344. I had this wonderful, rich experience with Brother Vincent-Marie of the Resurrection, who belonged to the community of canons regular in Lagrasse. Stricken by multiple sclerosis, he gradually lost his faculties of speech and movement. Despite that painful situation, Brother Vincent remained serene, joyful, and patient. All our meetings unfolded in silence and prayer. God asked him to be an ongoing holocaust and a silent offering for the world’s salvation; next to my friend, I became a pupil, learning the mystery of suffering.
Watching Brother Vincent, confined to his sickbed, silently revealed to me that the most sublime expression of love is suffering. On the eve of his burial, while reading his personal journal, I discovered all the spiritual energy that nourished his interior life. Indeed, in those pages I found a very profound reflection: “I believe that suffering was granted by God to man in a great design of love and mercy. I believe that suffering is for the soul the great worker of redemption and sanctification.” Yes, suffering is a state of happiness and sanctification. Listening to the Brother, I thought I was reading Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who wrote: “I found happiness and joy on earth, but solely in suffering, for I’ve suffered very much here below.”
Brother Vincent offers us one final secret for coping with suffering and finding joy in it. I discovered it in his personal journal. He wrote: “Every day I shut myself into a threefold castle: the first is the most pure Heart of Mary. . . , against all the attacks of the Evil Spirit; the second is the Heart of Jesus, against all the attacks of the flesh; the third is the holy sepulcher, where I hide myself next to Jesus from the world.”
345. The language of suffering and silence contradicts the language of the world. Faced with pain, we see two diametrically opposite routes traced out: the noble way of silence and the stony rut of rebellion, in other words, the path of love of God and the path of love of self.
346. This pathological fear of suffering and silence is particularly acute in the West. On the other hand, African and Asian cultures manifest a remarkable acceptance of pain, sickness, and death, because the prospect of a better life in the next world is profoundly present in them.
What is the appropriate attitude toward a patient who is incurably ill?
347. When the illness becomes incurable, speech no longer matters much. It is necessary to be able to keep silence, to be able to caress the suffering person affectionately so as to convey to him the closeness, warmth, and compassion of God. It is enough to take his hand and to look at each other without saying anything. The tenderness of a look can bring God’s consolation and comfort. In the presence of a suffering sick person, it is not necessary to speak. It is necessary to be compassionate silently, to love, and to pray, with the assurance that the only language that is appropriate for love is prayer and silence.
348. The sick person is initiated into silence by his own state. He finds that he has made more progress than the well person in the mystery of God’s silence. A suffering person is in wordless expectation. But his heart throbs with hope and abandonment, which immerse him in God.
349. Sickness is an anticipation of the silence of eternity.
When facing death, what is true silence?
350. When God comes to take a person, two forms of silence set in: the silence of the living, who are petrified by the death, and the silence of the dead person, which causes us to enter into the mystery of Christian hope and true life.
The former are confronted with the mystery of an agitated, sad, painful, disconsolate silence. This silence marks their faces with anxiety, sadness, and the refusal of the death that comes to disturb a tranquil indifference.
351. Nowadays Western societies reject death, traumatized by the pain and grieving that accompany it. Modern man would like to be immortal. This denial of the great passage leads to a culture of death that permeates social relations as a whole. Postmodern civilization denies death, causes it, and paradoxically unceasingly exalts it. The assassination of God allows death to keep prowling all the time, because hope no longer dwells within the horizon of men.
352. When death is sidelined, the result is the detestation of its silence. New funeral customs display a false joy and an adulterated form of bereavement that are unwilling to let silence do the speaking. Western decadence has reached such an extent that it is no longer uncommon to hear applause and long speeches during funeral services. Mourning is expressed by tears, not by an artificial, uprooted joy. Did Christ not weep for his friend Lazarus when he had died and been buried for four days?
I do not want to fail to recall that death is a difficult time that causes natural confusion among the living. Likewise, tears are the manifestation of an authentic silence. I also know how difficult it is to accept the suddenness of the separation. Sometimes it is a part of our life that passes away. Death carries off segments of the story of the individuals who remain on earth.
353. The great question of death can be truly understood only in silence and prayer. How else can the silence of the departure be comprehended except by the silence of our heart and our lips?
354. Before the silence of death there is often the silence of sickness and suffering. There is only one way to meditate on the meaning of death, and it passes through interior silence.
Indeed, continuity of relations between the dead and the living exists only in silence. The inseparability between the world of life and the world of death is achieved in silence and in a relation that goes beyond bodies. Despite the physical disappearance of the body, our relations with our beloved dead are indestructible, real, and tangible, because their affection is deeply engraved on our hearts.
355. Death is the silence of mystery, the silence of God, and the silence of life.
How can Christians nourish their silence? The definitive answer is given by Christ on the Cross, where they can find a God who suffers and dies. But Christ’s victory is the source of hope and silence, so immense is God’s gift.
