ST BRUNO AND OUR FEAR OF SILENCE

Fr Billy Swan

The feast of St Bruno (1030-1101) on 6^th October each year, reminds me of the time I went to see the movie ‘Into Great Silence’ back in 2005. Directed by Philip Gröning, it portrays the daily life of Carthusian monks in their monastery at Chartreuse near Grenoble in France. This was the place where St Bruno escaped with a few companions in 1084 to live an ascetic form of religious life among steep rocks and snow-covered mountains. It remains a vibrant community of monks today who dedicate themselves to silence, simplicity and prayer.

I recall a friend of mine inviting me to see ‘Into Great Silence’ with the warning that the movie was over two and a half hours long with about five minutes dialogue. The remainder of the film was in silence. I recall questioning at the time how such a film could possibly be a commercial success. As we know, a typical movie a director is looking for a good story-line, engaging characters, plots and sub-plots, noise, action, romance, good guys and bad guys. Success is equated with moving audiences to the edge of their seats. Therefore, the idea of making a film/documentary with none of these ingredients was taking a huge risk to say the least.

I also recall my fear of being bored by such a movie in the absence of the noise and action we have become so used to in most modern productions. Nevertheless, I was curious and so I went along. The movie theatre was packed and there was an atmosphere of silence over the two and a half hours we were there. No one left early. My initial fears of boredom were soon replaced by a realisation that the unhurried pace of life lived by these men of God was challenging my understanding of time that was dominated by activities and deadlines. The more the film progressed, the more it drew us into the beauty and simplicity of life that these monks lead. The witness of the elderly and vulnerable monks only added to the sense of enchantment, captured by a profoundly human and moving film.

The amazing triumph of ‘Into Great Silence’ tells us more about us than it does about the Carthusian monks and sons of St Bruno. It tells us that despite our fear of silence, we also thirst for it. To face oneself in stillness is an essential exercise of knowing our true selves and knowing God.

First, knowing ourselves. We can only know ourselves by facing ourselves and when we stop running from ourselves. Floating into my mind as I write this is the 1982 song ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ sung by Charlene. The song tells of one woman’s journey to so-called paradise without really getting in touch with her true self. This task of getting in touch with our true selves is one that is not new. It was one that St Augustine (354-430) embraced after years of searching for happiness in futile places outside himself. For Augustine, this inner journey was not an end in itself but a prelude to giving himself away in self-sacrificing love: “First come back to yourself from the things outside you and then give yourself back to the one who made you” (Sermon 330, 3). This process of coming back to one’s true self can only be done in silence and prayer. From the witness of Augustine: “We are called home from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. Why do we rush about…looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?” (On the Trinity, 8, 7, 11). When Augustine did manage to enter into himself in silence, not all he saw was pretty: “Lord, you turned my attention back to myself…And I looked and was appalled…You thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it” (Confessions, 8, 16).

This can be our experience too when we shed our fear of solitude and silence – we face up to the things we have been fleeing from for a long time – our sinfulness, our wounds, our loneliness and incompleteness. Silence pulls us back to the real. As Thomas Merton masterfully put it: “It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business and our noise: these are the illusion” (No Man is an Island). The silence also puts us in touch with our dignity as God’s beloved and the freedom to rejoice in the goodness and blessedness in the created world around us. Again, in the words of Merton:

“There is in all things and inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in the wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature and the gift of my Creator’s thought and art within me” (The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton).

Silence is also the space in which God reveals Himself. Into this silence, He speaks his Word. Immersed in silence we listen to God with “the ears of the heart” (St Benedict, Rule, Prolog) – the God who speaks not in noise but in gentle whispers (cf. 1 Kings 19:11–12). Before significant moments of preaching and decisions in his life, Jesus spent time in silent prayer to listen in silence to the promptings of the Father and the Spirit. He spent forty days of silence in the desert before he began his public ministry (cf. Matt. 4:1ff; Mk 1:12; Lk 4:1ff). He withdrew by himself in prayer before choosing the Twelve (Lk 6:12-19). The time the Lord dedicated to silence and contemplation nurtured his intimate relationship with the Father and gave birth to his words and actions that followed.

As his disciples, our thoughts, words and actions need to be preceded by silence too. But yet, this is the silence we continually run away from and are uncomfortably with. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in our restless hearts seeking fulfillment in things other than God. Only a conscious “remaining in the moment” experience of encounter with God in silence can bring that stillness and rest we crave – where God’s thirst for us meets out thirst for him.

The success of ‘Into Great Silence’ was because it took us by the hand and gently led us back into the silence that is so undervalued in our culture. It taught us not to be afraid of silence and not to run away from it. The silence embraced by St Bruno and lived the Carthusian monks, becomes not a burden but the space in which we can know ourselves more and know God better. Free from distractions and noise, it leads us deeper into reality and all that is true. Blaise Pascal once lamented that “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” (Pensées). In our modern world, we have grown uncomfortable with silence and familiar with noise. Here is how Cardinal Robert Sarah describes it:

‘Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet… Noise is deceptive addictive and a false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us top: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God’.

(Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Power of Silence against the Dictatorship of Noise, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2017, p.56).

On the feast day of St Bruno, we give thanks to God for him and the Carthusians for teaching us not to flee from solitude and the sound of silence. For it is in silence that we encounter both our own misery and God’s mercy, our blessedness and God’s intimate union with us. Here is the graceful silence lived by the monks at Chartreuse – the silence and stillness they invite us to cherish and cultivate every day.