In Pursuit of Silence Page 4

  I walked along the edge of a dark road that unspooled through the white landscape as far as the eye could see. Tiny clusters of gray farm buildings loomed off in the distance, silos like church towers from which the spires had been snapped. I recalled the message written by contemplative monks defending their vocation to a synod of bishops. The monks noted that God had created his people in the desert, and it was to the desert that he had brought them after their sin in order, in the words of Hosea, to “allure her, and speak to her tenderly.”

  All ascetic practices, silence as much as fasting, can become forms of seduction if entered into deeply enough. But those of us who don’t adopt them can never know the possibilities of life revealed to their adherents. In the early twentieth century, Dr. Frazer, an American anthropologist, went off to study the so-called Silent Widows of a tribe of Australian Aborigines. It was the custom of these women to enter a period of silence lasting as long as two years after the death of a spouse to elude and repel the spirit of the dead husband. Because the rule of silence extended to mothers, sisters, daughters, and mothers-in-law of the departed spouse, it happened that the majority of women in the tribe were prohibited from speaking during the period of mourning. To the outsider, this suggested an awfully limited existence. Yet Frazer noted the “odd circumstance” that many of the women, when the time of mourning was complete, chose to remain silent, communicating only by signs.

  As I walked along, white feathers began to twirl down from the sky.

  The Trappists are technically known as the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. The movement developed in the seventeenth century under the guidance of Abbot Rancé at the French monastery La Trappe, for which the order is named. Before becoming a monk, Rancé had been a dazzling polymath, an ardent hunter, and a lover of fancy dress. Then he had the unfortunate experience of walking into the sickroom of the Duchess de Montbazon, his grand passion, to discover that she was missing her head. After the duchess’s unexpectedly abrupt death, an impatient undertaker had decapitated her corpse to make it fit inside a mismeasured coffin. That sight marked the end of Rancé’s days of gadding about in lace from the Sorbonne to the chase. He sold everything he had, withdrew into La Trappe with his valet, and set about forging the most ascetic monastic order the world had ever seen. Their rule of silence was absolute, with the brethren discoursing between themselves by sign language alone. For half the year, strict fasts were observed. During the remaining six months, the monks subsided primarily on roots. When not praying and silently meditating, they performed field labor, sometimes adding a chastening innersole of thorns to their wooden sandals.

  In the tradition of the older Cluniac order that the Trappists sought to renew, silence, as much as celibacy, was seen as a way of copying the angels who parted their lips only to praise God. By observing quiet as a community, the monks blocked off the main highway to frivolity—chatter—and sought to lift themselves onto a plane of rapt attention where God’s sacrifice and human mortality became audible to all.

  The idea of silence as the quickest route to solemnity is enshrined in countless religious practices and lies at the origins of national moments of silence as well. While we don’t know when silence first became part of mourning rituals where the secular and sacred intermingled, we might glimpse traces of the crossover in Carnival observances. An eyewitness of the Venice Carnival in 1868 recounted how, at the final moment, “As the great clock of St. Mark was striking the midnight hour, the band ceased playing and scarcely a sound was heard in all that immense crowd.” After the intervention of “a moment of silence and darkness,” a small light appeared, followed by a blaze of fiery serpents, Roman candles, and rockets. Eventually the flames ignited “the figure of the doomed Monarch”—King Carnival—who perished in a “deafening explosion.” The moment of silence at midnight signaled the end of the rule of the flesh and reminded the crowd that Lent was imminent.

  There are competing claims for the first national moment of silence, most of which—like stories of a memorial silence held across the United States the year that the Titanic sank—are suspiciously unmentioned by contemporary sources. The first widely observed national moment of silence appears to have been one commemorating Armistice Day in England. It was begun in 1919, the year after the armistice, at the prompting of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, a former high commissioner in South Africa who’d been deeply affected by a three-minute pause in work and conversation observed daily in that country throughout the First World War. In a letter he wrote advocating for the silent pause, Fitzpatrick declared that it would serve both to preserve the memory of the sacrifices made by the “Glorious and Immortal” war dead and to create solidarity among the living.

  When the British adopted the ritual, not only sound but all motion was interrupted, with trains halting, factories shutting down, and telephone exchanges ceasing to connect calls. So powerful did this two minutes of silence prove to be that the BBC began lobbying to broadcast the silence, instead of just switching off during its observance. In 1929 they began doing so, and these transmissions of national silence became a phenomenon in their own right. As a BBC representative explained, “Its impressiveness is intensified by the fact that the silence is not a dead silence, for Big Ben strikes the hour, and then the bickering of sparrows, the crisp rustle of falling leaves, the creasing of pigeon wings as they take flight, uneasy at this strange hush, contrast with the traffic din of London some minutes before.” The BBC’s role, he concluded, was to allow the silence to be heard for what it really was, “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.”

