Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  Each of these dimensions of silence—internal and social—determines how we go through life and whether or not we do it well.

  The silence of the heart, that deep-down awareness of what we’re thinking and why, is our monk’s cell. It’s in that place of total honesty where we come to realize who we ourselves really are. We learn there what we fear and what we are resisting. We hear there the voices we so commonly block out with noise that seduce us to give in to ourselves. It’s in silence that we hear the sounds of our better angels calling us to rise above our lesser selves. It’s in silence that we arm-wrestle our picayune selves to the ground of truth.

  Silent reflection throws us back upon ourselves, exposes our wounds, and challenges us to authenticity. Silence is not an event—not a confession, not a miracle. Silence is a process that transforms us from an etching of our potential to the fullness of ourselves. Silence frees us from our public selves and steeps us in our spiritual selves so that we have more to give to the rest of our world in the future.

  Silence can, of course, become our private game of escapism. We can begin to substitute feeling holy for being holy. We can withdraw from the real world and call withdrawal a spiritual life. We can use silence to avoid the world, its problems, and our responsibility to them. We can simply dissociate from the people around us and tell ourselves that we have done a holy thing. But if we do, we are misusing silence, debasing its spiritual value, and making ourselves our own god, whom we go inside ourselves to worship.

  The ninth step of humility is clear: Silence is not for its own sake. The silence we seek is the silence that does not sin the sin of eternal agitation. It is a silence meant to help us—once healed of our anger, finally harmonious and serene—see that the world around us is a graceful and peaceful place.

  It is only this kind of silence, calmed and calming, that knows how to listen to others rather than freeze them out in tacit anger or ignore them in the interests of our own self-protection. Silence can become such a holy way of being unholy at our very base.

  It is only by listening that we get to really know the other as well as ourselves. The attention we give to others by showing interest in their interests or fears or preoccupations is the beginning of human community. It requires us to actually attend to another rather than simply use the encounter as an excuse to talk about ourselves alone. It is the holiest of human acts.

  The understanding that we bring to others comes out of the understanding of ourselves that our own self-reflection has earned us. Only when we know ourselves—our motives, our struggles, our fears—can we reach out to the other without judgment, with care.

  It’s by listening to the pain and fear of the other that we prove the compassion we like to think we have. It is in the genuine care we bring to the other out of the honesty of the self that wisdom emerges. Both ours and theirs.

  In silent listening, one soul is able to meet another without the noise of a garrulous and superficial world to drown out what is trying to be said. It is silence that leads us both to honesty and to insight unalloyed. Then we learn in a whole new way how listening is a dimension of silence and silence is the only ground from which real listening can possibly spring.

  Finally, it is silence that teaches us, as the ninth step of humility insists, that there are simply some times when silence is the only real answer that counts.

  As the Rule reads, “In a flood of words you will not avoid sinning” (Prov. 10:19). Too often so-called conversations or discussions become arguments and deteriorate into pure folly. No one really gets heard and nothing is resolved.

  When comments are made out of anger or spite, meant only to hurt or to bait another person, when no real conversation or genuine, heartfelt communication is being attempted, silence is the only possible answer.

  When what I say will only escalate someone else’s anger or when what they say is only meant to goad mine, holy silence saves the day and the soul of the relationship.

  When what is being said is said with malice, no matter how “true” it may be on one level, truth has not failed us, we have failed truth. When nothing is changing in the attitude or openness of either party, it’s time for self-reflection. What is it in me that has brought this encounter to this point? And, more important, I must discover in silence what it is in me that is needed now to put it back together again.

  Silence is good when it is teaching me about me and urging me on to become even more of the best of myself. Silence is good when I am listening to the other intently and bringing balm and strength to what could otherwise become disheartenment and demoralization. Silence is good when I refuse to sin with my tongue. And silence is always good when it is the monk’s cell to which I go to hear the voice in me that is divine, that is calling me to holiness.

  Silence grows me and frees me. It saves me from arrogance and disdain for others by being the place where I go to discover myself. It enables me to become the ear of God on earth, listening for pain and healing it, listening for my own smallness and rising above it, listening for the voice of God urging me always on.

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  It was barely dawn. The sun was coming up over a sea rolling with whitecaps—intense but not angry. Down at the edge of the water, she was sitting with her back to me, hands up, head tilted into the light. It was a profile of profound peace and eternal centeredness. It filled her with a kind of stolid serenity. And, it raised my heart and mind to God as well.

  Silence does that. It centers and calms the entire world.

  The spiritual implications of the ninth step of humility go deep in the human soul. They bring to consciousness the underlying meaning of the spiritual life. Spirituality is not about feeling good about ourselves. It’s about doing good wherever we are. It’s about bringing good to everyone. It’s about becoming the good we seek. It’s about fashioning our souls in the kind of silence that enables the whole world to feel safe in our calm and quiet presence.

