But Job cannot understand God’s designs because the essential key, eternal life, has not yet been granted. The worst things have an end when we have gone over to the side of the kingdom of God. Look at the migrants: they are ready to face extreme dangers in the faint hope of finding a better life in Europe for a few years. But God our Father is preparing us for an infinitely better life without limits. What man lacks is the ability to imagine eternity, unending fullness granted through total communion with God, the land where the justice that the prophets attempted to describe will take shape.
God’s silence cannot be understood without the perspective of eternal life. God’s time is different from ours; for him, “a thousand years [are] as one day” (2 Pet 3:8). He lets us experience trials for a little while before saving us for a whole lifetime. Who would dare to complain about a surgeon who, in the two hours of a painful operation, cured a sick person for the rest of his life? His office would be swamped with calls! Before entering Carmel, Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus had read Father Arminjon’s conferences on eternal life. One remark had struck her; the priest said that when the soul had departed from this life, the Lord would say to her: “My turn now!” This means: “During your earthly life, you gave me all you could by way of love, and now it is my turn to give, infinitely and for all eternity.” Jesus had said: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk 10:29-30).
We must understand in the same way God’s silence, which has no definitive meaning. He keeps quiet for a few hours while leaving the world in our hands. But the day will come when he will “make all things new” (Rev 21:5).
God can draw the greatest good from evil itself. Everything God permits has a meaning. To the mystic Julian of Norwich, who liked to talk about God’s courtesy, affability, simplicity, and modesty and who one night had fifteen visions on which she meditated for the rest of her life, Jesus had “showed me that Adam’s sin was the greatest harm that ever was done, or ever shall be, until the end of the world”. He then added this extraordinary remark: “Since I have turned the greatest possible harm into good, it is my will that you should know from this that I shall turn all lesser evil into good.” In order to console her, he told her: “I shall make well all that is not well and you shall see it.” The recluse concluded: “[It was] as if [our Lord] said: ‘Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.’ ”
Finally, we are a little like Job. We know now that eternal life exists, but we have no experience of it. So we continue to stumble over the evil of this earth. With Pascal, we must place a bet on eternity. Jesus did not say very much that allows us to imagine eternal life, but we can be certain about one thing: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (Phil 4:8); and also whatever is beautiful: nothing of that will be destroyed; on the contrary, all will be accomplished so as to attain it fullness.
ROBERT SARAH: We are often revolted by unbearable events. God seems to sleep and not to defend his weakest children. He has his way of caring for the poor that we cannot understand. God wants this suffering to contribute to the salvation of the world like the death of Christ himself. In reality, a world without God is a very cruel world that sheds rivers of blood; its barbarity is repeated under all skies and in every historical era.
Let us remember Auschwitz. Inside the concentration camp, there was a horrible prison, the famous starvation bunker designed for a slow, cynical death. There, in an underground cell, Saint Maximilian Kolbe died after a long and terrible agony. All around him there was nothing but torture, barbarity, suffering, and misery. Outside there was a yard where some twenty thousand men were assassinated; beside it, the “hospital” where they conducted vivisection on human beings and, at the end of an avenue, the crematorium. However, in Father Maximilian Kolbe’s heart, joy reigned, along with the peace that Christ had promised to give to his disciples and to those who follow his example in dying on the Cross, like him, so that others might live. In similar circumstances, Saint Thomas More, who was imprisoned and then executed, prayed in the Tower of London for the grace “of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all, to set the loss at naught, for the winning of Christ.”
I could look the same way at the murder of the seven monks in Tibhirine, Algeria, in 1996. Their sole vocation was prayer and the service of God and of their brothers. All these deaths participate in the death of Christ for the salvation of the world.
There are many today who are enduring a non-bloody martyrdom while trying to live out their faith in a world that is increasingly atheistic, hedonistic, and indifferent or even hostile to God. We must not fear the world’s opposition; this growing hatred should instead gladden us. This is what Jesus had promised: “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know him who sent me” (Jn 15:20-21). When the Christian faith is persecuted, it becomes stronger.
Certainly, we will always be surprised by God’s choices. Man cannot immediately grasp the good that God intends for him while he is going through the most horrible trial.
Only a faith perspective can enable us to continue to advance toward God. Who knows whether God might give, at the moment of his choosing, a magnificent springtime to the Christians of the Near East? Our human eyes are too feeble and sick to understand heaven’s economy.
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: I would simply like to recall a story. One issue of the magazine Cahiers sur l’Oraison [Notebooks on prayer] reports that before leaving for the gas chamber, a Jew wrote on a slip of paper: “Lord, remember also the men of ill will, but do not remember then their cruelties. Remember the fruits that we have borne because of what they did. And grant, Lord, that the fruits that we have borne may one day be their redemption.”
We should meditate on the grandeur of this message, which shows that the Holy Spirit was at work in the horror of the concentration camps. In the Book of Daniel, God does not prevent the three young men from being thrown into the furnace, but he protects them because the angel of the Lord goes down into it with them. This story is symbolic. God does not spare us the trial, but as he tells us in Psalm 91:15-16: “I will be with him in trouble, I will rescue him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him, and show him my salvation.”
ROBERT SARAH: It is urgent for the modern world to regain a faith perspective. Otherwise mankind is headed for its destruction. The Church cannot confine herself to a merely social vision. Charity has a spiritual meaning. Charity is closely related to God’s silence.
God has a plan of salvation for the whole world, and men must always seek to understand his perspective better. We must be willing to join him in his silence.
NICOLAS DIAT: Reverend Father, as we were preparing our interview, you said to me: “As with all the great questions, the more we reflect on silence, the less we understand. Who has ever understood love?” Your Eminence, do you subscribe to this difficult yet hope-filled remark?
ROBERT SARAH: Who can understand God? Who can enter into his silence so as to comprehend its mystery and fruitfulness? We can reflect on silence so as to draw closer to God, but there comes a time when our thinking can make no more progress. As with all questions connected with God, there is a stage when the search can go no farther. The only thing to do is to raise our eyes, to stretch out our hands toward God, and to pray in silence while awaiting the dawn.
Silence is part of these inquiries that show us that there is a mystery in the presenc
e of mystery.
Silence is the prerequisite for being open to the great answers that will be given to us after death. We would like God to speak right now while we are passing through this world. But for the moment, we live in the night, praying in silence. One day we will understand everything. Until then, it is necessary to seek without making noise. I know well that God’s silence constantly runs into man’s impatience. Nowadays, moreover, man fosters a kind of compulsive relationship with time.
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: When I was in the novitiate, the Novice Master assigned me to read The Mysteries of Christianity by Matthias Joseph Scheeben. At the end of each chapter, the theologian took care to emphasize that we had understood little and that most of it still eluded us. He was right: the more we study a mystery, the more we understand that we do not understand, and this causes our wonder to grow.
It is fortunate that so many problems elude us; an infinite number of them remain to be discovered. The most familiar realities are full of mystery. For example, the more science advances, the less it understands matter. Only someone who has not reflected on it thinks that he knows what time is. How can we imagine that we could solve the problem of the meaning of God’s action in this world?
Contemplation is nourished more by what we do not understand. In meditation, a man seeks to grasp something of the mystery. In contemplation, he marvels and abandons himself to God’s love, which surpasses us.
“If you understood him, it would not be God”, Saint Augustine wrote (Sermon 117). In faith, lack of understanding is essential, and it is not a form of frustration; it enables us to dream. A yawning space has opened, and our silence comes to slip into this expectation.
NICOLAS DIAT: Why is silence so important for the Church?
ROBERT SARAH: If man seeks God and wants to find him, if he desires a life of the most intimate union with him, silence is the most direct path and the surest means of attaining it. Silence is of capital importance because it enables the Church to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, imitating his thirty silent years in Nazareth, his forty days and forty nights of fasting and intimate dialogue with the Father in the solitude and silence of the desert. Like Jesus, confronted with the demands of his Father’s will, the Church must seek silence in order to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of Christ. The Church must be the reflection of the light that pours out from Christ. And the light of Christ gleams, radiates, and illumines in silence and cannot be stopped by the deafening night of sin, which prompts Saint John to say: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1:5).
Light makes no noise. If we want to approach this luminous source, we must assume an attitude of contemplation and silence.
In order to reflect the brilliant light of Christ, Christians must resemble the Son of God. This outpouring of light is always discreet.
The true nature of the Church is not found in what she does but in what she testifies. Wherever deep, mysterious things are, there is silence. Christ asked us to be a light. He ordered us, not to conquer the world, but to show men the way, the truth, and the life. He asked us to be silent but convincing witnesses of his love.
Silence is the place where we welcome mysteries. Why is Holy Week celebrated in silence? The answer is simple: We must enter into the Passion in order to be conformed to Christ, to be in communion with his sufferings, to become like him in his death, so as to arrive at the resurrection from the dead (cf. Phil 3:10). The profound silence of Holy Saturday is not a day of sadness but a moment of our being placed into the tomb with Christ and of contemplating the mystery that reason cannot fathom without the help of him who reads the secrets of hearts and knows what is the desire of the Spirit (cf. Rom 8:27). Led by the Holy Spirit, the Church has a mission to educate the faithful in silence because there is no life in silence without a life totally led by the Spirit.
How could I forget the Holy Spirit missionaries whom I saw praying for long hours in the silence of the church in my village of Ourous? They were absolutely faithful to Christ’s teachings. These priests withdrew to the interior desert of their heart to be with God. I was very fortunate to have such men as a model.
Children should be introduced to silence. Youngsters who are about to receive the Body of Christ for the first time should get ready by setting the world aside for a few days, leaving for a deserted place where they can prepare themselves in silence to encounter God.
Without silence, the Church does not live up to her calling. I fear that the reform of the liturgy, especially in Africa, is often the occasion for noisy, purely human celebrations that are hardly in keeping with the will of the Son of God as expressed during the Last Supper. It is not a matter of rejecting the joy of the faithful, but there is a time for everything. The liturgy is the place, not for human rejoicing, passions, a profusion of discordant words, but for pure adoration.
Today, noise invades so many aspects of people’s lives. The Church would make a serious mistake by adding noise to the noise. Love does not need words.
DYSMAS DE LASSUS: My humble experience as a Carthusian leads me to say that the Church must not lose the sense of the sacred. If we abandon the mystery, we lose the Infinite One. As Qoheleth said, there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Eccles 3:7). The Church has the burning obligation to bring the mystery of God to mankind. The word that will bring this message must first have penetrated the individual who speaks it so that it becomes totally his. Lectio divina, listening to the Word of God, which has always been at the heart of monastic life, is the time of the word, the time of the heart that listens, receives, and allows itself to be impregnated. It is also the time of silence that will meditate at length so as to let the Word penetrate the very depths of our being and to become truly ours. If we move along too quickly, the imprint will remain superficial or will be erased. Carthusians do not have the mission to preach, and therefore I have no experience in that area, but no one can doubt that a word that comes from the heart and has been experienced in depth by the person who brings it will make a deeper impression on the one who listens to it.
In a famous document, the “Ladder of Monks”, Guigo II, the twelfth prior of the Grande Chartreuse, illustrated the stages of this penetration. It begins with reading and continues with meditation. The latter leads to the heart-to-heart conversation with God and will blossom into contemplation. When we are face to face with a God who has become man, how can we not remain silent? Reading, study, and reflection, these initial stages finally lead to silence; there, instead of working ourselves, it is important to let the Holy Spirit work in us, to explain the mystery that our intellect cannot understand. The Spirit has the power to capture us to the very depths of our soul by the love that he awakens in us.
The silence of the Church’s life, it seems to me, is connected to the mystery and gentleness of the divine voice. In order to hear it, you have to turn your ear because the Holy Spirit does not speak loudly, nor do Jesus and his Father. When the Word became man and came to live in Nazareth, for thirty years the Nazarenes saw nothing! It takes time and silence, therefore, to discern the voices of heaven, which are discreet and infinitely respectful.
ROBERT SARAH: Mystery is the Infinite who comes to encounter the finite. When we look at the life of Jesus, his discretion and silence are striking. The Church must follow the message and the manner of Jesus. She must give witness by her life and be sober in her words.
If we only brood over our own thoughts, we distance ourselves from the mystery; the Church runs the risk of being founded no longer on a faith but on changing, relative opinions.
The great saints hardly spoke, and yet they are the best messengers of the Church. When the martyrs were attacked, they did not defend themselves, they kept quiet. They now live a life hidden with Christ in God (cf. Col 3:3). Success, praises, persecutions, or death have no importance. Along these lines, Saint Bruno is a perfect example.
Of course, when the barbarians doggedly persist and use the most refi
ned methods to destroy morality, the family, and the mystery, it is necessary to speak forcefully. As children of God, we must know how to choose the right time, the right words, and the weapons of faith and charity. Those who fight the good fight hate vulgarity and useless chattering. A few sentences are enough to tell the truth. Today the crisis of the modern world, with its sinister repercussions on the Church and her hierarchical leaders, does not prevent Christian life from developing or the faith from being consolidated, strengthened, and propagated. The Church continues to evangelize the peoples despite the powers that strive ever more perversely, with so many financial and technological means at their disposal, to demolish religion, morality, the family, marriage, and fundamental human, spiritual, and ethical values. The Church today is going through unprecedented exterior and interior trials. Something like an earthquake is seeking to demolish her doctrinal foundations and her centuries-old moral teaching.
Mankind itself has always imposed demanding ethical rules, prohibitions, and essential laws to prevent man from giving in to momentary impulses and to help him to ensure a greater quality of personal and social life. This is the result of efforts that are necessarily long and often demanding and difficult. The Church is being shaken violently by a general apostasy in formerly Christian countries. She is suffering from the infidelity of traitors who abandon and prostitute her. But this universal weakening, which affects the world, the faith, and believers, must be a special opportunity for the Church to take a stand for God (cf. Mt 10:32-33) with clarity, vigor, and determination by proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is necessary to reinforce in every faithful Christian the love of God; it is necessary to revive staunch adherence to the Catholic faith, it is necessary to proclaim the consistency of the Church at the heart of a world that is in complete upheaval and threatened with collapse.
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