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“Whenever I am assailed
by melancholy and nothing is able to subtract me from it, when I am
alone, cut off and separated from the rest of the world, I know what to
do. I open a book of poetry or a sacred book and set off in search of a
sentence that will give to my legs the quivering of a strange rapture.”
1
Under certain aspects,
the experience of silence and prayer in the Bible, the encounter between
silence and human words, silence and divine Word, are narrated like a
reality sometimes of regenerating suffering, sometimes like a maturation
of wonders which are always necessary in every authentically human
growth. The Word of God cannot be functional for the states of souls of
every single man, yet it can bring to light the sense of many grey an
meaningless events as history of covenant and encounter, of struggle and
expectation.
A
complex theme
Why is there so much
fear of pause, of silence? It is not difficult to discover that many of
us suffer of horror vacui, the unbelievable uneasiness
that assails us when everything is silent and we are almost pushed to
look at the face of finite things as well as at those who seem to be
infinite. .
The printing press, the
media and the common modus vivendi, do not help us to give a
sense to forgotten dimensions. The fathers called station a form
of quiet: the desire of not worrying too much about things, to the end
of getting ready for prayer.
Why is there so much
emphasising of the media on the silences of cowardice, conspiracy of
silence and division and so much little space for such a silence as it
is light capable of generating transparent and luminous words? Why so
much noise is made in many ecclesial celebrations, just as if one could
pray only with words or with giving suggestions to God, as they do with
idols? What to do? Which direction is to be taken?
In some Biblical texts,
the one who prays intuits that hope is there where the dawn is waited
for and new signals are welcomed (Psalm 63). We know that in reading and
meditating the Word each man interprets also his own history with
emotion and personal language
Moreover, when we speak
of prayer and silence in the Bible, we must keep an eye on the
temptation of seeking theoretical definitions, because it is not typical
of the Semitic mentality to formulate theories. There exists a certain
discretion of the soul when we have to deal with these themes: we
perceive an interior uneasiness that makes us aware of how particular
the argument is. Cardinal Martini states, “…I think that prayer is a
reality we cannot speak of”.2
Waiting
in silence
In the Holy Scripture,
prayer is present as an experience of relation. We are not alone when we
pray: there is a You to whom we turn our eyes and whom we listen to.
Moreover there is the entire cosmos with its history: the sufferings and
joys of a people in a journey. As in all relations, in the Biblical
prayer silence is listening, waiting and wonder.
We should always step
back a little, opening a space when we try to listen and to make some
experience of the gift. For man this does not seem immediate joy. It is
meaningful the fact that the Hebrew mystics speaks of Simsun, the
withdrawal of God from creation so that the world may freely
unfold and express itself. “Silence acquires a positive and humanising
value in the Bible when, as an interior motion that springs forth
before the unknown, it predisposes us to catch the mystery of the other;
when it favours communion, when it is an expression of opening in
welcoming the others, above all the Other ”.3
In the Bible, as in
life, there are silences and prayers, which do not assimilate each
other. There is a non-communicable silence of division, which generates
hatred (Genesis 37, 4), and there is the silence of grief as well as of
collective weeping (Lam. 2, 10). In the first one man is silent because
he is prisoner of himself, in the second case man is silent because in
being silent he prays, invoking forgiveness and life. The prayerful
silence in some Biblical texts expresses the desire of “entrusting
oneself” also in dramatic situations from the human viewpoint, in which
existence seems to be emptied of its sense, hit by tragedy, but
surprisingly animated by the will of starting living again
We find an interesting
and suggestive passage in the Lamentations. It looks like the
end: Jerusalem speaks through the uproar of its destroyed palaces (Lam
2, 5), children die in the womb of their mother, almost swallowed up by
the abyss (Lam 2, 11).
Everything seems to speak only of destruction
“Mute, they sit on the ground, the elders of the daughters of
Zion, they have put dust on their heads and wrapped themselves in
sackcloth. The young girls of Jerusalem bow their heads to the ground.