  The ninth step of humility reminds me that the missing spiritual resource in modern society is an appreciation of the role of silence in life. We all live overwhelmed by noise. The human experience of silence gets slimmer by the day. Boats plow our waterways with boom boxes on their bows. Cars squeal past our homes with windows down and belching sound far into the night. Sound sanctuaries are few and far between in a world of canned music, the ubiquitous television, horns and whistles, and airport runways in the middle of the countryside. And all the while, we forget that the spiritual life, the reflective life, starts in silence and grows in silence and comes to fullness in the self that listens to silence.

  Most of all, we forget, if we have ever known, that silence is the bridge to humility. To be able to be silent when what we want to do is to erupt into full voice and full force with everyone around us is the essence of humility. Then the world becomes a placid, saner place because we have been there, attentively but quietly.

  Humility invites the world into our thoughts and nourishes our understanding with the ideas the rest of the human race brings to us. The humble person does not pontificate at the expense of everyone else who has something to say but nowhere to say it. In those situations, silence is the great equalizer, the forerunner of a genuine democracy.

  Humility makes the powerful accessible to the powerless. There is no reason to fear the powerful who are dedicated to hearing those who seek to speak to them. Nor is there any reason for revolt because our ideas—which are all we really have to give—have not been made welcome.

  In an interesting twist, silence—the willingness to hear—itself empowers the powerless; it levels the playing fields of the world. It raises up the lowly just as Scripture says and gives them both stage and audience.

  Indeed, silence is the great teacher of us all. In the silence within us, we hear our own pain. We plow our own growth. Most certain of all, we bring new hope to those around us. Now, perhaps, they can feel more secure in their own futures because they se
e at long last that the powerful are as dedicated to the communal voice as they are to their own.

  Our moments in reflective silence expose the adversaries within to ourselves so that we might come to terms with them. It makes us known to ourselves so that we might understand the struggles and needs of others better. The fact is that people resist silence and so run from it as if it were a scourge. And yet, it is only by nourishing serenity within us that we can possibly survive the noise around us, which muddles our minds and stirs our blood to the point of inanity.

  It is in the ability to be self-reflective that we can come to think our way through the impulses that drive us to a more tender, more gentle, more meaningful way to live.

  Without doubt, silence gives us the power to respond thoughtfully rather than foolishly, maturely rather than out of furor run amok. It teaches us to stop focusing on our own ideas and concerns and attend to the concerns of our wider and more basic purpose on earth.

  It’s by personal reflection and by listening to the ideas of others that, in the end, we begin to grow to full stature. It’s in silence and listening to others that we learn self-control, kindness, and compassion. None of these ideas come packaged. They come only through experience: the experience of my own struggles and the awareness of the soul-stretching experiences of others.

  We learn in silence that our struggles are not either the center or the fulcrum of the world. They are simply the compass point at which we come to understand the strife and trials of others and our own call to alleviate them.

  Ironically enough, it is silence—self-reflection and listening—that makes a person an honest citizen of the world. Once we acknowledge our own demons, we become a genuine member of the human community. We can stop lying to ourselves now about who we really are. We can stop plunging headlong into the fabricated cacophony of a world trying to hide from itself. We can even stop trying to hide from ourselves, because, having found ourselves, we no longer need to go on attempting to be someone else.

  Finally, we know that talk without thought is not only useless but destructive of relationships, of truth, of possibility, of the very center of our souls. The demon of the ever-chattering self makes me deaf to the voice of God within me.

  The ninth step of humility frees us from making a shrine to ourselves. It connects us. It refuses to allow us to cut ourselves off from the part of creation we were born to bless with our openness. It is through a listening silence that we ourselves gain wisdom from the words and ideas of others.

  Silence frees us to learn, to become, to reflect, to respond, and to repent. It is the degree of humility that opens us to the entire world.

  The tenth step of humility is that we “are not given to ready laughter, for it is written, ‘Only fools raise their voices in laughter’ (Sir. 21:23).”

  What is the challenge here?

  Of all the steps of humility with which I found myself faced in the early days of my religious life, not one had as much effect on me as this one. This directive against laughing I simply could not accept. Everything in me rebelled at the thought of being at the mercy of a bloodless, humorless existence all the rest of my life—and that in the name of holiness.

  I did my best to make up excuses for it in my mind, trying to hang on, waiting for someone, anyone, to declare it officially null and void or at least to modify it. But no explanation ever came. We just read it year after year, without comment, without edits.

  When I look back now, that in itself was the only saving dimension of it. No one talked about this one: not in the books, not in religion class, nowhere. Everyone simply ignored it. And, truth was, the community itself was a very funny place.

  There was a lot of laughter to be gotten in a monastery just watching one character after another doing very serious things in very hilarious ways. Sister Hildegund, for instance, was stone-deaf. Or so she said. She went shouting through the basement of the monastery, grumbling to herself, totally unaware of how loud she was being in a house committed to silence. Thundering along the stone passageway, she was giving orders to anyone and everyone in sight who might listen. But no matter whether they listened or not, she just disappeared into the rest of the cavern, grumbling about them instead.

