I hold myself
in quiet and silence .
(Sal 131,2)
Love silence, if you love the truth,  
This will make you shine in God like the sun,
It will free you from dissipation.
Silence unifies your heart, making it one with God
(Isacco di Ninive, First collection 65)

Today we are invaded by words, noise and chats to the point that sound pollution can be numbered among the ecologic problems. Moreover, in the cacophonic society we live in, the word has become an almost compulsory instrument for self-affirmation and celebration, even at the cost of assuming aggressive forms, capable of wounding persons: “words like arms”, it has been rightly said… Therefore, we understand why many persons feel the need of silence, namely many would like to learn how to be silent, in order to re-discover the beauty of silence and, at the same time, the beauty of forms of non-verbal communication. To be silent means fasting verbally; silence can be compared to physical fast, both of them being healthywhen the body and psyche, namely the whole human person, demand it. 

However, we must ask ourselves frankly: what is silence?  The first difficulty, in fact, is that of speaking about it, since silence is understood only when we experience it in solitude; moreover, it is elementary, but essential to remember that the reality of silence is not equal for all and can change in the same person during the different phases of life

Moreover, when we fathom the depths of silence, we discover that silence is not primarily a spiritual experience; rather it could be even an impediment to it. Silence is a human experience and, in the course of life, every person actually knows different silences, which in some cases can be assumed as positive and necessary, in other cases they are repelled as negative and deadly. Therefore, silence is not a good in itself or an absolute good; it can find justification and sense only on certain conditions, only when it is lived with awareness and is oriented to an end, a goal.

Silence or mutism?

An attentive sight does not miss the fact that the positive valences of silence can be fully understood only if we have the courage of looking, first of all, at its negative side. Silence is a constitutively ambiguous reality and, therefore, it can be without life, can assume the form of mutism, which impedes and refuses communication. The rejection of communication humiliates the word and silence as well, finishing by shutting up the person into a kind of prison. This pathology does not  manifest itself by chance when the psychic balance is seriously wounded; those who have been able to meet the abyss of mutism in persons hit by folly, know what it means this form of saying “no” to communication: it is a refusal of life!   

There is also a bad, malign silence nurtured by anger and hatred. Elias Canetti has rightly written about it that, “some persons reach their utmost wickedness in their silence”; they make negative judgements, they despise others, they have the nurtured and daily nursed will of not having any person before them or at their side, because its diversity annoys them and they turn the other into an enemy: nobody greets him or address any word to him, treating him just as if he were already dead! They do not need to reach a manifested hostility, because this mute and deaf hostility is more perverse. Isn’t this the reality that sometimes inhabits the daily life of our families and our communities?

Another form of negative silence is that of self-illusion: a silence kept to preserve the self image derived from confrontation with reality and with others. This is then translated into autistic forms of life, whose most efficacious figuration is that of a desert crowded with phantasms which finish by dominating the unlucky person obsessively. Truly, silence may become a cause of desperation, a form of anguish: this silence is sometimes imposed by the torturer to his victim, or sometimes it is freely chosen by those who set on deadly journeys. 

We need to admit with realism that these forms of silence are not stranger to us: it is important to be aware of them and, at the same time, be ready to transform them into the vital silence from which life and senseful words derive.

Silence as form of communication

The persons, who start this fight, slowly learn to discern that positive, inalienable silences also exist. First of all a silence respectful of the word of others, as well as a silence chosen in the awareness that “There is a time for keeping silent and a time to speak”(Qoelet 3,7). A particular silence is that of friendship and of love: love creates a non-verbal silence, much more eloquent and intense than any word; it is a language in which silence itself becomes word. This is how a silence of presence and fullness is born in which the simple staying together becomes a source of joy: this silence is a loving, attentive and contemplative  listening to; “a subtle silence that turns into voice like Elijah on mount Oreb (cf. 1 King:  19,12). Finally, there is also interior silence, in the heart of each one of us, to welcome the presence of others and of the Other, God: this is a disposition that digs out a space for the Lord in the intimacy of our being and allows His Word to find an abode in us.

