Followup Questions on Silence as Redemptive

[[Dear Sr Laurel, referring to your article on the importance of silence to the hermit's witness, I just don't understand what it means to say that God speaks to us in silence or that silence can be redemptive. I think I also wonder if a person going into silence and solitude might not imagine God speaking to them. "Locutions" is a new word for me and I don't mean to offend but isn't it more likely that a hermit hears what they want or need to hear and it really just comes from themselves?]]

It's not always easy to understand silence, especially when we try to do so from the outside. While it may refer to the absence or relative absence of noise, Silence (with a capital S) is also and more truly the abyss and ground of all creation we refer to as God. More and more we each must learn to entrust ourselves to that silence, which, we will find embraces us and loves us without deficiency, limitation, or condition. When we do this we will find that over time (usually a lifetime) and layer by layer, we come face to face with ourselves and as we do that we will also encounter the demons and distortions of our own hearts, all of the ways life has wounded, distorted, and broken us --- and our profoundest gifts and potentials as well. As we do this a choice is always present: will we continue to be defined in this way or will we see ourselves in light of the loving embrace or gaze of God and allow ourselves to become all God calls us to be?

Silence as Redemptive:

In the article you mentioned I implied that there are many silences --- some of pain, anxiety, grief, mutenesses of all sorts (embarrassment, shame, ignorance, fear, prudence, discretion), etc. No doubt you have experienced many if not all of these. Imagine what these are like when they are met with a refusal of another to hear you during these times --- when they are met with the silence of rejection or abandonment or even of hatred. These silences are exacerbated and even transformed into an existential scream of anguish --- a silent but noisy scream that may express itself in all kinds of attitudes and behaviors. But now, imagine that a person who has been transformed in such a way meets a deeper silence, a silence capable of embracing the entire person they are and truly hearing them. What would happen?

Imagine when someone simply sits with a person in need, perhaps for hours at a time, and listens to and also gazes at them in loving silence. They provide a welcome, healing, empowering silence, a silence of safety and personal summons. Imagine a therapist doing this, or a spiritual director --- regularly over time. Imagine a similar silence when two friends choose simply to be with one another because they love and delight in one another. Imagine a person gradually entrusting herself to the silence of prayer again and again, first pouring out her heart in words and tears and then, giving even more of herself, including the parts of herself she cannot understand much less articulate, to a deeper silence which embraces the whole of herself --- and imagine that as a result of entrusting herself in this way she finds herself comprehended and loved --- that, in fact, she is returned to herself as newly coherent because she is loved beyond imagining.

We have all had experiences like this, experiences of silence in which we meet ourselves more honestly and clearly than life usually allows, experiences of silence that quiet the unceasing noise of our own pain and strivings, and softens the fear associated with them as it allows us to take a step back from these; we've all had experiences of silence that are affirming and accepting of all we bring to them, experiences of silence which re-contextualize the facts of our lives and allow them and us to make a new kind of sense, experiences of silence which somehow quiet and transform the chaos of our lives or the cacophony of our minds and hearts into songs and symphonies expressing a compassionate creativity at work both in and through us --- even while it transcends us utterly. We have each and all had very much smaller but similarly redemptive experiences of silence as well: times of play and relaxation and concentration when the silences gave birth to poetry and music, to images and insights, perceptions and inspirations of truth, beauty, and meaning in myriad degrees and forms.

Locutions:

Occasionally (even very infrequently) in the profound silences of prayer or of our environment we may hear a word or phrase or even a complete sentence which addresses us in the deepest parts of our being.These words and sentences tend to speak to us in our deepest needs as well --- which may mean they address us and reveal our deepest potentialities and gifts too. In my experience, limited as it is, these come from within us but also transcend what we know or can allow ourselves to imagine. One might hear the special name God calls them by or an affirmation of the value one has to God. One may hear a commissioning, a sending forth to serve, and so forth. I want to stress that these kinds of events happen "from within"; we hear them inside our own heads and while this is so there is usually a profound sense they come from God, not from ourselves.

I do not personally trust supposed or reported locutions which are either very frequent or consist of long speeches, for instance, and I can understand why you might distrust the phenomenon as a whole. But I know Sisters I trust profoundly who have had "locutions"  (they tend to be highly aural persons) and I have experienced a relatively small number of them myself of the type I described. If one prays regularly and lives in a constant dialogue with and attentiveness to God chances are pretty good there will be (very) occasional locutions. I believe these kind of "come with the territory" --- they are not necessarily signs of great holiness or spiritual advancement. Still, given the limits I mentioned, they tend to be of God, the God who bears witness to Godself in our hearts.

By the way, the locutions I have experienced or heard described have a uniquely memorable quality. They function a bit like a refrain in a song but in this case they are a refrain in our lives which punctuate and underscore the songs we are. There is no need for them to be frequent or numerous because they communicate something central which, like ecstatic experiences in prayer, can speak to us for the rest of our lives and never really be exhausted of meaning.

God Speaking in Silence

Just to be sure I have explained a little more of what I mean by God speaking in silence let me say that I do not mean locutions. Instead what I mean is that the immense or infinite Silence which is God --- a silence which contextualizes our lives, wraps us in love, and transforms our noisiness into quiet and our isolation into solitude is the very speech of God. One who dwells in silence learns to "hear" it. It is experienced as an accompanying and empowering music which allows one's life and, in fact, the whole of creation to achieve articulateness. It is the condition of possibility of the Word being made flesh and flesh being made Word. I know this can sound like nonsense --- the notion of "hearing silence" is difficult to convey. I hope you will trust me that this is real even when my explanations are completely inadequate.

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.