St. John of the Cross: The Depth, Height, and Edges of Silence
Overture on Silence
There are many kinds of silence: the stony silence of hatred, the crimped silence of hurt, the directed silences of envy and contempt, the silence that is the pause between our chattering and nattering, the concentrated silence of an attempt to find oneself in the scattering of oneself across work and home, task and function, busyness and the distractions we pile on in our leisure, the silence that is the time of planning and plotting, the silence rutted by fantasy, the silence that is the relief of withdrawal from a worn day with even more worn words, the silence before one drifts off to sleep, the silence which marks our having been beaten down and become abject, and the silence that is the acceptance of one’s death now coming in from the wings. There is happily also the silence of waiting on a sign that we are loved, the silence from which a work of art emerges and returns, the blessed silence from which scripture comes and the silence with which it is received. And even more happily for those of Catholic and Orthodox persuasion there is the contemplative silence that marks our meeting with God who is before, after, and beyond words. And there is the great silence of the Cross that we can only meet in silence and pinched awaiting, which is a background at the very least, and sometime even the foreground, of the deepest and most fruitful silence of all, the Father’s generation of his own Son in and as Love, which is the ground of the universe and the fountain of our wild hope that the crooked things of the world and the bent back of our own desire will be straightened. With respect to this last silence we can only answer in and with a silence that is rich, deep, ebullient, and joyful.