Why to keep silence, why are we to learn silence in a progressive and reasonable way? First of all because from silence such energies can emerge as translate themselves into a more fecund intellectual activity, capable of stimulating our memory and of sharpening our faculties of reasoning and imagination. Yes, in silence we become more receptive of the impressions transmitted by our senses; we become capable of listening to, looking at, touching and tasting. Let us think of a common experience: does it not become natural to be silent when we give or receive a caress? Long hours of silence make us different; they help us to look within our being, to dwell with ourselves and, above all, to listen to what inhabits our depth

Thus, we gradually learn the reasons why we speak, since we come to know unsuspected truths. We discover that our words are instruments of conquest and seduction, means to allow our “I” to acquire power, success and dominion on others: aggressive and interested words, bent to non-confessed and non confessable scopes, instruments of manipulation. Summing up, thanks to silence, we learn how to speak, we decide when and whether it is worthwhile to break the silence, we dominate the way and the style by which we turn to others

Through the aware practice of silence we can watch and see that our words may be always a source of dialogue, knowledge, consolation and peace. Only then, through grace, our communication can also build up communion; only then we can open our hart to the listening to God.

The silence of God

Among the numerous meanings of silence there is one that today is called to cause wih excessive easiness: the silence of God, not in the tragically interrogative sense of his apparent keeping silence before the abyss of evil, but also in the tiny, daily and personal sense. Many times we hear complaints that sound like accusations against heaven, “God does not speak to me; he does not tell me anything!” These words often are not pronounced by spiritual aged figures, whose long experience of prayer might have known also “dark nights” of God’s absence, but by youths or common believers who, with their complaints,  seem to justify their luck of faith, their going far from places and temples of prayer, of dialogue with the Lord, in faithfulness of love. The question, “Where is God?” has become almost a habit every time we are shaken by some terrible event, accusing him of a guilty silence in the unravelling of our personal happenings.  Among other things, this frees us from even more disquieting interrogatives, “Where is man, brother of his similar? Where am I? What about my responsibility and solidarity?

  In reality, the “silence of God” is a Biblical expression, which the Old Testament puts particularly in the mouth of men and women of prayer. This proves that the silent God is not so much an argument of chattering or discussions, but rather an interrogative at the peak of a long suffering; when one is caught by anguish, oppression, massacre or an injustice that kills, and there is no one that comes to the rescue, nobody to listen, to defend, to denounce the evil,  it is then that the believer calls God and, if nothing changes, he supplicates whole-heartedly, “God whom I praise, do not be silent! ” «If you stay silent, I shall be like those who sink into oblivion” (Psalm: 28, 1). He who prays like this, does not presume that God may speak, but expects some change in his situation, a change in the surrounding reality and in himself. In fact, we can live a suffering journey without denouncing the silence of God, but this is possible only if we endeavour to understand that our journey has a sense. In his extreme abandonment on the cross, He turned to the Father intoning psalm 22, the song of the right man persecuted until death, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But just in that psalm, after the lamentation, when it seemed that everything was aporia, that everything was over, the praying voice rose up with the exclamation, “You have answered me” (Psalm: 22,22).

However, these invocations of the psalmist, these supplications to God that He may cease beeping silent, are to be decoded : in other words, it is the matter of discerning whether it is God who keeps silent or the believers, the people, the praying persons who do not listen, unable to catch the word of God, that may be pronounced in a different way, through unexpected and unforeseen events.  Anyhow, we ought to believe that God may speak also with his silence, through his voice of subtle silence?  (1 King:  19, 12)? Yes, silence can be another kind of language, near that of the pronounced word or of word-events that are realised. With this regard, we should not forget an extremely enlightening Biblical text, which once resounded as an entrance antiphon of the midnight Christmas Mass, “When peaceful silence lay over all and night had run the half of ever swift course, down from the heaven,  from the royal throne  leapt your all-powerful word” (Wisdom: 18,14-15); This is echoed by the suggestive expression of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Jesus Christ is the Word that came out of silence (Ai Magnesii 8,2).

Yes, God is truly silence and word: not a mute and deaf silence, but one which is a way of communicating something different from what the word does, a way that, in given circumstances, may reveal itself more efficacious  and “eloquent” than any speech. The Word of God remains written in his great silence and finds in it its origin and possibility to be read: we ought to listen to both of them, because both of them are presence of God, of a God who cannot help being presence, because he has always revealed himself as such. We know that the temptation of atheism and of nothingness is constantly in ambush even, and perhaps above all,  in  men and women of prayer, in great contemplatives who live faithfully and in a solid adhesion to the Lord: they, too, may finish by complaining of God’s silence, weeping for His absence and invoking a word.  Yet, they are the ones to give testimony that the presence of God is never missing: God is always present in man created by Him to his own image and loved by Him till the end.

We accuse God of mutism, attribute to Him the emptiness of our heart because we are unable to listen to Him, because we expect from Him a word to our own image and similitude.

Enzo Bianchi
Basic community – 13887 Magnano (Biella)