(Lam 2,10). One
experiences the difficulty of a communication made up of hardly
believable words, but the absence of words becomes supplication, weeping
and therefore prayer.
It is a prayerful
initial prayer that leads us out of self to look at another perspective:
it is the exodus. S. Baez comments, “With their silence, the aged accept
to deserve death because of sin and assume it; acknowledging their
faults and accepting death in exile they express their faith in the God
of life at the time of suffering ».4
Their suffering is such
as it does not kill the hope of Easter, “Surely, Yahweh’s mercies are
not over” (Lam 3, 22). «Yahweh is good to those who trust him, to all
who search for Him. It is good to wait in silence for Yahweh to save »
(vv. 25-26). «To sit in solitude and silence when it weighs heavy» (v.
28).
The eyes of Jerusalem
stream with tears (Lam 1,16), but we can see hope in its silence: it is
Easter! “Salvation is the interior exultance deriving from the certainty
of God’s love. Consequently there is a very strict link between
salvation and prayer, since prayer is another way of expressing our
trust in God who loves each one personally ».5
Casting
an archway
When we try our best to
silence the mercy of the Lord, breaking the bond, silence opens the
blinds to Light! A. Neher speaks of a God with broken
archways: he allow us to build an arch on the abyss that separates
us from Him. This arch is not always made up of words, but sometimes it
is made up of gestures, of tears and even of silence: it is a mystery of
the encounter to which we can simply give the name of prayer.
It is a form of prayer,
which may seem to be unusual, yet this apparently dark silence, which
seems to express a deep distance between human life and God, allows
darkness to clear up and to assume other semblances, those of morning
silence, when we wait for dawn, which allows us to live new events.
This new day opens in
the text with the new awareness that we must go beyond, that we must
work a conversion, bowing down our head and being silent while imploring
the change. We can say with the words of the Psalmist, «Stay quiet
before Yahweh, wait lovingly for Him» (Psalm 37,7).
The psalmist draws us to
the intuition that love can be nurtured also by silence and that what
looks like a giving up is in reality an opening to communication, a
waiting for the mercy of the Lord. God’s mercy becomes evident because
of its duration, faithfulness and saving power. “In fact it is evident
that the word comes from silence, and the voice of the word is at the
same time destined to be silent; in other words: we can neither
pronounce or listen to any word if not “from silence” and “in silence”».6
In
bitterness
How to think of the
paradigmatic experience of Job, if prayer in the Bible is praise,
supplication, repentance, lamentation, that is, if it has a multitude of
shades? Such a hard story, which seems to touch absurdity, is like many
human stories, where the drama of suffering is consumed on the skin of
innocent people. If we do not start from conceiving prayer as a simple
ritual moment, the sacred text shows us how the life itself of the
believer can be silent prayer, or shouted prayer, bitter silence.
Each man fulfils his own
journey. At a certain moment, Job puts his hands on his mouth (Job: 40,
4), he starts to wonder; it is a wonder that often in life seems the
only way out, almost a compulsory way. Yet a dialogue is born from that
gesture with its go’el made up of silence and words, until
the clash will change into encounter and vision. The words Job
pronounced before God, express his interior change for a re-discovered
mystery.7
We can deduct that in the fatigue of reconciliation, which Job lives
with himself, with others and with his idea of God, there is a true
course of initiation to prayer, understood as a stay in the presence of
God, accepting and respecting His freedom: a humanly delicate
experience.
Like Job, every believer
who dialogues with the Lord precipitates into the paradox of having to
accept that the only way of escape is that of been disposed for change,
the difficult one, which is lived when what one has always thought of is
unbelievably opposed to what one will need to think of or to live. It is
about this going beyond (metànoia means just this: to go beyond)
that Job states, “Before, I knew you by hearsay but now, having seen
you with my own eyes…” (Job: 42, 5).
