à la métaphysique [Silence as an introduction to metaphysics], the philosopher Joseph Rassam asserted that “silence is within us the wordless language of the finite being that, by its own weight, seeks and carries our movement toward the infinite Being. This is to say that thought does not arrive at the affirmation of God on its own power, but through its docility to the prevenient light of being that is received and welcomed as a gift. The act of silence that defines this reception bears within it prayer, in other words, the movement by which the soul raises itself to God.” For Joseph Rassam, as for Robert Cardinal Sarah, “although speech characterizes man, silence is what defines him, because speech acquires sense only in terms of this silence.” This is the beautiful and important message of The Power of Silence.

  On April 16, 2013, a few weeks after his election, Pope Francis recalled: “The prophets, ‘you killed them’, and then venerated them. [They build monuments for them, but after killing them.] That is a manifestation of resistance to the Holy Spirit.” In this world, the man who speaks about silence can experience the same ups and downs. Admiration, rejection, and condemnation follow one another and disappear.

  The words of the silent are often true prophecies but also lights that people seek to extinguish.

  In this book, Robert Cardinal Sarah had only one aim, which is summed up in this thought: “Silence is difficult, but it makes man able to allow himself to be led by God. Silence is born of silence. Through God the silent one, we can gain access to silence. And man is unceasingly surprised by the light that bursts forth then. Silence is more important than any other human work. For it expresses God. The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and others so as to place ourselves humbly and generously at their service” (Thought 68, The Power of Silence).

  What virtue does Cardinal Sarah expect from the reading of this book? Humility. From this perspective, he can adopt as his own the step taken by Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val. Having retired from the public business of the Church, the former Secretary of State of Saint Pius X had composed a beautiful “Litany of Humility”, which he recited every day after celebrating Mass:

  O Jesus, meek and humble of heart,

  Make my heart like yours.

  From self-will, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being loved, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being extolled, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being honored, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being praised, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being preferred to others, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being consulted, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire of being approved, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire to be understood, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the desire to be visited, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being despised, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of suffering rebukes, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being calumniated, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being forgotten, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being ridiculed, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being suspected, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being wronged, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being abandoned, deliver me, O Lord.

  From the fear of being refused, deliver me, O Lord.

  That others may be loved more than I,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That others may be esteemed more than I,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That others may be chosen and I set aside,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That others may be praised and I go unnoticed,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That others may be preferred to me in everything,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  That others may become holier than I,

  provided that I may become as holy as I should,

  Lord, grant me the grace to desire it.

  At being unknown and poor,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  At being deprived of the natural perfections of body and mind,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When people do not think of me,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they assign to me the meanest tasks,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they do not even deign to make use of me,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they never ask my opinion,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they leave me at the
lowest place,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they never compliment me,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  When they blame me in season and out of season,

  Lord, I want to rejoice.

  Blessed are those who suffer persecution for justice’ sake,

  For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Nicolas Diat

  Rome, September 2, 2016

  I

  SILENCE VERSUS THE WORLD’S NOISE

  The greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice. Spiritual conception happens when the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces. Let us turn now to the stillest event of all, stillest because it came from the remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion—from God.

  —Romano Guardini, The Lord

  NICOLAS DIAT: In the anthology Voix cartusienne, the Carthusian Dom Augustin Guillerand correctly writes that “solitude and silence are guests of the soul. The soul that possesses them carries them with it everywhere. The one that lacks them finds them nowhere. In order to re-enter silence, it is not enough to stop the movement of one’s lips and the movement of one’s thoughts. That is only being quiet. Being quiet is a condition for silence, but it is not silence. Silence is a word, silence is a thought. It is a word and a thought in which all words and all thoughts are concentrated.” How are we to understand this beautiful idea?

  ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH:

  1. There is one great question: how can man really be in the image of God? He must enter into silence.

  When he drapes himself in silence, as God himself dwells in a great silence, man is close to heaven, or, rather, he allows God to manifest himself in him.

  We encounter God only in the eternal silence in which he abides. Have you ever heard the voice of God as you hear mine?

  God’s voice is silent. Indeed, man, too, must seek to become silence. In speaking about Adam in paradise, Saint Augustine wrote: “Vivebat fruens Deo, ex quo bono erat bonus” (“He lived in the joy of God, and, by virtue of this good, he himself was good.”) By living with the silent God, and in him, we ourselves become silent. In his book I Want to See God, Father Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant Jésus writes:

  God speaks in silence, and silence alone seems able to express Him. For the spiritual person who has known the touch of God, silence and God seem to be identified. And so, to find God again, where would he go, if not to the most silent depths of his soul, into those regions that are so hidden that nothing can any longer disturb them?

  When he has reached there, he preserves with jealous care the silence that gives him God. He defends it against any agitation, even that of his own powers.

  2. At the heart of man there is an innate silence, for God abides in the innermost part of every person. God is silence, and this divine silence dwells in man. In God we are inseparably bound up with silence. The Church can affirm that mankind is the daughter of a silent God; for men are the sons of silence.

