Searching for God # 99

 Silence revisited…..

In a previous post on silence, it may have seemed as if silence was being considered as something less than either normal or acceptable. It may have seemed, as a premise, that humans were (or might be) deliberately ‘keeping secret’ whether from others, themselves or God, in some mysterious, even conspiratorial way. That was never my intent.

Silence in both a social and a private sense ( socially: shyness, reserve, distance, detachment; privately: self-talk, perception, intuition, imagination) is both a critical and an essential space for all humans. And that essentiality applies whether one is pursuing a search for God, an atheist, or an agnostic. Nevertheless, what remains as inescapably significant is the recognition of what might be ‘going on’ within our multiple silences and their  ‘hidden’ messages, the inner voice, the inescapable pulse of something beyond whatever we might be engaged in at the moment that the last post was wrestling.

Cultural differences often revolve around the degree of ‘silence, reticence, respect and reverence’ one shows to one’s circle of others. Researchers in social psychology are beginning to examine the role silence plays in communication, including such things as ‘pausing to think and reflect,’ or ‘underlining’ a point, or similarly, allowing the listener to digest the previous point.

Another perspective on silence is a theological one.

Some notes from Karen Armstrong in ‘The Case for God’ might be helpful:

Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom….Thomas (Aquinas) would say that we know we are speaking about ‘God’ when our language stumbles and falls in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, ‘This reduction of talk to silence is what is called theology.’ (Denys Turner*, author of The Darkness of God) Unknowing was not a source of frustration. As Thoman indicates, people can find joy in this subversion of their reasoning powers. Thomas did not expect his students to ‘’believe’ in God; he still uses credere to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as ‘the capacity of the intellect to recognize (assentire) the genuineness of the transcendent, to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real as—indeed more real than—anything else in our experience. This assent did not mean intellectual submission: the very assentire also meant ‘to rejoice in’ and was related to assensio (‘applause’) Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world. (Armstrong, op. cit, p. 145)

Denys Turner* (from goodreads.com) we find:

For the medieval mystical tradition, the Christian soul meets God in a ‘cloud of unknowing,’ a divine darkness of ignorance. This meeting with God is beyond all knowing and beyond all experiencing. Mysticisms of the modern period, on the contrary, place ‘mystical experience’ at the center, and contemporary readers are inclined to misunderstand the medieval tradition in ‘experiential’ terms. Denys Turner argues that the distinctiveness and contemporary relevance of medieval mysticism lies precisely in its rejections of ‘mystical experience’ and locates the mystical within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday.

And from Cambridge.org in a preview of an abstract of Turner’s work, ‘God, Mystery, and Mystification, 2019, we read:

…a central concern for Turner is the interplay between negative and positive theological language arising from an openness to the mystery of God, which leads to an ongoing spiral between knowing and unknowing. The mystery of God sustains both affirmations and negations without absolutizing either, since God is beyond both….Drawing on Julian of Norich, Turner argues that evil and redemption are fitting, which neither solves nor suspends the problem (of evil) but maintains the honest incompleteness of the human perspective on God’s narrative with creation.

Armstrong give us some background on mysticism from the thoughts and writings of one Denys the Aeropagite, an unknown Greek author and Saint Paul’s first Athenian convert. Quoting Denys the Areopagite she writes:

Scripture supplies God (Armstrong)

With horses and chariots and thrones and provides delicately prepared banquets and depicts Him drinking and drunk, and drowsy and suffering from a hangover. And what about God’s fits of anger, His griefs, His various oaths, His moments of repentance, His curses, His wraths, the manifold and crooked reasons given for His failure to fulfil promises…(Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 124-5)

Armstrong: But crass as it seems, it is valuable, because this gross ‘theologia’ shocks us into an appreciation of the limitations of all theological language. We have to remember this when we speak about God, listen critically to ourselves, realize that we are babbling incoherently, and fall into embarrassed silence…It is easy to deny the physical names (of God): God plainly is not a rock, a gentle breeze, a warrior, or a creator. But when we come to the more conceptual descriptions of God, we find that we have to deny these too. God is not Mind in any sense that we can understand; God is not Greatness, Power, Light, Life, Truth, Imagination, Conviction, Understanding, Goodness---or even Divinity. We cannot say that God exists because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself.

