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Sensing the Sacred - Silence
A sermon preached by Nicholas Buxton at
St Edward King and Martyr, Peas Hill, Cambridge, CB2 3PP
23rd October 2005.
A pdf document is available here
(75kb)
“The first 48 hours are the worst, if you can get through
that you’ll be fine!” Such was the response of a Benedictine
monk of my acquaintance when I told him I was going to be spending
a month with the Carthusians at Parkminster, a very strict order
of monks who spend most of their time in silence and solitude.
You could say that the Carthusians are to monking what the SAS
are to the regular army.
Well, the first 48 hours were pretty tough. It certainly wasn’t
fun. To be honest, I found it hard to see it as anything other
than an endurance test. But I persevered (many don’t apparently),
and after a while, though I can’t say I ever got comfortable
exactly, I nevertheless settled in a bit, and even started to
appreciate something of life in the artificial desert of the Charterhouse.
I noticed how the discipline of silence, and paradoxically the
enclosure – apparently so restrictive – actually allowed
for the opening up of an interior space that I am seldom aware
of in my normal everyday life.
Some of you may have seen a documentary series on BBC2 earlier
this year called The Monastery in which five ordinary men left
their everyday lives and went to live in a monastery for six weeks.
The programme emphasised the difficulties some of the men had
in coming to terms with a very different way of life in which
there were – or at least were supposed to be - significant
periods of enforced silence. Some found it stimulating, but others
found it very challenging. As it happens, speaking as one of those
five men, I can tell you there was rather more talk about silence
than actual practice, but never mind.
Still, it’s interesting to reflect on why we might find
silence difficult or disturbing. We often talk about an ‘awkward
silence’ that descends on a social gathering, or when two
people run out of small-talk. But why is it awkward? Why do we
feel it necessary to avoid silence, even if it means talking rubbish?
Why is it sometimes so difficult to break a silence, to the extent
that we might even experience a little stress as we desperately
try to think of something to say? It’s as if we think that
silence is somehow unnatural, as if nature ‘abhors a vacuum’.
To talk about ‘breaking a silence,’ however, implies
that silence is something whole, undifferentiated. Silence is
the void, the chaos of the genesis creation account, but also
therefore the whole from out of which the part is distinguished.
God breaks that awkward silence with His creative word and in
so doing brings the world into being. Yet the word needs a silence
in which to be born and a background of silence against which
to be heard. Silence is where we encounter the ground of being.
Indeed, in a sense, it actually is the ground of being.
Silence and revelation thus go hand in hand; they are two sides
of the same coin. We see this graphically illustrated in the Gospels.
Often when Jesus reveals his true self, his divinity, for example
in a healing miracle, he orders the person concerned not to tell
anyone about it. They must keep silence. For example, the healing
of Jarius’ daughter (Mark 5.43), the leper (Mark 1.44),
the deaf man (Mark 7.36), and so on. At the time of His transfiguration,
the disciples who are with him have an experience of God in the
cloud, and their reaction is silence (Luke 9.36, cf. Matthew 17:9
& Mark 9.9). Silence is the only appropriate response to something
awe inspiring, like an encounter with truth. We have the same
sort of experience in our own small way when we encounter something
of great beauty, be it a mountain view or a beautiful painting
or whatever.
If an encounter with God leads to silence, then maybe silence
leads to an encounter with God. There is a tendency these days
to think that simply by correct practice of certain meditation
techniques, we can achieve… what? Salvation? Enlightenment?
I think it’s a mistake to think like this. Our practice
merely lays the groundwork, opens us to a possibility, a possibility
of the action of grace. So it’s not so much about technique
but attitude, an attitude of openness, humility, obedience, and
self-restraint – which again, is not just about external
discipline, though that helps, but letting go of all that comes
between us and God – in other words ‘me’.
We have to empty ourselves of our selves, like Jesus did on
the cross (Philippians 2:7), so that we may hear the word of God
dwelling within our hearts. The prayer of silence is the heart
of the Christian contemplative tradition, and it is not without
precedent. Jesus was in the habit of withdrawing to deserted places
to pray (Luke 5.16), often spending the night in prayer on the
mountainside (Luke 6:12). As well as advising us not to heap up
empty phrases, Jesus commands us to ‘pray in secret’
(Matthew 6:6). A secret is something we keep silent about. Can
you keep a secret? means don’t tell anyone, don’t
say anything about this to anyone.
All this talk of silence, discipline, and emptiness, brings me
back to the Carthusians. The timetable and the austerity were
hard enough. Getting up in the middle of the night for three hours
of church, every day. Nothing but bread and water to eat on Fridays.
Cold showers. But the really difficult thing was just being present.
This is what Dom Cyril, the novice master would keep emphasising
when he came to check up on me every few days or so. “Just
be here,” he would say. And for the first week or so he
would always ask me whether or not I was there yet. It took a
few days to really understand what he meant. With little to occupy
or distract my mind I became very aware of how much of my time
is spent elsewhere – thinking about all the things I could
or should be doing, the people I might have been be seeing, what
I would do when I got out, and so on. Indeed, much of this idle
daydreaming was taken up with making plans for the future, surely
the most pointless of enterprises, and a clear sign of a distracted
mind.
The purpose of cultivating silence is to draw aside the mental
screen on which we project the transient and ephemeral phenomena
of everyday life, a mode of being characterised by distraction,
of being anywhere and indeed everywhere else but here and now.
It is to make ourselves present to the presence of God. And I
really noticed how most of the time we are simply not present,
even to ourselves or each other, never mind God. We encounter
God in the silent emptiness that is the heart of being, and therefore
of our being too. It is the place where we can share in that Being
in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts
17:28). Not that we are God, of course, but we are, ultimately,
what God is.
Nicholas Buxton
Trinity Hall, Cambridge |