  I remember experiencing some of these emotions myself when I once observed the two minutes of silence held in Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day. I had no expectations for the event, but when the sirens began wailing and everything stopped moving—pedestrians freezing in place on the sidewalk, people stepping out of their cars and simply standing, doors left hanging open—I found myself immediately overwhelmed. I remember watching the traffic lights change color over and over—red, green, yellow; red, green, yellow—with no car responding to the signals. Silence seemed to create a hole in the present into which the unspeakable past poured in a flood, swallowing our individual lives. At the end of it, the trivia surrounding those two minutes sounded painfully loud. I wanted somehow to live up to that moment of suspension.

  The yearning to be great and universal, so often awakened by war and disaster, seems to lie behind the last boom time of novices entering the silence of New Melleray Abbey as well. Since the surge began shortly after the Second World War, one might suspect that mass revulsion at the violent ways of humanity lay behind the increase in applicants. But an oral history of New Melleray that I paged through from the monastery library suggests a more complicated picture. One monk who came to the abbey after his army service explained, “You can’t look at a block of houses that’s just been blown to pieces and not realize there is more to life than consumerism and having a good time.” For this man, it wasn’t a repudiation of war and violence that fueled the decision to enter the monastery but disgust with the peaceable, vacuous face of the American consumer society he returned to. The military and the monastery are each, in their own way, dedicated to the watchful preparation for death—often in silence. The interviews with monks that I read suggested that the spike in monks in the late 1940s and early 1950s reflected the desire not to flee but to perpetuate certain intensities of life during wartime.

  SILENCE AND THE UNSPEAKABLE

  When Alberic and I met at the breakfast table the morning of my second day at the abbey, he looked glum. On the following day Brother Jonas was to be ordained as a priest. It had been a long process for him to reach this milestone. He had family and friends coming from all over to witness the ceremony, and now because of the weather many of them were canceling their visits. We also would be unable to set out to Trappist Caskets, where Alberic had intended to show me the quiet of monks at work. Instead of touring th
e coffin plant, he’d made arrangements for me to speak to several other monks about their pursuits of silence. “Nature is not friendly here,” he remarked, nervously eyeing the window, curtained with white snowfall from the outside. “She’ll walk over your face. She’s a bipolar mother. The monk in me loves this. We live on the edge, at the extreme of human capacities, but my human nature struggles with it.”

  The local population struggled with it too, and though not upholding vows of silence, they were little given to idle conversation, Alberic said. The farming was relentlessly difficult and unprofitable. It would also, I knew, have been deafening, despite the rural setting: 75 percent of farmworkers are said to have a hearing problem due to their use of heavy machinery.

  Indeed, the traditional Midwestern tight-lipped stoicism is now only rarely complemented by a larger environmental quiet. A priest I met at lunch after Brother Jonas’s ordination told me that his parishioners simply have no experience of silence. In consequence, Father David and other religious leaders increasingly prescribe very basic, pragmatic experiences of silence as part of their ministry. “We’ll tell people, ‘Allow for a period of no television or music each day,’” he told me. “‘Sit alone in quiet for a while.’ And I’ve had some people—after as little as half an hour—say, ‘Father, that was the most profound thing I’ve ever experienced!’ They just have nothing comparable in their life.”

  But what do they do with that profound experience? I asked. Father Stephen, an older, retired priest who was seated at our table, said that in his experience the problem was that without silence people had no ability to understand one another. He currently oversees meetings for councils that set policy for different parishes, and he has recently stopped allowing any difficult decisions to be made by discussion. Doing so, he has found, means that “the noise makes the decision.” Instead, he sends everyone off to meditate on their own about their place in the discord. They’ll regather much later and as often as not he finds people’s minds have changed. “‘Father, I was out walking the farm, and I was thinking about how I would feel bad if I were them and the matter were to be worked out the way I said it should be.’” Perhaps this was what Saint Bernard, the patron saint of the Cistercians, meant when, in one of his letters, he cited Isaiah to the effect that “silence is the work of justice.”

  As Alberic spoke of life on the Great Plains, much of which revolved around an extraordinary work ethic, I began thinking about the laborious rigor of the monks’ own lives. It seemed a far cry from the idyll my friends had envisioned. “Why do you get up so early?” I blurted out. “Why skew the day to begin at 3:15 AM?”

  “We’re supposed to cultivate wakefulness,” Alberic said, and he described vigil, the first prayer service of the day, as a microcosm of the hyperawareness that a Cistercian monk is called to uphold at all hours. To him, Alberic said, “the darkness is a very safe space. It’s about birth. Christmas night. The night when anything can happen. The quiet, dark places are where the treasure is buried.”

  “What do you do after you’ve finished vigil?” I asked.

  “We go back to our cells and read. Monks and books just belong together. We study. We pray. We meditate. We have six free hours before our workday begins. How many rich people can say that? We call it ‘holy leisure.’ Having that time does something to your humanity.”

