Silence
Silence is golden, they say, and if you’ve ever been around someone who just won’t shut up, you know what they mean.
On the other hand, if you’ve ever reached out to someone who simply didn’t respond—doubly likely in the digital age—you know how heartless silence can feel. Nothing forces the imagination into toxic overdrive like being ignored.
There are many ways of looking at silence.
It is indispensable to communication, to music, to peace of mind, to everything. It empowers whatever follows a pregnant pause. It alone can contend with the manufactured chatter of our minds. Silence can be blessed or suffocating and everything in between. The silence of the universe when asked where it came from, and what it means, is the fundamental shared Given of human experience. We start with it, we end with it.
Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence explores the silence of God, and the struggle of the faithful with that silence in 17th century Japan, where a Portuguese Jesuit priest is sent to investigate a case of possible apostasy, and finds himself in the “mud swamp” of Japanese torture of “hidden Christians.” As tests of faith go, it’s up there—and the only way out is to equate the token renunciation of faith required to save others from senseless suffering with the debasement and torture of Jesus. For me the novel inspires a vision of God who doesn’t sit above suffering, with the power to prevent or allow it, but is that suffering.
Consider the silence of Jesus with his captors. He knew he saw something others couldn’t see or understand, which must have been a lonely experience, and that his attempts to explain it could only cheapen it and deepen that misunderstanding. When you are asked to describe the indescribable, or to reason with ignorance, the eloquence of silence is all you have. Try describing the taste of a strawberry to someone who has never tasted one. Then put on in their mouth and shut up.
One current theory of consciousness, I believe, sees thoughts arising constantly from all areas of the brain, from myriad combinations of areas of the brain, all in a way best described as random, with nothing in control. No self, as Buddhists put it. We can’t say where these thoughts come from, only that they seem to be in competition with each other. The thoughts that win are rewarded with consciousness. They emerge from the slush pile, you might say, and get published. Same with language: when something emerges from the undifferentiated potential of reality, it enjoys the illusion of separateness from the whole, and is rewarded with a word. We invalidate the rest not because it’s not there, but because we’re not looking at it. Or don’t need it.
Our reality is what our brains choose to process. The rest is silence.
“Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious,” Emerson observed. I have long espoused non-specific religiosity. The impetus should not be toward language, but away from it. Don’t try to speak for it. What this universe is, how it got here, how life, human beings, appeared on this earth and what the point of our existence is—are unknowable to us here in this condition. We long for an agent, but any agent we name is limited by the reach of our own human minds. The profundity and mystery, the beauty, of the universe can’t survive having some human-invented scheme imposed on it. This always happens to the revelations of spiritual genius: the bureaucrats get hold of it and codify it, smothering the deep intuition that inspired it. Better not to name it, but let it stay in the realm of possibility, uncollapsed from potential to thing. Let it keep its holy silence!
The silence of Quakers, leaving room for the “other,” makes perfect sense. As does the silence of monastics, or meditation, or any perception that is not aware that it is aware. As soon as consciousness wins, a reduction takes place Consider the difference between a spontaneous experience and a later attempt to recreate it.
What about the Book of Job? Nobody knows who—singular or plural—wrote it, or exactly when. 6th century BC perhaps. Like Ecclesiastes, for modern Christians it sits in the Bible like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. You remember the story. Job is a wealthy, successful, righteous man, generous to those in need, and when God brags about him to Satan, Satan issues a challenge: take away the wealthy and successful, and that’ll be it for the righteous. You have to admit Satan has a really good case, but God, as we’ve come to expect of him, agrees to the challenge. So, Satan destroys everything Job owns, kills his family, and inflicts boils and what sounds like cancer upon him. The key piece of information in this story is known by only those three characters—God, Satan, and Job—which is that Job has done nothing to deserve his fate. His “friends” come to console him in his misery by arguing that God punishes sinners and rewards the righteous, so Job must have done something to offend God. Elihu, young and cocky, whose tirade seems to have been added later, even mansplains to Job that God doesn’t “talk” like people, but in visions and dreams and other abstruse ways. Like all the other arguments of his friends, Job has already heard all that, and he alone knows that it doesn’t apply to him.
What I love most about the Book of Job is Job, the only human being of the three principal characters. Satan is not scary. God is not awe-inspiring. They are emotionless, one-dimensional caricatures, who do not feel, suffer, wonder, or change—with a few simplistic human motives tacked on. Even in the end, when God tells Job that he, Job, knows nothing about the creation of the universe or the ways of God—in other words, what Job already knows perfectly well—God is like a puppet or a mummer in a morality play who is lowered onto the stage to explain the moral and adds nothing to our enlightenment. Yes, in the sublime poetry of God’s peroration (so at odds with the puppet show frame), he inspires awe, but it is human beings, not God, who feel it.
It is Job alone who adds to our enlightenment. He stays true not to the human-invented God, who in dumping all this torment upon him makes even less sense than he did, but to the part of himself that is able to sense God: he stays true to himself. The way Job thinks changes through the course of the story. He anchors his faith in his own experience. His vision of Paradise is never to have been born (see Ecclesiastes 4:2-3 KJV, see Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus). That is a longing that comes not from God, but from the heart of man.
Job comes to understand that people cannot speak for the mystery of existence, which some people call “God,” and loses patience with all of these people around him presuming to be able to.
“Will you speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?” (13:7 KJV) Job demands of his pontificating friends. He adds: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him” (13:15 KJV). Conjuring up the idea of an incomprehensible and capricious God leaves nothing for the agency of man. And the agency of man, Job comes to realize, matters. It alone has the power of connecting with the divine mystery.
When the puppet God speaks, it is with a human voice. When the mystery collapses into a name, a face, a time and place, it forfeits its essence. The poetry of the Book of Job is the human emotion of Job’s suffering, including what he must endure from his clueless friends, filling the silence with simple-minded, pre-fab explanations; and the enlightenment of what he learns.
“Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?” Endo’s priest asks.
Because anything less, you’re inventing it.
August 19, 2022