The text which follows is an informal, but profound meditation on the importance of silence for our spiritual life. It is taken from a homily given by Pope Benedict XVI when he concelebrated mass with the members of the ITC, (International Theological Commission), on October 6, 2006. The saint of the day was St. Bruno, a man noted for his life of silence and contemplation. I have taken the liberty of removing those remarks that are exclusively for theologians in an attempt to make the universal relevance of the pope’s message stand out for us “ordinary” Catholic Christians.
“…silence and contemplation have a purpose: they serve, in the distractions of daily life, to preserve permanent union with God. This is their purpose: that union with God may always be present in our souls and may transform our entire being.
…since we are part of this world with all its words, how can we make the Word present in words other than through a process of purification of our thoughts, which in addition must be above all a process of purification of our words?
How can we open the world, and first of all ourselves, to the Word without entering into the silence of God from which his Word proceeds? For the purification of our words, hence, also, for the purification of the words of the world, we need that silence that becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born.
….In this context, a beautiful phrase from the First Letter of St. Peter springs to my mind. It is from verse 22 of the first chapter. The Latin goes like this: Castificantes animas nostras in obedientia veritatis. Obedience to the truth must purify our souls and thus guide us to upright speech and upright action.
In other words, speaking in the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear out of obedience to the dictatorship of current opinion, is considered a sort of prostitution: of words and of the soul.
The “purity” to which the Apostle Peter is referring means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather, seeking obedience to the truth.
And I think that this is the fundamental virtue…this discipline of obedience to truth, which makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators of the truth, mouthpieces of the truth, for it is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but it is the truth which speaks in us, who are really purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth. So it is that we can be harbingers of the truth.
This reminds me of St. Ignatius of Antioch and something beautiful he said: “Those who understood the Lord’s words understood his silence, for the Lord should be recognized in his silence.”
….Only when we attain that silence of the Lord, his being with the Father from which words come, can we truly begin to grasp the depths of these words.
Jesus’ words are born of his silence on the Mountain, as Scripture tells us, in his being with the Father. Words are born from this silence of communion with the Father, from being immersed in the Father, and only on reaching this point, on starting from this point, do we arrive at the real depth of the Word, and can ourselves be authentic interpreters of the Word. The Lord invites us verbally to climb the Mountain with him and thus, in his silence, to learn the true meaning of words.
…..We are silent before the grandeur of God, for it dwarfs our words. This makes me think of the last weeks of St. Thomas’ life. In these last weeks, he no longer wrote, he no longer spoke. His friend asked him: “Teacher, why are you no longer speaking? Why are you not writing?” And he said: Before what I have seen now all my words appear to me as straw.”
Fr. Jean-Pierre Torrel, the great expert on St. Thomas, tells us not to misconstrue these words. Straw is not nothing. Straw bears grains of wheat and this is the great value of straw. It bears the ear of wheat. And even the straw of words continues to be worthwhile since it produces wheat.
For us, however, I would say that this is a relativization of our work; yet, at the same time it is an appreciation of our work. It is also an indication in order that our way of working, our straw, may truly bear the wheat of God’ s Word.”
Fire of Mercy, Heart of the World, Vol. III Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, pp. 863- 865