  Brother Neal, a tall, slender, slightly stooped man with a face that tends to cock to one side and piercing, pale eyes that crinkle and gleam, had his own perspective. “How do you relate to the fact of God being incomprehensible to us?” he asked me. Citing the twentieth-century German theologian Karl Rahner, Neal answered his rhetorical question: “Ultimately the only adequate response to God is silent adoration.” This is another idea that crosses multiple traditions, though it was slow to catch on in ancient religions. For much of antiquity, prayers were said out loud since the ears of the gods were thought to resemble gigantic human ears, requiring worshippers to make actual sound. Silent prayer was also looked on askance because the rationale for praying inaudibly was often the wish to conceal what one was praying for—taboo sex, magical powers, and criminal plunder, for example. As the gods shed their physical sensory apparatus, attitudes began to change. The late Platonists believed that, in order to reach a transcendent being, prayer itself needed to be distilled beyond the world of the senses. “Let us sacrifice in such a manner as is fit, offering different sacrifices to different natures,” wrote Porphyry, the third-century Neoplatonist. “For there is nothing material which is not immediately impure to an immaterial nature … Hence neither is vocal language nor internal speech adapted to the highest God … but we should venerate him in profound silence.” Rather than Alberic’s notion of silence serving as a reminder of dependence of being, what Neal talked about was the way that silence can represent a dissolving of all our habitual perceptions before some great truth.

  This aspect of Neal’s faith brushes up against many secular ideals of silence, often in relationship to the natural world. A famous Japanese poem about the islands of Matsushima consists only of the words, “Oh Matsushima!” The poet is so overwhelmed by the place’s beauty that he can only speak its name before he falls into silence. Many early-twentieth-century philosophies of silence resonate with this idea of an incommensurability between truth and our powers of expression. Wittgenstein ended his first book of philosophy with the proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Heidegger once declared: “Above all, silence about silence.” The French philosopher Max Picard wrote that the “silence points to a state where only being is valid.” In Picard’s view, this is “the state of the Divine.” Here Picard, a practicing Catholic, echoes many of the foundational ideas in Zen Buddhism. At one point in our conversations, Lushtak, my meditation-teacher friend, described silent meditation as an effort to “unplug from the mental story” we are constantly telling ourselves, in order to be completely attentive to the wonder of the ever-unfolding present moment.

  The Apaches, among other Native American tribes, are famous for their silence, and sociolinguistic research has found that the contexts in which silence dominates the dialogue include courtship and reunions after long separations, in which ambiguities about social roles abound. Silence seems a mark of acknowledgment of these uncertainties; the long pause gives people time to come into a new relationship with one another. The rest of us confront these same ambiguities all the time, but we often pave over them with speech and so deprive ourselves and our interlocutors both of the chance to know what it is not to know where we stand with each other—and to find new grounds for meaningful exchange.

  In some folklore rituals, silence is invested with the power not just to enrich existing relationships but to conjure up future lovers. The English tradition of the “dumb cake” involves variations on the idea of young women baking and eating a cake in absolute silence. After the women go to bed—sometimes sliding a slice of dumb cake under their pillows beforehand—visions of their husbands-to-be are supposed to appear to them. (In the eighteenth-century Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, we find the young diarist on a visit to the house of Mr. George Washington trying to persuade a friend to join her one night in eating the “dum cake,” but her friend is too spooked to take part.) There are also rituals of “Dumb Suppers,” comprising midnight meals consumed in total silence. Sometimes these suppers were rites of divination that foretold a woman’s fate in marriage; on other occasions they enabled the guests to make contact with a recently deceased loved one.

  In many traditions, silence forms a bridge to the unknowable far side of human experience, whether the searcher is gazing forward or backward in time.

  Before I left New Melleray, Alberic told me that he was going to “bend the rules a little” and take me down to a chapel reserved for the monks beneath the church that was, in his estimation, the most silent place in the abbey. He warned me that the silence in the room was so intense that it was likely to “take me outside of my c
omfort zone.” He knew of cases where people from the big city had found themselves physically unable to remain in the chapel for even five minutes.

  We descended lower and lower, and then wound our way through interminable unlit corridors. Alberic gestured for me to wait against a stone wall in a low-ceilinged hall and went on ahead of me to investigate the state of the chapel. After a minute, he returned, whispering in a low voice that he would not be able to read me the passage he’d hoped to recite as preparation for the silence since there was another monk inside the chapel. He led me forward through another door, and then we passed around a barrier wall into a small room that was completely dark except for a tiny candle in a glass at the far end, suspended from the ceiling by a chain. In the center of a row of chairs directly across from the candle, I could faintly make out the silhouette of a large man sitting with his legs wide apart and his hands on his thighs, breathing quite loudly. Alberic and I lowered ourselves into chairs along the side wall.

  Here, in this darkness, I began to feel a real gravity to the silence of the monastery, an inescapability that made me glean something of the rigor with which these men spend their lives preparing for death. The death of a monk is, in Alberic’s words, a “graduation ceremony. You haven’t persevered in the monk’s calling until you die. Death marks the point at which you’ve completed your transaction. There’s a lightness, even joy to the funeral. The night before a monk is buried, we light an Easter candle. We put two chairs on either side of the body, which has been placed in the center of the church. The candle is placed at the feet of the body. We take turns praying two by two over the body all night. And talk about entering into that silence.” Alberic shook his head. “You’d think it would be morbid or scary, but those are some of the lightest, most joyful moments in the monastery. The silence is telling you it’s going to be okay. Unless you have real psychological resistance, you know it’s going to be okay.”