87. The more man advances in the mystery of God, the more he loses speech. Man is enveloped in a power of love, and he becomes mute from astonishment and wonder. Before God, we disappear, snapped up by the greatest silence.
88. The wisdom of God has generated in every person a great love that nourishes the little silence of the human heart. Astonishment at the divine silence closes our mouth, like a celebrant who, performing his priestly duties before God, burns incense before the divine presence and adores in silence. Nothing in the world is more important than the silence of God. No human noises, even the very sweet sound of the Gospel, can express the magnificent silence of God.
89. In the presence of God, in the presence of his silence, everything disappears; the Apostles, even the evangelists are nothing compared to the silence of heaven. The Gospel is the most beautiful sound on earth, but it remains a mere sound, however sublime and important it may be, when contrasted with the great silence of the Eternal One.
90. In his Incarnation, Christ assumed human limitations. Face to face with God’s silence, we are confronted with absolute love. And this great silence also explains the freedom left to man. God’s only power is to love silently. He is incapable of any oppressive force. God is love, and love cannot compel, force, or oppress in order to be loved in return.
Saint Augustine and Saint John of the Cross went through the desert experience, whether physical or interior. They touched one little part of the great silence of God, and they were as though absorbed, engulfed in the divine silence and the furnace of his love.
91. In the manuscripts of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus we find this reflection: “If fire and iron had the use of reason, and if the latter said to the other, ‘Draw me,’ would it not prove that it desires to be identified with the fire in such a way that the fire penetrate and drink it up with its burning substance and seem to become one with it?” It is the same for someone who approaches the silence of God. He himself becomes silence.
92. Great spiritual men are often speechless and spend their days in silence. They live in the revelation of the mystery. They live in what takes them out of themselves so as to make them enter into the mystery of God.
There is also what we could call the asceticism of silence. In his Ascetical Homilies, Isaac the Syrian wrote: “After a time, a certain sweetness is born in the heart from the practice of this labor [the asceticism of silence], and it leads the body by force to persevere in stillness. A multitude of tears is born to us in this discipline through a wonderful divine vision of something that the heart distinctly perceives, sometimes with pain, sometimes with amazement. For the heart humbles herself and becomes like a tiny babe, and as soon as she begins to pray, tears flow forth in advance of her prayer.”
93. The asceticism of silence reaches its most perfect degree in the life of those who have tasted this encounter with God through the contemplation of his face. This is a form of nakedness and poverty. But one gains access to true glory only at this price. The asceticism of silence allows a person to enter into the mystery of God by becoming little, like a child.
In divine silence there are no words but tears, because man is touched at the deepest part of his soul, in the region of his being where God is seated; his silence is an immensity that demands an initially painful asceticism involving a Paschal aspect, an aspect of “Good Friday”. It causes tears to run down our faces. But very quickly we experience the fact that the simplicity of asceticism generates purity, delight, and the joy of contemplation.
94. Silence strips man and makes him like a child: pure but frail, innocent, and without provisions. Silence shapes us as the blacksmith works metal.
95. Silence, man’s effort, runs alongside hope, the theological virtue. In reality, the divine power of the theological virtue lifts and directs the human and ascetical impact of silence. Then a second moral virtue appears: fortitude. Its function is to remove the obstacle that prevents the will from obeying reason. Fortitude is active and takes the offensive. The thing is to apply oneself to cultivating this virtue, which drives back all that could prevent man from living in dependence on God. Silence and hope are two conditions allowing fortitude to find its nourishment.
Through this asceticism of silence, how can we not understand and appreciate better the lights offered by these different Bible verses? “When words are many, transgression is not lacking” (Prov 10:19). “He who guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov 13:3). “Whoever uses too many words will be loathed” (Sir 20:8). “I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter” (Mt 12:36). “Make balances and scales for your words, and make a door and a bolt for your mouth. Beware lest you err with your tongue, lest you fall before him who lies in wait” (Sir 28:25-26).
96. The asceticism of silence is a necessary medicine: one that is sometimes painful but effective. Through silence, we leave evil behind in exchange for good. Noise has no moderation, like a ship without a captain on a raging sea, whereas silence is a paradise, like a limitless ocean. Silence is also a great rudder that can lead to a safe port. To choose silence is to choose what is extraordinary. The man who loves silence has the opportunity to conduct his life wisely and effectively.
97. In his book Silence cartusien, Dom Augustin Guillerand writes: “The suffering of silence can also be God’s hallmark on a soul.” Silence is a sweet, violent seizure by God. The absence of speech, austerity, poverty: this is the asceticism of silence, the one that brings us back to the purity of the just.