The knowledge of God,
which seemed to be well consolidated in the tradition represented by his
friends and by their reasoning, is a living and authentic relation. The
way of seeing, which the text speaks of, is a change of the whole
person more than a visible fact. Now, one’s way of existing and of being
before God and his mystery is different and a new listening relation is
born, “Listening supposes opening and attention; it demands a silence
able “to see” and “to hear”, granting the priority to the other: this
generates dialogue and personal communion”.8
Job pushes us to look
beyond the horizon of consolidated securities, well kept through
unforeseen ways; to understand that silence is listening to an
interlocutor who does not allow himself to be caught by our schemes and
to whom it is important to entrust oneself, maturing in hope and trust.
We may ask ourselves: is it not legitimate to state that hard dance
between silence and words of supplication may constitute the heart of
prayer? It is important that the prayer of the believer be “a cry of
the heart” and at the same time, a page of the Scripture.
Many think of not
knowing how to pray and speak of this difficulty with sorrow, above all
in certain situations of life that seem to be without any way out; yet
the Bible itself makes us to understand that we are already praying in
acknowledging a similar inadequacy and poverty. At times we pray without
saying anything because, like Job, we no longer have the strength and
this puts a hand on our mouth, at times just pronouncing the name of the
Lord, as the publican did in the temple (cf Luke: 18,13).
Authenticity and trust
An authentic prayer is
born by accepting of not being able to possess or totally understand the
truth and the sense of events, even less the mystery of God; it is
something to which we must educate ourselves and help others to do it,
to grow in the attitude of prayer understood as an authentic and
trustful dialogue with the Lord. The Bible offers the possibility to
reflect on stories like that of Job, of Eliah, of Peter just as if they
were our own story; it suggests us never to tell lies before him whose
heart is greater than our fragility (See: 1 John: 3,20).
The life of every people
is made up of struggles and humiliations, where supplication and
complaint are not missing, where falsity destroys undefended existences.
Even in these situations prayer becomes a place of discernment, of
supplication, of praise and of blessing. In a Psalm we find one who
prays (it might be any man who prays on earth) who suffers the impiety
of men. He assumes an attitude of supplication and in speaking he raises
his hands imploring the Lord not to remain silent (Psalm: 28, 1).
Though he perceives
silence on the other part, he continues to pray with the narration of
his life. Turning his body to the holiest part of the temple, he lives
the silence of God as a danger of destruction, “I am like one who
descends into the pit”. Yet he does not stop and only emptiness seems to
be behind him, but the conclusion is different from every possible
expectation: “Blessed be Yahweh for He hears the sound of my prayer” (v.
6), from the fear of praise, a praise that is not simply his own, but
belongs to the community, “Save your people, bless your heritage” (v.
9).
The man who prays has
the certainty that his prayer will not be in vain. He who prays goes
beyond silence, is totally trustful and does not want to stop his
dialogue with Him, “Perceiving Him as lack, as emptiness, is already a
relation with Him”.
9
Some silences are of
waiting, others are difficult to be interpreted. How can we ever think
that our heavenly Father will hesitate to give “good things” to his
children? (Matthew: 7,1).
The supplication must
start always from the presupposition that he who listens to us wants
only our good. The apparent indifference of God cannot stop us from
hoping, even if at the moment we have the sensation of speaking a
contrary language. The evangelist tells us who the Lord is, and the
psalmist helps us to wait, “Be silent before the Lord and hope in Him”
(Psalm: 37, 37).
Descerning
In silence we can find
the right words, we can project gestures and important choices: several
times the Scripture indicates it to us as an essential dimension of
discernment (Genesis: 24, 21) and of the human maturation, a course
where man in particular the believer, entrusts himself to another
vision, different from the one that could be perceived immediately
Many wisdom texts insist
on the need of finding a healthy relation between words and silence,
because, “Death and life are in the gift of the tongue and those who
indulge it must eat the fruit it yields” (Pr 18,21). It is clear that we
are invited never to lose contact with our interior world, to avoid
banal superficiality, which often is a source of division and ill-being.