Quoting Denys the Areopagite:

Therefore…God is known by knowledge and by unknowing: of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he in any of the things that are, he is all things in everything and nothing in anything. (Ibid, p. 125)

The silence of awe, reverence, amazement, astonishment, and even ‘implausibility’ and beyond our imagination, within our sphere of experience is, then, perhaps the beginning and the final approximation of glimpsing something of the divine. And even then, we continue to fumble to articulate those moments.

Suddenly, while sitting at one’s desk in a large organization, one is stunned by a first-time “aha” about this story of forgiveness for everyone, always having considered that notion for others only, and not for one’s own person. There are no words, no explanations, no justifications, and no comparables.

Another similar but different moment of silence seems to arise when we are confronted by a diagnosis or by news of a sudden passing. We are in what we might attempt to call a pit of silent darkness, overwhelmed, ‘gob-smacked’ with the totality of whatever is or has just happened. Feeling completely alone, isolated, alienated, and abandoned and forsaken, we seem to recognize, perhaps unconsciously, that no words are ever going to explain not only what just happened, but what that moment is like for us. Empty, dark, and imponderably silent is the space of that moment. And, depending on whether we attempt to ‘rush’ out of it, or not, it might last for some time.

Paddling solo in a 12-foot canoe while sitting atop one of the seats, like a human sail, exiting a river mouth into a brisk, spring-time south-west wind and suddenly the canoe capsizes and the moment is silent, one is immediately up-ended, cold, dark and the instant evokes a reflexive gasp, until one realizes that one has no  oxygen and air, but is slowly drowning. In such a moment of the terror of silence, one’s imagination ‘projects’ pictures perhaps of roast-beef dinners and school report cards, inflated into some kind of significance that, itself, is beyond explanation. Floating, thrashing, clamouring for a ‘mooring or life-raft’ as if involuntarily and impulsively churning for breath and life….attempting to survive. And that moment of the deep is so riveting and so transfixing and so indelibly imprinted with chaos, confusion, fear and anxiety….all of it in total silence.

Or the silence of a delivery room when, without words, almost in a silence of reverence at the sight, sound and physicality of a three-second-old baby being passed into one’s arms rivets one’s whole being as some kind of unspeakable oneness with the baby and the universe. The room disappears, except for the window that draws one to its morning sun in the silence of--- I dunno--- is it prayer or is it complete amazement at the miracle of birth or is it all of those things and more?

Or the eerie silence in a pathology laboratory as preparations for an autopsy are being laid out. The deceased is, less than two or three hours from sitting in her kitchen with her husband, and now the process of discernment of  how and why she died has already begun. The mysterious air, the silence, the professional, and also very silent, movements of pathologist and assistant, the soft bell of an instrument on a grey-steel counter and the masked-and-scrub-clad chaplain interns move, if at all, as if they were at the altar, preparing for eucharist. This is the silence of wonderment, not merely about the ‘clinical’ cause of death, but more importantly about the amazing, complex and highly balanced ballet of recently pulsing organs, and systems and a whole human life. A sacred moment of not only respect for the deceased.  A sacred moment also for the moment of one’s encounter with the universe of the human anatomy and the ‘creation’ of a now-passed woman. Is it the silence of reverence for the woman, the heightened sensibilities of all present, the awesomeness of both the professional integrity of the scientist whose share in the silence and the ‘awe’ of what it happening…

We live and breathe moving into and out of silences…and many of those silences, while never fully falling into our comprehension or understanding, give us moments to jar us from our semi-consciousness, from our passive often-robotic routines, relationships, expectations and solving ‘situations’. And, without any full comprehension or explanation of how and why those moments have a meaning and a dimension and a resonance unique to each one, they do, perhaps give us a glimpse of something ‘more’ beyond our senses, our intellect, our experience, our expectations and our imagination…..And, we are wont to wonder…maybe, just maybe we glimpsed something extraordinary and unforgettable and……???

And, of course, we also wonder in silence!