The language of God – 8 July 2016

Meister Eckhart, one of our greatest, most daring and adventurous teachers, from the High Middle Ages, wrote, There is nothing so much like God as silence.  It is one of those enigmatic remarks we often find in spiritual teaching.  The ancient prophet Elijah, in despair at the major crisis in his life, stands before the Lord, as the Hebrew puts it, on Mount Horeb.  There was a mighty wind which threw even the rocks around, then an earthquake, then a fire – but, we are told, the Lord was not in any of this excitement.  Then, after the fire, a sound of silence…  And Elijah, says the story, “heard” the silence.   The Hebrew sentence uses two words to express the silence, and one of them actually means stillness.  It depicts the most dramatic contrast to all the noise and strife and terror that had gone before.  A sudden complete calm.  The tumult and the shouting dies.  It is not the only place in the Bible where such a transition happens.

Silence, writes Rowan Williams, is letting what there is be what it is, and in that sense it is profoundly to do with God.  So it is hands-off.  Silence signifies that for the moment we have stopped trying to manage and control, or to achieve anything.  It is not so much that we create a time and a space of silence and stillness for a while – it is much more our knowledge that anything we now say or do will simply intrude and be unnecessary, unhelpful.   We have already done all we can, which was to bring ourselves to sit still, and be silent within, as much as we can, which, as we know, often isn’t much.  (Thank God for commas.)

We meditators often need to be reminded also of some realities of the external silence.  The world, and what Dapper Dan the Weather Man calls Mother Nature, choose not to be silent, and are unlikely to do otherwise.  The traffic still drives past, sometimes kicking up gravel.  Doors creak.  Birds patter around on the roof.  Distant horns and sirens sound sometimes…  All of that, I have to say, is perfectly proper.  No one gets complete silence anywhere.  In a monastery there are noises, I have to tell you, including the monks’ gastro-intestinal chorus.  Thomas Merton in his hermitage deep in the woods still complained in his journal of some farmer driving his tractor perhaps 2 km away.   Serious studies of silence have shown that it actually never happens. 

And rightly so.  The silence that matters for us is within.  It comes when we are content to be still, and to shut down our deliberate thinking about people and issues, including ourselves – not because the thoughts are wrong, but because for the moment they are surplus to requirements – and then to say our mantra simply and humbly and gently, and to return to it whenever we realise we have strayed off. 

Sometimes this is put a little differently, as though the silence is there anyway, whether we are or not, and we divest ourselves of noise and busyness in order to enter it for a while.  That’s just another way of describing the same thing.

What we have made space for is presence and attention, God’s and ours.  In our noisy fractious clamouring world this is the road less travelled.  In this space, every repetition of the mantra is our consent to God, to the Spirit’s steady depletion of the ego which otherwise stands in front of God -- and to the growth of love and all Christikeness in us, day by day.