  3. God carries us, and we live with him at every moment by keeping silence. Nothing will make us discover God better than his silence inscribed in the center of our being. If we do not cultivate this silence, how can we find God? Man likes to travel, create, make great discoveries. But he remains outside of himself, far from God, who is silently in his soul. I want to recall how important it is to cultivate silence in order to be truly with God. Saint Paul, drawing on the Book of Deuteronomy, explains that we will not encounter God by crossing the seas, because he is in our heart:

  Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does [the law] say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom 10:6-9; Deut 30:12-14, 16)

  4. Through Sacred Scripture, when it is listened to and meditated upon in silence, divine graces are poured out on man. It is in faith, and not by traveling in distant lands or by crossing seas and continents, that we can find and contemplate God. Actually, it is through long hours of poring over Sacred Scripture, after resisting all the attacks of the Prince of this world, that we will reach God.

  Dom Augustin Guillerand is on the right track: what men possess in themselves, they find nowhere else. Unless silence dwells in man, and unless solitude is a state in which he allows himself to be shaped, the creature is deprived of God. There is no place on earth where God is more present than in the human heart. This heart truly is God’s abode, the temple of silence.

  5. No prophet ever encountered God without withdrawing into solitude and silence. Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist encountered God in the great silence of the desert. Today, too, monks seek God in solitude and silence. I am speaking, not just about a geographical solitude or movement, but about an interior state. It is not enough to be quiet, either. It is necessary to become silence.

  For, even before the desert, the solitude, and the silence, God is already in man. The true desert is within us, in our soul.

  Strengthened with this knowledge, we can understand how silence is indispensable if we are to find God. The Father waits for his children in their own hearts.

  6. It is necessary to leave our interior turmoil in order to find God. Despite the agitations, the busyness, the easy pleasures, God remains silently present. He is in us like a thought, a word, and a presence whose secret sources are buried in God himself, inaccessible to human inspection.

  Solitude is the best state in which to hear God’s silence. For someone who wants to find silence, solitude is the mountain that he must climb. If a person isolates himself by going away to a monastery, he comes first to seek silence. And yet, the goal of his search is within him. God’s silent presence already dwells in his heart. The silence that we pursue confusedly is found in our own hearts and reveals God to us.

  Alas, the worldly powers that seek to shape modern man systematically do away with silence.

  I am not afraid to assert that the false priests of modernity, who declare a sort of war on silence, have lost the battle. For we can remain silent in the midst of the biggest messes and most despicable commotion, in the midst of the racket and howling of those infernal machines that draw us into functionalism and activism by snatching us away from any transcendent dimension and from any interior life.

  For many mystics, the fruitfulness of silence and solitude is similar to that of the word pronounced at the creation of the world. How do you explain this great mystery?

  7. The word is not just a sound; it is a person and a presence. God is the eternal Word, the Logos. This is what Saint John of the Cross declares in his Spiritual Maxims when he writes: “The Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word He always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence must It be heard by the soul.” The Book of Wisdom already pointed out this same interpretation in regard to the way in which God intervened to deliver his chosen people from their captivity in Egypt. This unforgettable act took place during the night: “While gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne” (Wis 18:14-15). Later on, this verse would be understood by the Christian liturgical tradition as a prefiguration of the silent Incarnation of the Word in the crib in Bethlehem. The [contemporary French] hymn for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple also sings about this Coming: “Who among us can understand what begins here noiselessly, the offering of the grain as the first-fruits?” Saint John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, does not hesitate to add: “Therefore [the fact] that He was of us, an
d of our substance, and of the Virgin’s womb, is manifest from these things, and from others beside; but how, is not also manifest. Do not either thou then inquire; but receive what is revealed, and be not curious about what is kept secret.” Let us accept it in silence and faith.

  8. God achieves everything, acts in all circumstances, and brings about all our interior transformations. But he does it when we wait for him in recollection and silence.

  In silence, not in the turmoil and noise, God enters into the innermost depths of our being. Father Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus was right when he wrote in I Want to See God: “This divine law surprises us. It goes so much against our experience of the natural laws of the world. Here below, any profound transformation, any great external change produces a certain agitation and noise. The great river, for example, reaches the ocean only by the sounding onward rush of its water.” If we observe the great works, the most powerful acts, the most extraordinary and striking interior transformations that God carries out in man, we are forced to admit that he works in silence. Baptism brings about a marvelous creation in the soul of the infant or the adult who receives this sacrament in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The newly baptized person is immersed in the name of the Trinity; he is inserted into the Triune God. A new life is given to him, enabling him to perform the godly acts of the children of God. We heard the words of the priest: “I baptize you. . . ”; we saw the water flow on the infant’s forehead. Yet we perceived nothing of this immersion into the inner life of the Trinity, grace, and creation which requires nothing less than the personal, almighty action of God. God has uttered his Word in the soul in silence. In that same silent darkness, the subsequent developments of grace generally come.

  9. In June 2012, in a luminous lectio divina at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, Benedict XVI explained the reality and the deep meaning of baptism: