The Silence of Solitude and the redemption of Silences of Violence

Dear Sister, you wrote about silence being associated with some violence. I wondered if you could say more about that. Also, I am trying to understand what you mean by the redemption of silence and solitude and their transfiguration into the silence of solitude. Could you explain that for me? I understand they are different and also that they overlap some, but I am not seeing how a bigger silence redeems a smaller one (I know those are not your words exactly, but I think you know what I am referring to and I am unable to cut and paste from your blog).

Thanks for the questions. I need to find the post you are referring to. I remember the reference to silence as violence and don't think it was more than a few months old, but I am not sure which specific post I included that in. Still, until then, let me give your questions a shot.

Sometimes folks use silence and maybe isolation as well as a kind of weapon. That is a form of violence which can be both painful and damaging. For instance, there is a kind of shunning or exclusion that can work this way. We see this in certain religious sects and though the action is meant to serve rehabilitation it does not always work this way. We also see it, though, in society at large and even in families who punish by ostracizing and shunning. Jesus' culture had lepers and the otherwise "unclean"; India has its "untouchables," many countries and times have scapegoated Jews, etc. Dysfunctional families sometimes have the child on whom the anger and other tensions or dysfunctions within the group devolve. How ever and whenever silence is used in this way and some version of shunning happens the person caught in such a situation must find a way of redeeming things. They must find a context which embraces and includes their own situation and transforms and revalues it in the process.

The kind of silence that does that must be a loving and inclusive silence, the kind of silence we associate with good friends who sit companionably together in mutual support; it will be the kind of silence that is necessary when words would be weak, futile, and insufficient --- and thus, intrude, distort, and betray; it will be the kind of silence that occurs when one person's love has no words or another's pain has none because these realities are simply too deep and exist in silent relation to  the ineffable. We know that Jesus' suffering during the passion was the most intense and extensive any human being could have experienced. We know that Jesus' emptiness and abandonment were as deep as they could conceivably be and that his Abba suffered a rupture or separation in his own life as well at this time. Our own experiences of abandonment and emptiness are always mitigated by God's presence and often by the presence of others who love us nevertheless. We also know that Jesus' cry of abandonment was an inarticulate cry and that otherwise he was generally reduced to muteness. And yet he remained open and responsive to his Abba; when sin and godless death swallowed him up in ultimate emptiness and final muteness, God, the very abyss of the "silence of solitude" embraced all of that and took it into his very self. This silent love transformed it all entirely and brought life and meaning out of death and absurdity.

At my parish with the daily Mass community I am hoping we will be trying an experiment in shared silence soon. We have begun to talk about cultivating a period of extended silence before Mass once a week and asking everyone who comes into the worship space (chapel) to take their places quietly and join us in this way of developing community. We are not trying to create little islands of mute isolation as once was enforced pre-Vatican II. Nor are we looking to deal with issues of noise and courtesy per se. Instead we are looking to allow each person to experience the freedom to go deep within their own selves to that Self beyond words and at the same time, to support one another in this. Because we will all be rooted deeply in the God who is the silent Ground of Being we will be joined together at the level of heart --- beyond words, beyond our individual pain, but also in a way which allows each person to pour out their hearts to God in silence.

My hope is that a dimension of the same kind of community will come to be that occurs in monastic communities which share this kind of silent prayer regularly. If we can do this my sense is people will find it a powerful medicine or balm for their souls when words cannot help --- and, over time, we will be creating ministers capable of being with others in their pain in ways we each often hunger for, but which our culture distrusts or simply is entirely ignorant of. I believe it will transform our already-very-fine community of faith into a greater image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps some will discover a call to contemplative prayer and living!

My director showed me the above picture yesterday which symbolizes one of the ways our own work together sometimes proceeds. I think it's a great way of thinking of the shared silence of solitude that can embrace and safely hold the various discrete silences, mutenesses,  emptinesses and overly-full griefs, fears, and other realities of our lives that cannot be fixed or (often!) even touched by words. Similarly it can transfigure them into a greater and silent song of love, friendship, and communion. We (my parish community) want to be that community that cares for and supports everyone without exception beyond the limitations and exclusion of words, noise, and futile activism. So we will try periods of shared quiet prayer to create a context similar to the greater and loving silence which can also bring the redemption of those often-damaging forms of silence and exclusion I mentioned in my earlier post. Our world desperately needs people who can bring this kind of silence (loving inclusion) to its pain.

Does this begin to answer your questions? If not please feel free to ask again and even to sharpen those questions I failed to answer.

Exclusion or Inclusion: How is God truly Honored?

Today's Gospel is the continuation of a series of stories in which Luke describes what happens when Jesus is invited to dinner. He is dining with Pharisees and for them it is a decidedly uncomfortable occasion. Jesus has brought them to a point of crisis or decision; he has challenged them far beyond their social or religious comfort zone, and he has asked them to change the way they behave towards others in absolutely fundamental ways in order to really do the will of God. You may remember, he has just finished rebuking them for asking friends to dinner instead of the poor and disabled, that is for seeking honor and avoiding shame by asking to dinner those who could reciprocate (and so, give further honor) rather than those who could not. He affirms that if they behave as he demands they will find their reward at the resurrection of the just.

At this point, the point where today's Gospel begins, one of the Pharisees (I imagine him as the parish armchair theologian or the believer who rejects social justice as having anything to do with the gospel or with Church per se!) burbles on with, "Blessed is he who eats bread in the Kingdom of God." In other words, he tries to divert the focus from the here-and-now demands Jesus has made to a far more comfortable and pious reflection on heaven and the eschatological banquet --- as though that was the real thrust of Jesus' instruction thus far!

But Jesus will have none of it. Instead he tells another parable which sharpens the demands he has already made of these Pharisees; he intensifies the crisis they face, and refocuses attention onto their present meal practices. As Robert Farrar Capon puts the matter, [[(Jesus) launches straight into a story which bumps his hearers off the bus bound for the heavenly suburbs and deposits them back into the seediest part of town!]] (Parables of Grace, p 131)

The story Jesus tells is of a Master who invites guests to a great feast, and who, in the ordinary scheme of things, is shamed when those who are "worthy" of attending refuse his invitation for religiously acceptable reasons. As a result he sends his servants out in two different forays to actively seek out those who are seen as unworthy of attending the feast. The progression is significant: first the servant seeks out the disabled and poor or oppressed. Then, the net is cast wider to the prostitutes, pickpockets, tax collectors --- in general the social riffraff of both town and country. According to usual standards the attendance of none of these would bring honor to the Master. Rather, it would shame him --- as would his actively seeking them out. But in choosing to bring them into the feast and sending servants out after them, the parable serves to criticize and subvert the foundational honor/shame value-system of his society. On this basis alone Jesus' story would be shocking to his hearers.


But there is another dimension which gives Jesus' choice of substitute guests an added importance --- and an added impact --- an even greater shaking of the foundations on which the Pharisees' reality rests. Remember that the Essene community of this time celebrated meals which anticipated the eschatological Banquet just as our own meals, and especially our own Eucharists anticipate this. The Essenes, as was true of many Jews in Jesus' day, saw themselves as participants in a holy war against sin and evil and to help ensure God's victory in this they stressed the importance of freedom from ritual and moral impurity. As a result certain people were ineligible to participate in community life, and especially in community meals. These included the lame, blind, crippled, paralyzed, and otherwise afflicted (never mind prostitutes, thieves, collaborators and tax collectors, etc)!! The basic religious strategy for winning this "holy war" was exclusion. This separatist strategy was one the Pharisees and most Jews also adopted with regard to the world around them --- at least if they wanted to worship as Jews.

Jesus' parable, however, overturns this basic religious stratagem as well. It is not just the foundational social structure and mores Jesus turns on their head, but the religious ones as well. What matters to the Master in Jesus' story (as Luke tells it) is that his house be filled, his feast be celebrated and enjoyed. Where that is done he is well and truly honored. As Paul has been telling us throughout Romans as well, God's strategy for dealing with evil is inclusion, not exclusion, participation in, not isolation from. Our God is one who himself goes out into the hedgerows to seek out and bring the unworthy back with him. He searches for and welcomes the ritually and morally impure, the godless and despised. (And yes, he of course sends his servants out in the same way!) He is honored only when NO ONE, and no part of ourselves, is excluded, only when those who cannot reciprocate and have nothing to offer on their own are brought into the feast. Our God is the One who brings all of us, each and every broken and unclean sinner of us, into the community of Christ so that he may love us into wholeness and holiness. That is our God's strategy for dealing with evil! This is the way he conducts a holy war!

Today in the Church there is a movement afoot to create a "leaner, meaner, purer" remnant community of "faith." If there is anything today's Gospel teaches with a startling vividness and a stunning contemporaneity, it is that such a church has nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. An emphasis on purity and exclusion may work in some areas of the world (not the only example, certainly, but bioweapons labs come to mind here!), but not in terms of the God Jesus reveals to us, and certainly not in terms of any reality we would be courageous (or honest) enough to call the body or Church of Jesus Christ!