Lundi le 8 mai 2017
Cardinal Sarah dares the world to be silent Cardinal Sarah
dares the world to be silent link
“If we do not cultivate this
silence, how can we find God?”
Ours is a loud age … ours is a restless age.
We know the landscape well: the raucous media circus that
blurs the line between power politics and viewing pleasure;
the teeming internet jungle of tweets about jeremiads and
jeremiads about tweets; and a digital presence that multiples
itself exponentially, without end. We even internalize it,
drawing it into ourselves in greater doses until we not only
make noise, but are noise, plugged into the agitation
and clamor of the world and unable to watch or click or share
our way out of it.
But what else is there?
Into this milieu marches The Power of
Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, a
powerful new book with a revolutionary message: that what our
world wants least but needs most is stillness and silence.
Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea touched on the subject in his
first interview with Nicolas Diat, God or Nothing,
where he concluded that for many of us, the “disturbing” sound
of silence just doesn’t feel like an option. “We ceaselessly
need to hear the noise of the world: today logorrhea is a sort
of imperative, and silence is considered a failure.” The
Power of Silence, another interview with Diat, unpacks
the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of silence,
including our reticence to even begin engaging it.
The interview unfolds with a numbered series of philosophical
fragments, much like the Pensées of the philosopher
Blaise Pascal (whom Sarah quotes). “What will become of our
world if it does not look for intervals of silence?” Sarah
asks. “Interior rest and harmony can flow only from silence.
Without it, life does not exist. The greatest mysteries of the
world are born and unfold in silence.” In silence, where so
many of us see an unsettling absence, Sarah challenges his
readers to discover instead the presence of the greatest
mystery there is, one which, like the gaze of a lover, the
growth of a plant, or the motion of the stars, communicates
itself in and through its own silence. “Nothing will make us
discover God better than his silence inscribed in the center
of our being,” Sarah writes. “If we do not cultivate this
silence, how can we find God?”
The postmodern world cuts itself off from God precisely to the
degree to which its cuts itself off from silence and solitude.
“Without silence,” he writes, “God disappears into the noise.”
But Sarah also makes it clear that cultivating silence is not
just a matter of quieting speech and sounds; it also means
quieting our judgments, passions, and thoughts. In fact, the
path of exterior silence can painfully reveal the depths of
interior noise into which we’ve been plunged – which is
precisely why we tend to avoid it. “With its festive
appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself,”
he writes. “Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a
morphine pump, a sort of reverie, an incoherent dream-world.
But this noise is a dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic
lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior
emptiness. The awakening will necessary be brutal.”
Read more: Pope Francis and
Cardinal Sarah invite us to silence. Does that scare
you?
Sarah invokes various beautiful images – a temple, a melody, a
light, and a flame – to capture the glory of silence, but also
invokes more disquieting imagery to capture its power – a
burnt offering, a shadow, a wave, a violent seizure. The
necessary practice of silence means an encounter with God, and
the encounter can take us to “fearsome shores.” But Sarah
encourages us to venture on, discovering the same great peace
and fortitude that so many holy men and women have found in
their silence.
It would’ve been easy for Sarah to devolve into an indictment
of political, economic, and social powers – and while Sarah is
certainly not silent on their culpability, his focus is more
on revealing and inviting us into the great sources of silence
in the Catholic tradition. He returns to the Old Testament
again and again, but finds the greatest scriptural odes to
silence in the life of the Holy Family. Joseph never utters a
single word in the Gospels; Mary’s words are few – the Gospels
of Mark and Matthew have no mention of her words either – and
her entire life is swallowed up in faithful obedience and
prayerful attentiveness. But it’s in the life of her Son that
silence takes on a whole new meaning. “The whole life of Jesus
is wrapped in silence and mystery,” Sarah writes. “If man
wants to imitate Christ, it is enough for him to observe his
silences. The silence of the crib, the silence of Nazareth,
the silence of the Cross, and the silence of the sealed tomb
are one. The silences of Jesus are silences of poverty,
humility, self-sacrifice, and abasement; it is the bottomless
abyss of his kenosis, his self-emptying.”
For Sarah, who is also the Prefect of the Congregation for
Divine Worship, the Church has to protect and foster this
silence in its prayers, in its sacraments, and in its liturgy.
The Cardinal made headlines last
year when he called for a return to “ad orientem”
celebration of Mass (in which the priest faces the same
direction as the congregation), and in The Power of
Silence, doesn’t hesitate to call once more for a
“reform of the reform” of the liturgy, adding that “the future
of the Church is at stake.” He makes a compelling case, and
it’s clear that he’s driven not by any ideological commitment,
but a burning love for the Church and sacred silence, “a small
anticipation of eternity” that can uniquely open a heart to
God.
After a probing discussion of God’s apparent silence in the
face of evil – Diat hammers Sarah with various examples of the
horror unfolding in various parts of the world – the book
closes where it opened: at the Carthusian monastery of the
Grande Chartreuse in France, memorialized in the documentary Into Great Silence. The
Carthusians aren’t presented as a universal standard of
silence, but as exemplars of its vital importance – and Sarah
doesn’t necessarily call his readers to eliminate speech and
action, but on the contrary, to give them greater depth and
breadth by grounding them in that silence.
The Power of Silence is an eminently wise, rich, and
timely piece of writing, one that meets the mind both like a
quiet nighttime meditation and a rousing call to revolution.
Sarah’s voice has the freshness and liveliness of a springtime
of faith, and reflects the ongoing boom of Catholicism in
Africa. It’s a voice that the West desperately needs to hear.
It challenges us to return to the essentials of Christian
life, where our lifeblood isn’t the artificiality, egotism,
and endless chatter of the world, but the wordlessness,
humility, and eternal silence of God.
There we find our happiness, because there we find our
greatest treasure.
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