Bernard Toustrate wrote in the Forum Catholique, summarizing one degree of Sister Marie-Aimée’s “twelve degrees of silence” [Les Douze degrés du silence]: “If the tongue is mute, if the senses are calm, if the imagination, memory and creatures keep quiet and form a solitude, if not throughout the soul, then at least in the innermost part of it, then the heart will make only a few noises. Silence of one’s likes and dislikes, silence of desires insofar as they are too intense, silence of zeal insofar as it is indiscreet; silence of fervor insofar as it is exaggerated; silence to the point of sighing. . . . Silence of love insofar as it is fanatical. The silence of love is love in silence. . . . It is silence in the presence of God, beauty, goodness, perfection! A silence that has nothing constrained or forced; nor does this silence harm tenderness, the vigor of this love, any more than the admission of faults harms the silence of humility or the beating of an angel’s wings that the prophet speaks about harms the silence of his obedience, or the fiat harms the silence of Gethsemane, or the eternal Sanctus harms the silence of the seraphim.” How, then, can we define the silence of love?
98. Silence is the prerequisite for love, and it leads to love. Love is expressed fully only by renouncing speech, noise, excitement, and exaltation. Its highest expression occurs in a death that is silent and totally offered up, for there is no greater proof of love than to give your life for those whom you love (Jn 15:13). The silence of love is the outcome and point of arrival of someone who has given priority to silence in his life. It comes like a beautiful reward when man has managed to silence the dislikes, passions, and furors of his heart.
99. The love that says nothing and asks for nothing leads to the greatest love, the silent love of God. The silence of love is the perfect silence in the presence of God that sums up all goodness, all beauty, and all perfection.
100. Silent love can grow only in humility. There is a fundamental connection between humility and silent love. This agreement is significant and can be seen in God. The Father in whom we believe is infinitely humble, silent, devoid of all concern about prestige. Saint Paul writes—does he not?—to the Philippians: “Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cro
ss” (Phil 2:5-8). On the Cross, God was “like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth” (Is 53:7). Love is always humble, silent, contemplative, and on its knees before the beloved. Jesus illustrates this reality when we see him, on Holy Thursday, on his knees, washing the feet of his Apostles. The washing of their feet is a revelation, an unveiling of what God is. He is love: humble, priestly, sacrificial love; and God’s humility is the very depth of God.
101. The silence of love resembles the sounds of the angels’ wings when they carry out God’s commands. This silence is a love that obeys God’s own silence. The silence of love corresponds to a completion: the meeting of two silences, the human silence and the silence of God, that are walking along together. Gethsemane and Christ’s Calvary represent the most beautiful union of these two silences.
102. In Ecclesiastes we find some extraordinary verses:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace. (Eccles 3:1-8)
The silence of love comes from the silence that has been able to surpass all these stages so as to render an account to the silence of God.
In a letter to his friend Raoul le Verd, provost of the cathedral chapter in Rheims, Saint Bruno declared: “What benefits and divine exaltation the silence and solitude of the desert hold in store for those who love it, only those who have experienced it can know.” What is the real connection between solitude and the silence of the desert?
103. In my thirst to see God and to hear him, I often happened to experience the solitude and the silence of the desert. When I was Archbishop of Conakry, I often isolated myself in a desert place, bathing in solitude and silence. Of course there was vegetation all around me. I heard the birds chirping. But I had created for myself an interior desert, without water or food. There was no human presence. I lived in fasting and prayer, nourished only by the Eucharist and the Word of God.
The desert is the place of hunger, thirst, and the spiritual combat. It is vitally important to withdraw to the desert in order to combat the dictatorship of a world filled with idols that gorge themselves on technology and material goods, a world dominated and manipulated by the media, a world that flees God by taking refuge in noise. It is necessary to help this modern world to have the experience of the desert. There, we get some distance from everyday events. We can flee the noise and the superficiality. The desert is the place of the Absolute, the place of freedom. It is no accident that the desert is the place where monotheism was born. The desert is monotheistic; it preserves us from the multiplicity of idols that men make for themselves. In this sense, the desert is the domain of grace. Far from his preoccupations, man encounters there his Creator and his God.
104. Great things begin in the desert, in silence, in poverty, in abandonment. Look at Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself. The desert is where God leads us in order to speak to us in a heart-to-heart conversation (cf. Hos 2:16-23). But the desert is not only the place where men can experience the physical test of hunger, thirst, and total destitution. It is also the land of temptation, where Satan’s power is manifested. The devil often leads us there to hold out to us the prospect of all the world’s splendors and to persuade us that we would be wrong to give them up. By going into the desert, Jesus exposed himself to Satan’s seductive power and firmly opposed it, thus prolonging the event of his baptism and his Incarnation. He is not content to descend into the deep waters of the Jordan. Christ descends also to the very depths of human misery, to the regions of broken hearts and ruined relationships, to the most depraved carnal dictatorships and the desolate places of a world marred by sin. The desert teaches us to fight against evil and all our evil inclinations so as to regain our dignity as children of God. It is impossible to enter into the mystery of God without entering into the solitude and silence of our interior desert.