356. Church teaching about death does not seek first to console or to reassure the bereaved with soothing words. Following Christ, she intends to speak about the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. In Preface I for the Dead, we find this statement: “Life is changed not ended, and, when this earthly dwelling turns to dust, an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.” Faced with such a reality, only silence truly prevails.
357. Why seek to rebel against death? The rejection of death is a dead end. For, above and beyond the departure and the burial, death is a new birth. In confronting death, we are like infants; we do not know how to speak, but life matures and grows invisibly.
358. Death is comprehensible if, in silence, we direct toward Christ a look of faith: from Calvary, where a God with a lacerated, ruined body is brought to earth, to the tomb where death is overtaken after three days, men find the essence and the fragrance of divine silence.
359. Christianity allows mankind to have a simpler, more serene, and more silent view of death, far from the cries and tears of despair.
360. Death is a door, and we must agree to go through it noiselessly, because it opens in order to lead us to life. The Grim Reaper brings men back to their heavenly fatherland. This is the hope that demands all our prayers! We must desire to go through this door with serenity and faith.
For many people, unfortunately, death seems like an endless night with no tomorrow. And yet night brings valuable things that day does not even imagine. A man without faith believes in lights that he thinks are reliable and eternal. But while we are speculating about our future, saying: “I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (Lk 12:18-19), at the very moment when we are posing questions and making decisions, God extinguishes them. The roofs of our houses collapse on us, the lofty towers are undermined by ants, the walls crack and crumble, and the holiest buildings are reduced to ashes wh
ile the night watchman constructs a theory about their durability.
I am well aware that such language is absolutely incomprehensible and shocking for those who do not have faith. Materialistic man wants to make out of life one big party, a time to take advantage of all sorts of pleasures, a compulsive enjoyment. Then, as late as possible, death comes to stop this course and leads to the void. There is nothing left. These people move about like animals, without soul or hope. When the fateful day arrives, since the abyss is about to open up beneath their feet, it is just as well to falsify death in one painless moment. For the survivors, a celebration is still possible. . . . Death is transformed into a noisy, exhibitionistic spectacle, in soulless funeral parlors, in pagan crematoriums and morbid funeral urns. By means of new technologies, they are taking this profanation and disdain for the human body a step farther by liquefying it, as though to deny the divine destiny of man.
361. A man of faith must look to Christ in silence. The martyrs agree to die without making a sound because they know that death is a door. One’s demise is the door to life. I am thinking of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who gave his life to save his comrades and accepted death with immense simplicity. On February 17, 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and beaten violently because he refused to deny Jesus Christ, then transferred on May 28 to the camp in Auschwitz, with identification number 16670. Even in the darkest years of the invasion of Poland by Hitler, Maximilian Kolbe exhibited all the vigor of his courage and the depth of his faith. Making himself close to everyone, he felt capable of accomplishing anything for love of Jesus, who ceaselessly communicated his strength to him through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Maximilian Kolbe was not a man to compromise; he thought that truth could not be disguised “and that all that we can and must do is to seek it, and when we have found it, to serve it to the end. We must serve truth until death.” In July 1941, a man escaped from Block 14, where Father Kolbe was. In reprisal, the Nazis selected ten men and sentenced them to die by starvation.
Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to replace one of the ten prisoners, Franciszek Gajowniczek, the father of a family. The ten prisoners were locked up in an underground, dimly lit bunker. Hunger and thirst drove the doomed men insane within a few days, but with the help of prayer Maximilian managed to keep his companions calm so that piety prevailed in the midst of tragedy. After two weeks without food, only Father Kolbe, who had supported his companions and seen them all die, was still alive. He was finally executed on August 14 by an injection of phenol in the arm, and his body was burned in a crematorium furnace on August 15, 1941, the day of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
How can one find silence when confronted with the suffering of death? “Is the moment of death not the only moment of true silence in life?” The philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch answered this question in Penser la mort?: “Yes, but for someone who looks at the dying person. The one who is about to die is often in such a state that the words silence and solitude no longer have any meaning for him. The one who looks at him can picture this instant as the most extreme moment of silence in contrast to the existence that surrounds him. Although one can be supported, comforted, and helped throughout one’s life, the step of death itself, the moment of death, well, that has to be taken all alone.”
362. In order to respond to that statement, I would like to quote once again several lines by Father Samuel in Qui cherchait Théophane:
In his final days, Brother Théophane could hardly talk at all. I decided to recite the Creed, finishing it with several questions: “Do you believe this?” “Yes.” “Do you love our Lord?” “Yes.” “Do you love the Virgin Mary?” “Yes.” “Do you want to do God’s will?” “Yes!” These energetic yeses were whistled a bit, as in the Auvergnat dialect, because of a pronunciation difficulty that had just appeared. One day I was so touched, and at the same time amused, by these very simple, wholesome, sincere acts that I interrupted the prayer to make a jest, to which he answered in the same tone: “You are a saint!” “Yesss!” It seemed to us, during those final days, that his attention was intermittent. We wondered where to draw the line between free will and automatic responses. Brother Théophane in fact drifted from one to the other. His silence came as much from his recent difficulties in speaking as it did from a mixture of recollection and half-sleep. When I realized this, I always asked him: “Are you tired?” “No.” “Do you want to continue?” “Yes.” His adherence to God was therefore limited to a frank assent repeated two or three times against a background of well-established habits. Is that not the human dough of all human prayer?