“Whoever looks down on a neighbour lacks good sense; the intelligent
keeps a check on the tongue” (Pr 11, 12).
These texts do not refer
explicitly to prayer, but it is evident that they indicate a quality of
the existence that affects the quality of prayer. Is there any of us who
does not admit that there are days in which we truly exaggerate in
uttering words? If we do not educate ourselves to prudence, if we have
no pauses, prayer also will be a constant going back to one’s own
I, a paradoxical tentative of feeling always to be right. We need to
reflect and to quiet down (Psalm 4,5), that is, we must be silent,
because this is the way to acknowledge one’s own hardness of heart,
one’s own lies and to get ready to change deeply, as Job did.
A heart
of many silences
As we have already said,
there are many meanings attributed to silence in the Bible, yet all of
them bring to light that it is the matter of an important dimension in
the life of man who seeks answers of sense and wants to understand
where history goes, of which he is not the unique protagonist.. The
silence in the Bible, like that in life, is not always of the same
“colour”. There is the silence of him who feels fascinated by the
presence of God in the temple and perceives his own frailty (Psalm 65);
there is the silence that expresses the language of creation and
introduces us to the beauty of its mystery (Psalm 19), as well as the
silence of disquietude and of suffering presented to God (Psalm 39,10).
The Scripture depicts
carefully the itinerancy of the believer, the doubts, the pain, the
supplication and the praise, the welcoming wonder, the escape, the
clandestine situation. The New Testament presents silence to us as a
fundamental dimension of our existence, which renders the relation with
self, others and the Other truer. There is an essential way also in the
use of words, that shows a heart free from egoism, for “: «words flow
out of what fills the heart” (Matthew: 12, 34).
A similar life-style
cannot be improvised. The Gospel does not speak of silence as of one
instrument of purification, but leads us to the intuition that to grow
in love and to become adult in faith is a sine qua non. Sometimes
we must seek it, cross it, at other times we must accept it as a
compulsory passage, so that our history may get mature and be fulfilled
(Luke: 2, 51). Prayer will be the expression of a booming life, without
questioning if life is full of noises of every kind. It will be
expression of desire, of conversion, where words are reduced to a
minimum. The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke: 18, 9-14)
shows clearly how much is the value of the one and of the other.
Life is full of words
and speeches, which conceal the truth, the fear of silence and of the
interior reflection. We need the courage of discerning certain personal
and communitarian suggestions, and this can be done only in silence. It
is there that prayer becomes a keeping far from illusions; it is a light
fathoms and discovers equivocations and subtle ambitions disguised as
religion. The word becomes humbler and simpler: God is honoured with
“fear”, which is love and trust.
Note
1.
L. Singer,
Del buon uso della crisi,
Troina 2006,97. [Torna al testo]
2.
C. M.
Martini, La preghiera e la
vita, Milano 2004, 9. [Torna
al testo]
3.
S.J.Baez,
Quando tutto tace. Il
silenzio nella Bibbia,
Assisi 2007, 23. [Torna al testo]
4.
S.J.Baez,
Quando tutto tace, 40.
[Torna al
testo]
5.
A. Mello,
L’amore di Dio nei salmi,
Qiqajon, Magnano 2005,
12-13. [Torna al testo]
6.
M. Cacciari,
«La parolaa dal e nel
silenzio», in Il Messaggero, 2007/5,39. [Torna al
testo]
7.
S.J.Baez,
Quando tutto tace,
114-115. [Torna al testo]
8.
Ibidem,
116. [Torna al testo]
9.
S.J.Baez,
Quando tutto tace,
181. [Torna
al testo]
Antonietta
Augruso
Via Eurialo, 91/16A – 00181 Roma
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