Before the Silence
In December 2016, I watched one of the most emotionally intense and scarring movies of my life on the big screen that had me questioning parts of my faith. This movie was Silence, written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Based on the novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence follows two Jesuit Priests, Fr. Rodrigues, and Fr. Garupe, leaving their home in Portugal to bring the Gospel to Japan and to discover the whereabouts of a well-known Priest who committed apostasy. Throughout the film, the themes of silence, despair, and hope appear and reappear. The scene that never left my mind was one during one of Fr. Rodrigues’ prayers.
“I feel so tempted to despair. I’m afraid. The weight of your silence is terrible. I pray, but I’m lost. Or am I just praying to nothing? Nothing. Because you are not there.”
The film received mixed reviews among various Christians. Some praised it for displaying the brutal reality of missionary work as it emphasized despair and abandonment. Others criticized it for not being a hopeful message and claimed the film was saying, “Keep your faith to yourself.” While people argued about it, I was dealing with the film tapping into the biggest fear that I had: being alone in the silence.
In Pastoral Ministry 201, we recently finished up our readings on Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation by M. Laird. Each chapter is full of thought-provoking questions and hard-hitting realities regarding contemplative prayer. As Laird states,
“Silence is an urgent necessity for us; silence is necessary if we are to hear God speaking in eternal silence; our own silence is necessary if God is to hear us. As Maggie Ross boldly puts it, ‘Salvation is about silence.’”
M. Laird’s book for PM members could not have been more well-timed, let alone for anyone currently reading it, for Lent calls us to sit in the silence during contemplative prayer, meditations, and the reading of the Scriptures. Throughout the book, he gives different examples and reasons on how to pray in the silence, when to pray, and why to pray (more on that later).
We are three days into Lent now and most of us probably have a good grasp of our fast. What we also may be feeling is a heightened silence due to what we are abstaining from. The silence is strong. It is fierce and it is daunting. With this growing silence, you may feel the urge to break your fast. But what we should be wary of is the urge to be distracted. As in our school days when we just didn’t want to complete essays and projects, we will do anything to distract ourselves from what needs to be done.
Unlike what we are abstaining from during Lent, distractions can be just about anything. The “urgency” to clean, do laundry, wash the car, to overly tend to others, you name it. We feel the need to distract ourselves all while making poor reasons or excuses for it. Let’s face it, no one deliberately wants to be in the silence, for it opens up fears and loneliness that we feel deep within ourselves. This is something that I have had to do for a few months now being in Ohio.
I am an ADHD extrovert from a family of 8 who loves relationships and community. For over 25+ years of my life, I’ve always shared a room or house. Now? I live alone in a two-story house. To some, this seems great. To me, it is a nightmare. Nothing makes an extrovert more scared and anxious than living in a house alone. This also doesn’t include the fact that I am in a house that I don’t call home in a state and city that’s completely foreign to me while my friends and family are 2,400 miles away. In between getting ready for bed and falling asleep is the threshold of silence. I would deliberately distract myself by scrolling on social media for hours or playing online video game matches until I’d rage quit (thanks for nothing, Overwatch). I was so afraid of being alone that I was doing anything and everything to distract myself from it. In many ways, I still am afraid.
Along with Into the Silent Lands, an Eastern Orthodox college friend recommended a book during Lent called Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict by E. de Waal. Like with her previous book To Pause at the Threshold, I not only was challenged by her writings, I found myself in vulnerable spaces I did not anticipate. In Seeking God, de Waal touches on the intention of listening, whether it is in contemplative prayer, scripture, or complete silence. She writes,
“To listen attentively to what we hear is much more than giving it passing aural attention. It means in the first instance that we have to listen whether we like it or not, whether we hear what we want to or something that is actually disagreeable or threatening. If we begin to pick and choose we are in fact turning a deaf ear to the many unexpected and unacceptable ways in which God is trying to reach us.”
Especially during Lent, distractions can reveal how afraid we really are and also how rebellious we can be. When we say “no” to our desires and say “yes” to God, we aren’t just learning the importance of self-control and humility, we are learning the importance of obedience. For most Americans, “obedience” is not a word we like. As Christians, though, it is what we are called to do, without grumbling or complaining (see Phil. 2:14-16).
Obedience during Lent is not an easy task. We begin to feel the temptation to postpone prayer, take the edge off, and drown out the silence with noise, all the while knowing that we could be growing more deeply with God. As de Waal puts it again,
“To listen closely, with every fibre of our being, at every moment of the day, is one of the most difficult things in the world, and yet it is essential if we are meant to find the God whom we are seeking. If we stop listening to what we find hard to take then, as the Abbot of St. Benoît-sur-Loire puts it in a striking phrase, ‘We’re likely to pass God by without even noticing Him.’ And now it is our obedience which proves that we have been paying close attention.”
I want to clarify that we need to be careful in how we approach obedience. It is not meant to be “follow all the rules to a T,” because we would be no different than the Pharisees. Nonetheless, obedience is what we are called to do in the life of prayer and faith. Another caution to keep in mind is “doing it all at once.” This could be making up for the missed days by sitting for longer periods in silence or punishing ourselves by deliberately adding Sundays into our fast. This was something I began to do after moving to Ohio and it fell apart entirely and it took my Spiritual Director, my close friends, and my fiancée to get me to stop. So how do we overcome distractions and sit in the silence?
How we pray is important regarding our bodily posture. If we aren’t careful, we can become sluggish by praying in our beds only to doze off (I am 100% guilty of this). C.S. Lewis and M. Laird make this very clear. To quote Lewis in the Screwtape Letters,
“At the very least, they [humans] can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers, for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and whatever their bodies do affects their souls.”
To quote M. Laird on posture and breathing during prayer,
“While it is important to remember that we can pray in any position, certain positions are more suited to still prayer and many Chrisitan contemplatives have come to see the benefits of an erect and stable sitting posture…Something as simple as bodily stillness and breathing make a contribution of untold value to discovering the unfathomable silence deep within us.”
What can be attributed to posture and breathing is sitting outdoors as the wind gently caresses our face, being before a crucifix or holy icons, or kneeling before the Holy Eucharist. Needless to say, it is not a one-size-fits-all all nor is one position greater or “more spiritual” than the other.
Another factor to take in during Lent is time. Despite putting aside distractions and desires, we all have jobs and responsibilities to attend to. What we can do is set time aside to do contemplative prayer. Some examples can be setting aside 15-20 minutes in the morning or evening as M. Laird mentions in his writings. Another can be going on a prayer walk in silence, reflecting on the life of a Saint, or turning off the music when driving home from work or school. When you begin to practice this more, it will become a habit and can lead to the opportunity to extend your prayer time. The more we implement times of silence, we will not only be open to spending longer periods with God but will want to continue after Lent. A good Lent is not a “return to normal life” but a life moving forward after inward change.
St. Paul stresses to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:16-17) and to not labor in vain (Phil. 2:14-16). Lent is a time to live this out, not for the sake of reward or self-gain, but to recognize that God is with us in the midst of our struggles. It will be hard, for we do have times when God feels far away or that we aren’t doing enough for Him to respond (I know this because that is me currently). When we endure and persevere, God not only sees our intention and heart, but He is there with us in it all. Whether it is through Scripture, prayer, clergymen, or even divine revelation, God sees us in our contemplations and struggles and is revealing himself. Always.
“But even if God had been silent my whole life, to this very day, everything I do, everything I’ve done…speaks of him. It was in the silence that I heard your voice.”
- Fr. Rodrigues, Silence