105. All the prophets went off to the desert to meet God. The experience of God is inseparable from the experience of the desert.
106. Saint John the Baptist himself spent thirty years in the desert: “And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel” (Lk 1:80). John the Baptist built his relationship with God in the place of the greatest silence. The desert leads to silence, and silence draws a person into the most profound intimacy of God.
It is inevitable that the contemplative who has perceived God in this tranquil night of the interior and exterior desert should aspire not only to the most recollected cloisters but to remote, austere hermitages. These are forceful truths that are based on experiences of undeniable validity. But does one absolutely have to live in the desert or in a monastery in order to become a contemplative?
107. God opens up for everyone, right in the middle of the world and in ordinary life, paths toward a more radical life of contemplation and sanctity. As Father Marie-Eugène wrote in I Want to See God:
Very numerous are the spiritual persons for whom life in solitude can be only an unrealizable dream. This one is married, has charge of a family; consequently his duties impose on him an absorbing daily task in the midst of the tumult of the world. Another has a vocation to the exterior apostolate and is engaged in the multiplicity of good works that his zeal has created, or at least must carry on. There was a time when they might have hesitated between the solitary life and that which is now theirs. But the time is no longer. Moreover, they made their choice, acting in obedience to the light of their vocation. They are taken up with obligations from which they cannot withdraw, and that God requires them to fulfil faithfully.
We must ask, then, if apostolic activity—necessary for the extension of the kingdom of God—and accomplishment of the most sacred duties of family life are incompatible with the demands of contemplation and of a very elevated spiritual life. There are many souls who are thirsty for God and who feel their desires sharpening in the excessive activity to which the most authentic of their duties bind them. Could they be condemned never to arrive at the divine plenitude for which they long, because God has taken them away from the solitude of the desert? We cannot think so; for it is the same Wisdom who imposes on them these external duties and who calls every one to the Source of living water. Divine Wisdom is one and consistent in His calls and requirements. “Spirit of the power of God,” strong and sweet, Wisdom makes play of obstacles to pour out graces into holy souls throughout the ages, and make of them friends of God and prophets.
108. If the solitude of the desert were absolutely necessary for the development of contemplation, we would have to conclude that all who cannot go there and those who could not bear it are incapable of attaining sanctity, which would be reserved for rare, privileged souls. The examples of Saint Faustina Kowalska, Saint John Bosco, Saint Josemaría Escrivà de Balaguer, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and Saint John Paul II show that all are called to contemplation, perfect love, and holiness. It is up to each individual to place himself at the disposal of the silent God who awaits us in the deep desert of our heart by avoiding din and turmoil.
In his Oeuvres spirituelles [Spiritual works], Father Jérôme declared: “How beneficial, therefore, are those who, by the weight of their silence, play the role of the dike and the
breakwaters and stop all the turmoil that comes from within or without by putting themselves in the way. Thanks to them, the lake always remains calm; the ships do not break their moorings; the hulls do not collide.”
109. The choice of silence is therefore a gift for humanity. The men and women who enter into the silence offer themselves as a holocaust for their brethren. The exterior world is like an overflowing river running down a slope and threatening to smash everything in its path. In order to control this force, it is necessary to build dikes. And silence is this powerful dike that controls the tumultuous waters of the world and protects from noises and distractions of all sorts. Silence is a dam that restores a kind of dignity to mankind. The monasteries and the spiritual masters are dikes that protect humanity from the threats that weigh upon it. How necessary it is for people to imitate them so as to make silence an effective dam!
110. Persons who live in noise are like dust swept along by the wind. They are slaves of a turmoil that destroys their relationships with God. On the other hand, those who love silence and solitude walk step by step toward God; they know how to break the vicious circles of noise, like animal tamers who manage to calm roaring lions.
Saint Cyprian of Carthage writes in his Epistle to Donatus:
While I was still lying in darkness and gloomy night, wavering hither and thither, tossed about on the foam of this boastful age, and uncertain of my wandering steps, knowing nothing of my real life, and remote from truth and light, I used to regard it as a difficult matter, and especially as difficult in respect of my character at that time, that a man should be capable of being born again—a truth which the divine mercy had announced for my salvation—and that a man quickened to a new life in the laver of saving water should be able to put off what he had previously been; and, although retaining all his bodily structure, should be himself changed in heart and soul. “How,” said I, “is such a conversion possible. . .?”. . .
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