By SHAUN KENNEY
For those who are into Catholic filmmaking, Into Great Silence has to be one of my favorites. The film centers among a monastery whose rule is strict and entirely unique. Filmmakers had to wait years before being allowed into the monastery to document the lives of these monks, many of whom struggle to adapt to the Benedictine Rule.
With talk of married priests in the wake of the Amazon Synod in October, it is worth a discussion of the monastic tradition and why it is so important to the West — what it preserved and why its role is so very important in our postmodern age.
St. Benedict’s Rule was an innovation of a sort, but it was rooted into a monastic tradition that predated even St. John the Baptist’s sojourn into the desert. Thus the idea of monasticism wasn’t a novelty to the Christian faith even as the Emperor Constantine lured Christians from the catacombs, the bishops of the time asserting themselves more as princes rather than princes of the Church.
Yet monasticism took rough shape as the excesses of the fourth and fifth century began to be made manifest, first in the deserts of Egypt, then in the form of Stylites in the Eastern Churches, and finally in the form of the Benedictines in the Western Church. By the sixth century, St. Benedict had enough of the immorality of Rome, and chose to establish a monastery at Monte Cassino, where he eventually wrote his Rule and died in AD 547.
The Rule of St. Benedict might seem harsh to our ears. Obedience to a superior in all things, humility in work, humility in relationships, submission to even the meanest of tasks, suspicion of laughter, humility in dress and posture.
Yet one of the things that St. Benedict emphasizes in his Rule is a willingness not to pray. By that, I do not mean that one doesn’t pray, but rather that one does not pray with words. Rather, it is a submission to silence that matters.
I’m sure we can all relate to this in discussion, whether through a friend (or perhaps ourselves) we find that one rarely if ever leaves air in the conversation. Americans are particularly notorious for feeling a need to talk and talk and talk — because we see it as a sign of friendliness.
But consider that same conversation when we sit with God. I’m sure many of us have experienced this in front of the Blessed Sacrament, namely that we start out with prayers and then everything comes flooding out at once. Of course, this is good — God wants us to do this. Yet when the flood breaks and everything is done, what is next?
What comes next is silence.
This is where many Christians fail in their spiritual development, because too many of us look to fill the void. St. Dominic was given the gift of the rosary by the Blessed Mother as a bridge between our desire to talk and God’s desire to listen — the prayers of the holy rosary are designed not so much to repeat one Hail Mary after another as they are to preoccupy our senses so that God can speak within us. Hence the meditative power of the rosary and why it is such a dangerous weapon against evil.
Silence is one of those tricky things. Mother Teresa of Calcutta labored with silence in her spiritual development, believing herself to be abandoned by God at times. St. John of the Cross called this silence the “dark night of the soul” where the euphoria of our initial conversion wears off and the sacraments simply do not impart the same joy as they did before.
St. Evagrius of Pontus noted that this silence and acedia — typically defined as sloth, but what St. Thomas Aquinas later called “the sorrow of the world” — was one of the greatest struggles of the ascetic. It was, as he described it, the “noontime devil” that plagued those in the middle of life.
The solution according to the early monks was to continue to work and pray. Thus the phrase Ora et Labora became the spiritual shorthand for the Benedictine monk. Yet sometimes, even this preoccupation was not enough, and monks would wander from monastery to monastery, unable to bear what silence brought.
Now there’s a mystery. Silence speaks. Or more accurately, as the twentieth-century ascetic Carlo Carretto says, if we feel uncomfortable in our silence with God, it is a defect of the soul — our pride. So within our acedia, we try to fill in the silence with noise so to speak. Our conscience troubles us, we get bored, we attempt to fill the space with poetry or music, or we simply carry ourselves off to other pursuits.
The most dangerous of these is when we attempt to substitute prayer or labor with something closely aligned to the basic good of each. For instance, if we choose to purchase and read a plethora of spiritual books in an effort to avoid this great silence of God.
Or perhaps we choose a pursuit such as going shopping, eating in fine restaurants, travel, or some other middling affair. These are all well and good when pursued for their own sake, but as the adjective ab- suggests, when they are abused they are indeed falling away from their true vocational purpose.
Silence in front of the Blessed Sacrament is one of the hardest yet most spiritually rewarding moments in a Catholic’s spiritual development. Like a potter to the clay, allowing God to work in you and being comfortable not speaking, not interrupting, but allowing one’s soul to conform to the will of God? That sounds easy, but it’s really hard.
That is the heart of the monastic movement. This perspective certainly puts the monastic tradition of warehousing knowledge in a far different light. One would work to copy texts, not so much because the texts were valued but because the work itself helped drive away this noontime devil. One labored in the fields, chopped wood, mended clothing, washed dishes, all because if a tiny bit of space crept into their daily lives? It might induce one to seek something other than silence. Even humor.
Of course, today we are practically filled to the brim with distractions. Television and iPhone apps, games and computers, radio and Twitter. Commercials clutter nearly every aspect of human life. Our politics is crammed full of bogeyman at every level of government (they’re not really that bad, folks . . . newspapers don’t make money by selling headlines that read “All Is Well”) and yet we chase this bad news as if a tanker in the Straits of Hormuz matters a whit to us back home.
There is some great comfort that, in the grand contest between the principalities of this world and the Kingdom of God, one side begs us to react to just about everything. The response of the other Kingdom? Silence. It is worth noting that Jesus Christ during His Passion said but seven words, whereas this article alone will be in the neighborhood of several hundred words.
Thus this monastic silence remains a cornerstone of Christian piety in the West, not for its own sake but because it declutters our spiritual life and forces us to reconcile with our Creator in a way no other prayer does. When you consider it, even prayers such as the Our Father do precisely this — they declutter and focus. Every Ave Maria does this. The Fatima Prayer puts a final point on things as well, as there is nothing left to say.
Of course, the monastic tradition and the tradition of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church are inextricably linked. Obedience, poverty, and chastity aren’t for everyone (even if diocesan priests get to fudge a bit with regards to poverty). Yet preserving the spiritual virtues of silence in a cluttered age is notable. With an indeterminate number of children running amok on the farm, I can assure you that clutter is a welcome feature of marriage, not a bug!
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No new news with regards to my friend, other than he is resting, sober, and doing well. God will do the rest — but thank you again for your tremendous prayers and kind thoughts.
St. Louis de Montfort and Venerable Matt Talbot, pray for us!
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First Teachers encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights to the author directly, either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to svk2cr@virginia.edu.
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