The language of silence

The past year was, for me, a melancholic affair. I have a melancholy spirit, so I guess you can say I’ve been in my element. Still, it does get a tad too much sometimes; the silent house from absent family, brushes with sickness twice in one year, and so on.

‘For silence’s companions, empty houses are heaven—at least until you get sick and can’t get around to organise things for yourself.’ (Photo: Karen Callaway, Catholic New World)

I have to reacquaint myself with silence — a guilty pleasure, knowing that my wife has to deal with the kids on her own on the other side of the ocean. Still, silent houses feel like monasteries in a way our modern lives dread and I love: no background noise, no constant activity, no distracting nothingness and so on.

For silence’s companions, empty houses are heaven — at least until you get sick and can’t get around to organise things for yourself. Still, even that is a valuable lesson in humility for those of advancing age.

I am learning to understand that as we grow older, solitude is one thing we are compelled to reckon with. Growing older is presenting itself as a lesson in stripping off facades.

Solitude, as we know, is not defined as being alone, but as being at peace with what you have or don’t have, with who you are. It is about being restful rather than restless.

Sometimes being in the company of others encourages us to maintain a facade, to promote the false self we present to the world. Socialising with others, paradoxically, serves to heighten the state of our inner being. Being alone provides an opportunity to let go of the façade, and works to still our disquiet.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but the truth is that, as social beings, our peace cannot be complete without the community of love we are called into by our nature.

God, the Trinity, is the first community of love. Our first experience of that community of love is within our own families. Everything we do, however we do it, points to this community of love.

Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI, in one his media sermons, says that too often silence speaks to us of loneliness, of missing out on life, of being disconnected, of being a tomb of non-life. And so we cling to each other and look for conversations, amusements, and distractions that can fill in the silent spaces in our lives.

Ultimately this running away from silence is founded unconsciously on the fear that, deep down, something is missing, both inside the world and inside ourselves, and we cling to whatever can protect us from that painful truth.

But that fear is unfounded. As the Trappist mystic Thomas Merton put it, there is a hidden wholeness at the heart of things and that hidden wholeness can be discovered only if we get to the deepest level of things.

And the language we need to get there is the language of silence—the language of God and the language of intimacy.

I know at some stage I will lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing much will be left for me but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they too will submerge, become inaccessible to me.

The prospect terrifies me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.

That is the scare I got during a recent sickness when my mind seemed to be misfiring. And yet, let his will be done!