Father John Main, whose vision and teaching really led to
the initiation of the World Community for Christian Meditation, was a
Benedictine monk. His talks to
meditation groups were gathered together and published. One of those collections is entitled The Way of Unknowing – and one of the
talks therein is entitled God’s Two
Silences. I think it is particularly
important teaching for grown-up faith.
God’s first silence – if we may use these terms – is what we
read at the beginning of the Gospel of John.
In the beginning was the Word…
The Word, God’s Logos,[1]
was before all time, primal, writes John.
The Word was with God, and the
Word was God… all things came into being through him, and without him not one
thing came into being… and the Word was made flesh… God’s Word is God’s eternal loving will and
presence, eventually glimpsed in Jesus, whom Paul calls the icon of the invisible God.[2] Here is a mystery, to be received but scarcely
explained. It is God’s first silence,
not spoken, not written, but vibrant with love and purpose, creating and giving
life – and light, says John. God’s knows
us from before we were ever made. To pay
attention, to pray – to listen, is the Benedictine word – to be silent
and still, is to enter the silence of God, waiting, hearing, consenting to the
Word of God. That is what we do. Very often it does not seem quite that way,
it seems fractured and interrupted. It may
seem that all we do sometimes is glimpse a little light in the distance. The mantra helps because, if we use it, it is
a returning-point, to being still, silent, listening, consenting. If God and we are both in silence – and God
always is – then we are in accord.
God’s second silence, says Fr John Main, is the silence of
absence and loss. This silence is to be
taken seriously, not overlaid by feverish forms of worship or sentimental
spiritual advice. John Main writes that
this silence of absence and loss has a purpose.
It is the way we learn the perils of possessiveness. It is true that we can experience times of
great peace and reassurance, joy and wonder in nature… but these are all gift,
not of our making but of immeasurable grace, infinitely beyond our owning or
control.
We learn in contemplative life and prayer to be content with
both silences, loving God because God is love, not because God makes us happy
or fixes things. The Psalmists of Israel
knew both silences – and interestingly, the Psalms we don’t get to sing in
church so much are largely the ones expressive of God’s second silence. More recently the French woman Simone Weil
wrote movingly of the second silence. In
the abyss of the Second World War and occupied France, she wrote: Affliction
makes God appear to be absent for a time… more absent than light in the utter
darkness of a cell… The soul has to go
on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love… Then one day God will come to show himself to
this soul… But if the soul stops loving
it falls, even in this life, into something which is almost equivalent to hell.[3] Perhaps so – but as John emphatically states,
the light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has never overcome it.
[1]
John 1:1-18. “Word” in the Greek is Logos (ὁ λογοϛ)
[2]
Colossians 1:15
[3]
Simone Weil: The Love of God and
Affliction.
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