  “Who’s supposed to feed the cat?” she shouted at the novices one day. “She’s starving.” I don’t think so, I said to myself. She’s the biggest cat in town. “You jackrabbits!” she said to every novice within earshot. “Don’t you know a hungry cat when you hear one? Just listen to her crying!” So much for being stone-deaf! Of course we laughed. And so did every professed sister in earshot.

  Or there was the time when a professed sister, one of the dignified and proper kind, bowed over in chapel a bit too enthusiastically. As the community bowed and the prioress intoned the last psalm, we heard something crash on the hard tiled floor. The novices who sat in the front pews watched in horror as a bright new set of false teeth went swirling down the polished middle aisle straight and fast as an ice hockey puck. The entire community stopped praying in midair. Then, in a silence that echoed from wall to wall, the community coughed itself out of chapel, laughing all the way. And no one said a word. No corrections were given. No imperfections spoken during Chapter of Faults that week. Nothing at all. Clearly, this step of humility had fallen off the books somewhere.

  Or there was the night five fire trucks showed up in the community yard after midnight, sirens blaring, ladders being cracked open, thousand-watt lights moving across the building searching every nook and cranny of the building’s face, nuns running madly down the halls, trying to figure out what kind of national attack had hit the sleepy neighborhood of Ninth Street. Until a window opened on the third floor and the prioress leaned out through the wooden shutters, dressing gown flowing and head scarf askew. She was waving madly at every fireman in sight. “No, no, no!” she hollered through the roar of the sirens. “We’re not on fire. I just put red lights on the windowsills to scare away the pigeons!” But by that time, everyone else on the block was awake, too. All of them laughing.

  We were a community that knew how to have a good time. We had big German pretzel sandwiches on feast days and sing-alongs on bus trips. We sat around at night and told funny stories from our classroom experiences during the day. We laughed for years about the first grader who stood up straight after he got his polio shot, pointed at his rolled-up-shirtsleeved arm, and said to his nun-teacher, “Just wait till the parents hear about this!”

  We reveled in telling public jokes about our jubilarians, older sisters celebrating milestone anniversaries, at the community dinner every year. And, to tell you the truth, at their memory services after they died, too.

  What’s more, to this day, six decades after I entered this community, we gather almost every year to hear one of our members do a stand-up comedy routine on the daily foibles of the group. The laughter can be heard halfway into town.

  No, we were not—are not—a dour group.

  So what was going on? Was this tenth step of humility real or not? And if it had been expunged from the book, why didn’t anyone simply say so? And if not, why not?

  For someone like me, who collects stories and tells them with relish, the question was an important one. Was this really a community I could be myself in, in fact, be happy in? Or, better yet, was this spirituality emotionally well balanced?

  And furthermore, what did laughter, legal or not, have to do with humility?

  I spent a good deal of time just trying to figure out why laughter would be considered a threat to the spiritual life. Was spirituality the suppression of life rather than the fulfillment of life, as I had always thought it would be? The question deserves an answer in a world on the brink of grim at all times.

  “Only fools raise their voices in laughter,” the Rule quotes from Sirach. It was a scriptural prescription, a note, and therefore a weighty one. So, it seems, this step of humility has something to do with fools, with people who are not sharp-witted enough or cultured enough to
do differently. This was, at least, the beginning of an answer.

  Clearly this step has as much to do with a certain kind of person as it does with a certain kind of action. It’s about the foolish, about people who stumble through life, making one hapless mistake after another. The thought is intriguing: Raising our voices in laughter, then, has something to do with making the wrong choices in life. And then thinking it’s funny. Like: Drunk is funny; dense about what we should be smart about is funny; doltish is funny. I was beginning to understand. Not to raise our voices in laughter as fools do had to be warning us not to think that bad decisions are meaningless, that bad judgments are amusing to anyone.

  I began to understand that there are some things in life that must be taken seriously at all times.

  The light dawned: The tenth step of humility means to free us from going through life uncaringly, thinking that all of life is one big joke. Because if we do, in the end the joke’s on us. Only those who are too proud to think they can make a mistake or have yet to pay for the consequences of it would think that doing nothing worthwhile is laughable.

  What is the underlying issue?

  The Novice Director did not like laughter at all and reserved a very special frown for it. The Scholastic Director, on the other hand, loved a good story but never, ever, laughed out loud. Never, ever, made a sound, however surprising or raucous the occasion. She just stood there, eyes twinkling, mouth open in silent pantomime of good humor and hearty response. A kind of Santa Claus ho-ho-ho without a voice box.

  And so the question lingered and became even more irksome as the years went by: Why, in so profound a document as a Rule for monastic communities written in the sixth century, had laughter occupied such a prominent place in the very cornerstone chapter of its spirituality? And, frankly, how psychologically healthy could a person—or a community—be without laughter?