In the TV drama Downton Abbey, the execrable aunt who has caused a lot of damage by her plain speaking says to the wonderful Dowager Countess of Grantham, “My dear, I always say what I think...” “Why,” asks the countess, “no one else does.” There are people who have never experienced what it is like to think it perhaps, but choose not to say it.
One of the most famous of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd and 4th centuries was Abba Moses the Black. He was probably an Ethiopian, and tradition says he had been a robber, a highwayman. One of the many stories tells how a council was being held in Scetis, and some of the fathers there treated Moses with contempt, saying “Why does this black man come among us?” But Moses kept silence. Later, some asked him, “Abba, did that not grieve you at all?” He said to them, “I was grieved, but I kept silence.” On another occasion, when one of the brothers had committed a fault, Abba Moses was asked to come and help with the judgement. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others said, “What is this, Father?” Moses replied, “My sins run out behind me, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” When they heard that, they said no more to the brother but forgave him.
One of the consequences of a contemplative discipline in which, so far as we can, we are paying attention to the real world rather than day dreaming or fantasising, and to human brokenness including our own rather than blaming, judging, labelling, is that we seem to have less and less to say. If God teaches us in the silence to make peace with ourselves, as Jesus taught, then it becomes less difficult to understand what C S Lewis called this bent world. At any rate we pause now on any threshold of passing judgement, and often as not we say nothing at all.
It doesn’t mean at all that we lose our sense of justice and our indignation when people and our precious environment are maltreated by the misuse of power. But it is not possible to come from the silence and resume the old strategies of label and divide, name, blame and shame. The silence extends out far beyond the time of meditation, the mantra follows us off down the road, and there is something in our hearts put there by God which tells us that speaking up judgmentally and hurtfully will not improve anything. And if we are compelled to speak up, it is likely to become a rare event, and it will always somehow reflect what we have come from in the silence and stillness.
Isidore of Pelusium, one of the later Desert Fathers, put it this way: Living without speaking is better than speaking without living. For a person who lives rightly helps us by silence, while one who talks too much annoys us. If, however, words and life go hand in hand, it is the perfection of all philosophy.
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