Silence and Taciturnitas – 16 November 2012

There is nothing so much like God as silence, wrote Meister Eckhart back in the early 14^th century.   And yet, as we know, silence can make people anxious, sometimes even disturbed or frightened.  Silence needs immediately to be filled up with speech or music or some mindless noise.  I said last week that St Benedict used two different words in this regard.  One is taciturnitas, which means restraint, of speech or other noise – clearly a necessary thing in a monastery.  But we are also advocating taciturnitas when we teach children (if we do) not to interrupt, not to yell and scream inappropriately, and so on, not to bang doors.  I think taciturnitas is a virtue almost lost, needing to be recovered and practiced, in large sections of our culture, including the church, where we are nervous of silence.

So how is this different from Benedict’s other Latin word silentium, silence…? Father Laurence Freeman comes at it in this rather unexpected way…  Whatever is purely natural, not trying to be anything other than itself, is silent…  Silence, authenticity, does not mean merely keeping noise levels low; it is the condition of pure truthfulness.  Silence is what is left when the noise we are making, interiorly and exteriorly, ceases.  It begins to be glimpsed when the noise is turned down.  This is because God is not known by thought and debate, but by love.  I am not the sum of my knowledge and experience, even less am I the sum of my possessions and reputation.  Some of that might be interesting, but it is not the authentic person God made and knows, sees and loves.  Silence is when we eliminate the noise of all that and begin to encounter God, as Jesus put it, in spirit and in truth. 

So we can say that taciturnitas is a discipline, a learned behavior, and we practise it among family, friends and colleagues.  It is an acquired habit of listening rather than speaking and interrupting.  It is a prerequisite for understanding.  It is a product of wisdom.  Silence, silentium, is first of all a gift from God.  It is a gift we receive in the stillness we can create.  It is an encounter with truth, God’s truth, my own truth, the truth of the present moment, and that truth is love.  It is the end of fear.  We practise the mantra because our thought and memories and fantasies, for the moment, are all forms of inner noise.  We habitually identify ourselves with these recurrent, ever-changing states – it might be exciting, it might be interesting, but it is not the truth.  Meditation, says Fr Laurence, is not what we think.  The ancient Christian understanding of Logos, the Word of God (John ch.1), leads to a deeper understanding of silence, he writes.  Silence is the source of creation.  The Word proceeds from the abyss of the silence of the Father. That word is love.

Perhaps then, we find what contemplatives mean by silence just a little puzzling.  It is always going to be difficult to explain silence with words – the more the words, the more the obscurity.  It is not explained.  It is encountered, given.  And the sign of this silent interiority is love.  Whoever loves, writes St John, is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God… (I John 4:7-8)