363. Agony and death are always a great, profound sorrow. But an attitude of silence is the best Christian way of welcoming death. The Virgin Mary stood silently at the foot of her Son’s Cross.
The moment that opens the door to an encounter that will make us see God, as the testament of Job so vigorously asserted, is the most beautiful silence in earthly life. But it is nothing compared with the silence of heaven.
364. When the soul is detached from the body of the departing person, it rises in an incomparable silence. The great silence of death is the silence of the soul that travels toward another homeland: the land of eternal life.
It is necessary to be in unison with the soul-silence of the deceased. The great works of God always occur in silence. The moment when the body was united to the soul and the moment when that soul came apart from its carnal envelope are moments of silence, eminently divine moments.
365. All that is from God makes no noise. Nothing is sudden, everything is delicate, pure, and silent.
V
LIKE A VOICE CRYING OUT IN THE
DESERT: THE MEETING AT THE
GRANDE CHARTREUSE
In the withdrawal of monasteries and in the solitude of the cells, patiently and silently, the Carthusians weave the nuptial garment of the Church.
—Saint John Paul II, Message to the Prior of the Carthusian
Order for the ninth centenary of Saint Bruno’s death
Our principal endeavor and goal is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of cell. This is holy ground, a place where, as a man with his friend, the Lord and his servant often speak together; there is the faithful soul frequently united with the Word of God; there is the bride made one with her spouse; there is earth joined to heaven, the divine to the human. The journey, however, is long, and the way dry and barren, that must be traveled to attain the fount of water, the land of promise.
Therefore the dweller in cell should be diligently and carefully on his guard against contriving or accepting occasions for going out, other than those normally prescribed; rather, let him consider the cell as as necessary for his salvation and life, as water for fish and the sheepfold for sheep. For if he gets into the habit of going out of cell frequently and for trivial reasons it will quickly become hateful to him; as Augustine expressed it, “For lovers of this world, there is no harder work than not working.” On the other hand, the longer he lives in cell, the more gladly will he do so, as long as he occupies himself in it usefully and in an orderly manner, reading, writing, reciting psalms, praying, meditating, contemplating and working. Let him make a practice of resorting, from time to time, to a tranquil listening of the heart, that allows God to enter through all its doors and passages. In this way with God’s help, he will avoid the dangers that often lie in wait for the solitary; such as following too easy a path in cell and meriting to be numbered among the lukewarm.
The fruit that silence brings is known to him who has experienced it. In the early stages of our Carthusian life we may find silence a burden; however, if we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence itself something, that will draw us on to still greater silence. To attain this, our rule is not to speak to one another without the President’s permission.
Love for our brothers should show itself firstly in respect for their solitude; should we have permission to speak about some matter, let us do
so as briefly as possible.
Those who neither are, nor aspire to becoming, members of our Order are not to be allowed to stay in our cells.
Each year for eight days we devote ourselves with greater zeal to the quiet of cell and recollection. Fittingly, our custom is to do this on the anniversary of our Profession.
God has led us into solitude to speak to our heart. Let our heart then be a living altar from which there constantly ascends before God pure prayer, with which all our acts should be imbued.
—Statutes of the Carthusian Order, Book I, Chapter 4, “The Keeping of Cell and Silence”
God has led his servant into solitude to speak to his heart; but he alone who listens in silence hears the whisper of the gentle breeze that reveals the presence of the Lord. In the early stages of our Carthusian life, we may find silence a toilsome burden; however, if we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence itself something that will draw us on to still greater silence.
On this account, the brothers may not speak indiscriminately of what they wish, or with whom they wish, or for as long as they wish; with few words and with quiet voice, they may speak about matters affecting their work; but apart from this, they may not speak without permission either to monks or to strangers.
Since, therefore, the observance of silence is of vital importance in the life of a brother, this rule must be kept with great care. However, in doubtful cases not foreseen by the law, let each one prudently judge according to conscience and the needs of the moment, whether, and to what extent, it is lawful to speak.
Devotion to the Spirit dwelling within them, and love for their brothers, both require that, when it is lawful to speak they should weigh their words well and be watchful of the extent to which they speak; for a long and uselessly protracted conversation is thought to grieve the Holy Spirit more and cause more dissipation than a few words, that are indeed against the rule, but are quickly cut short. Often a conversation, that was useful in the beginning, soon becomes useless and, finally, worthy of blame.
The Power of Silence Page 21
