The value of silence

Fully participating in Holy Mass means, sometimes, we just need to stop all the frenetic activity and be quiet.

Those who know me know that, while I have a tendency to spiral off into obscure monologues and am more than happy to talk for far longer than most normal people are willing to listen, I’m not particularly loud or extroverted. Although I don’t mind having a captive audience and in some sense relish the opportunity to force feed long-suffering parishioners my favorite little homiletic themes, I don’t get particularly worked up or demonstrative about it. These days, I’m working hard to become more of a listener, which I admit I’m not very good at because I always want to interject, because over the years I’ve come to realize that other people have really very interesting things to say. You are all quite fascinating and it would be a dull person indeed who cannot appreciate that.

When I was younger, I was fond of engaging in pointless conversational debate, which I undertook not for the sake of listening and expanding my knowledge and empathy but, rather, so I could try to defeat my verbal opponent. Theological debate was for one purpose; emerging victorious. As a non-Catholic I liked to take issue with any and every teaching of the Church that I thought I knew (mostly I misunderstood them), and as a theology student in a protestant seminary, particularly a student who was beginning to seriously doubt his own dearly held theological positions, I relished these vigorous back-and-forths. I used to think arguing was fun. It’s so embarrassing.

In particular, I thought God owed me some answers. I talked at him a lot. Like a toddler demanding the same thing repeatedly even after you’ve said no, I asked the same questions over and over. I told God to justify Himself, explain to me why I wasn’t happy, why I stayed up all night in existential dread, why every nerve I had was raw. I was reading, debating, complaining, objecting, analyzing. I thought it was a sincere spiritual search, but because I wasn’t taking the time to listen, it was all noise.

When I first encountered the Catholic Church, which was when I wandered into a Solemn Mass at St. Francis de Sales in 2009 or so, it was as if a weight had been lifted off my soul. I experienced true silence for the first time. The noise was gone and I could breathe freely in the presence of God. I didn’t even know what Holy Mass was or what was happening. I was just a guy on a spiritual journey. It was the contemplative silence of the liturgy that really converted me, because silence is the source of beauty. It was the beauty that pierced my heart. Holy Mass is the embrace of Absolute Beauty, and it forms the conditions under which God speaks. Here, we can rest in his presence and we are set free to step up to the threshold of another world, a perfected world that is even now sacramentally pouring itself into this one and re-making it.

This is the value of a place like this Oratory where silence is guarded and protected. There’s a palpable sense of the sacred here, even the chant arises from the silence and returns to it. Occasionally, I ask parishioners how they made their way to the Oratory. Recently, one parishioner told me that, when she was new to town, her goal was to find a parish in which people were quiet before and after Holy Mass. She searched out the silence, which she found here, and out of the heart of that contemplative reverence she has become quite fond of the Traditional Latin Mass.

The ongoing temptation for even us Catholics is to drown ourselves in noise, to be constantly speaking, as Cardinal Sarah says, at devastating speed and volume. We’ve been conditioned by the noisiness of a world which equates busyness and functional metrics and activity with productivity, and productivity has been deified as the end-all-be-all of success. In the Church we want to be successful, to accomplish things, do things, help read the readings at Holy Mass, walk the gifts up the aisle, say a response, sing a hymn, do something, anything. Be part of this committee or that committee, get involved with measuring our progress, how many video series we can watch, how many training seminars we can attend. People often ask me how to participate in Holy Mass. My response is that you make your sacrifice the way you make your sacrifice. You participate in whatever way you like – follow along in a missal, watch, ponder the symbolic actions, try to follow along with the allegorical nature of the liturgy as sacrifice, focus on the prayer intentions you’ve brought with you, look in through the door from the bathroom line and strain to see or hear anything at all - but always be sure that you don’t confuse activity for participation. Participation can only arise out of a recollected silence, a stillness before the Lord.

Silence participate with Christ in his inner life. There’s an ancient homily for Holy Saturday, the day Our Lord is in the grave, which says, “Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps.” To join him in his silence is a privilege. It is our priestly duty, to make our sacrifice and join Our Lord in his death to self, the sacrifice of love which does not result in the absence of something but, rather, is the presence of everything.

There’s a documentary called Into Great Silence, which about the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse Monastery in the French Alps. The monks there keep a vow of silence and the film barely has dialogue. The monks serenely work—stirring a pot of porridge, shoveling snow out of the garden, ringing the chapel bell... The only sounds in the monastery are the chant of the Divine Office and Holy Mass. When the film-maker first proposed the idea for the film to the monks in 1984, they were interested but asked for some time to think about it. 16 years later, they contacted him and agreed! Their habit of silence has placed them into an entirely different frame of mind. They are free from schedules and restrictions. Their lives are a unified whole, and silence has transformed every action into part of every other action. It’s all prayer.

The introit for today’s Holy Mass, drawn from the book of Wisdom, begins, “Dum médium siléntium tenérent ómnia/ When a profound stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful Word, O Lord, bounded from heaven’s royal throne.” I cannot help but thinking of the prophetess Anna. In the half-light of the temple, in the flickering candles, decade after decade she kept her silent watch for the Messiah. A forgotten woman from a lost tribe of Israel, love kept her there, waiting for him. Like a mother, she dreams for him, she peers into the silence like a prophet. When Christ arrives, she immediately recognizes him. Her participation in the mystery is total.

The Blessed Virgin Mary also keeps Christ tucked away in the silence of her heart. Her Son is “a sign that shall be contradicted.” She knows this. She suffers it. Contradicétur is a compound word made of the two smaller words contra and dicta, meaning to speak against. The noise of sin, the noise of Satan, the noise of our own ego, that need to interrupt and interject, to claim that we know better, this is the sin that attacks the silence, the vice that pries us away from our participation in the heart of Our Lord.

Christ is a sign, a silent, still sign of infinite depth who through his death and resurrection becomes the bridge to Heaven. He is a Kingdom the reality of which we are not equipped to speak about because he is too glorious, too overwhelming. This is why we become uncomfortable with silence. It’s the unveiling of the Word, and when the Word is spoken, the old passes away and the new arrives in overwhelming power.

But I encourage everyone to not be afraid. Rest in the silence. Allow God to speak and envelop you. In the silence, you are named. You are loved. And perhaps, if we listen very carefully, particularly at Holy Mass, we will hear the heartbeat of Mother Church, and we will feel Christ at our side, and he will come to us bounding from Heaven’s Royal Throne to share himself and press eternity into our souls.