By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Perhaps you, like me, have sometimes been left with the sudden and awkward realization that you are in fact speaking to yourself when, confronting another human being with whom you thought you were communicating, you were met with total silence and completely ignored.
More and more, the ubiquitous earphones have become mandatory equipment for many young people — and those who fancy themselves so — as these increasingly shut out the real world around them and enable escape into a world of their own artificial manipulation.
Earphones are becoming smaller and smaller, harder to detect, making it more and more difficult to know whether others are tuning out their environment and their neighbors. The option may be coming soon for human beings to permanently and surgically install Bluetooth speakers in their heads, in effect turning themselves into robots. Surrendering our immediate sensory data collection capability made possible by our own sensory experience in favor of a remote transmission makes us in fact artificial and programmed beings.
The power of silence is in the opportunity for examination of conscience it offers in the absence of the noise we have been using to crowd out life itself. What kind of noise fills up silence can take away from life, rather than adding to it. It can conveniently forget that we have an inner voice to direct and illuminate us.
Silence is human, a space wherein our Creator gives us the power to be truly and fully ourselves and thus realize the means of our own self-gift. We cannot give what we do not have. If we are never alone with our own thoughts, do we in fact have anything of our own to offer?
Filling a space with other things does not make the space more meaningful. Space has a meaning of itself as coming from the Creator. Silence is a space that is meant to be consecrated and holy through our virtuous cooperation with grace.
Classical music, an academic lecture, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are examples of beautiful noises. Some noises are even necessary. A husband telling his wife that he loves her can be a very beautiful noise. It can be followed by the silence of a joyful and serene acknowledgment of this beautiful reality which sanctifies the life of man.
Some noises are plain annoying no matter how necessary, such as a jackhammer repairing the pavement or a dentist’s drill removing a cavity.
Any number of distractions exist. Some are visual and some are aural. Visual noise can be as distracting as sensory data entering only through the ears. Some fill their houses with things. Others fill their minds with facts. Many today crowd their conversation with trivialities.
Radio, TV, traffic, phones, and videos — all of these can provide good and sometimes even necessary information and uplifting experiences that enhance life. Every life, however, is always enhanced and uplifted by the experience of silence. Silence makes a most generous space for God.
I grew up in a boisterous and noisy environment with six siblings, where one’s voice was soon discovered to be a tool ready-made for self-assertion. One begins to think that, like the others, one must speak out not only loudly, but the loudest, in order to be heard and acknowledged.
There comes a time when there is so much noise that no distinguishing sounds can be heard at all. It is then that the stillest, smallest voice has the most power of all to make a profound statement and even effect a profound change.
Perhaps you personally have tried to gain the attention of others in the midst of a clamoring throng by being the one different from all the rest, the one who dares to be different and to lower your voice. It is then, against all logic, that perhaps for the first time, one’s desire to be heard is after all realized.
This happened to me at Rome during an outdoor audience with the Holy Father. Pope Francis was making the rounds and greeting the hundreds of guests gathered behind the barricades at a Wednesday general audience. Those standing at the top of the esplanade close to the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica, to either side of the dais where the Pope is seated during the audience, can usually expect that he will walk by and greet those at the inner edge inside the barricade.
I was not among those with such proximity to the Holy Father. I was positioned behind them with no realistic hope of having a conversation with him.
I stood up on the metal railings to get a better view and to see him moving along and greeting visitors one by one. As he approached I said, in a soft tone, “Grazie, Santo Padre, grazie.” Despite all the noise and distractions, surrounded as he was by photographers, handlers, prelates, and pilgrims, he heard me, looked up directly at me, hesitated for just a moment and then nodded ever so slightly in response. Then he turned back to speaking with the others.
In that moment I shared in the power of the difference, the contrast, between the seeming strength of noise and the true strength of silence, symbolized by the voice expressing itself in a volume so different and so much softer than the rest.
The only power to stand out against loud in competition with loud is by contrast, with its seeming power to command, to awe to compel. Noise has an end point of utility when it reaches the limits of its capacity to influence the human person. Humanity itself resists the toxicity of noise for its own sake.
Human nature itself is the compelling reason for silence. The nurturing, affirming, and comforting needed by the human person remain necessary realities at the heart of experience shared by all of us.
Thus the strength that silence can offer to each of us. Silence remains the power available to and necessary for every human person for combating the dictatorship of noise. Silence renders the human person ever capable of liberation from imprisonment to the oppression of the will by forces from outside.
Silence always liberates the human person for God and communion with Him in prayer.
Silence can be used for many things. Mental concentration for task accomplishment is one of these. The highest purpose for silence is awed encounter with God. Perhaps the ecstasy of the visionaries such as those at Fatima can help us to better understand such a gift.
Here on our earthly journey toward the beatific vision, however, the power of silence is used for its most important purpose by each of us sinners as an aid to our salvation.
Silence for prayerful attention to God and His purpose in our lives leads to serene enjoyment of created being-ness, of the creatureliness with which we are endowed by God. Silence expresses our dependence upon Him alone for all that we need and a readiness to do His will.
I have not yet read The Power of Silence by Robert Cardinal Sarah. I am nevertheless inspired as are so many others through his example to throw off the addiction to the dictatorship of noise.
Silence was in fact long ago canonized by the Church when she began to increasingly give way in the Sacrifice of the Mass to silence during the priest’s very low recitation of the most sacred prayers of the Mass, when Christ becomes truly present in the Eucharist, during that prayer which we call the Canon of the Holy Mass.
Change happens in silence and in this world there is no change greater or more momentous than that of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, at Mass.
Silence is human and divine and, in that space created by it, the two truly meet. Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@MCITLFrAphorism
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