Silence: Cultivating the atmosphere of our communication with God.
P. Alexander P. Zatyrka P., SJ
- Why is there so much talk about silence?
Lately, a lot has been written and said about silence. A contemporary author -trappist monk- writes in one of his works how he felt astounded when he first left his monastery to discover the amount of talk about silence in secular life. It was no less astonishing the number of books published concerning this matter. The fascination with the topic called his attention especially because it was of no interest for monks in a life of enclosure. The monks did not speak about it or worry with the teaching of silence. He understood that people from the world talked about silence because they needed it a lot. In an agitated and scattered world everyone seemed in need of some peace and quiet.
I have dedicated this last decade of my life to a subject that I am passionate about: The experience of God. This encounter with the Mystery is capable of radically transforming the human beingand has been registered in different cultural and religious traditions. Such encounter transforms lives for the better takingus to an experience of harmony and plenitude that translates into a desire to live in communion with everyone and everything. I am passionate about going deeperinto the details of this experience,what makes it easier and what makes it more difficult. As a matter of fact, my research has been focused precisely on the process ofapproaching the experience of God. To this spiritual “didactic” that enables us to perceive the Mystery consciously we give the name of Mystagogy. In my studies on this subject I have come to notice that cultivating solitude and silence are two essential elements to open oneself to the experience of transcendence.
- Silence: experience of God and mystagogy
My definition of mystagogy is: “a practical (2), experiential (3) journey (1) that helps (4) believers come closer to the Mystery (5) introducing them to God’s life (6) as an experience of communion (7). This is our salvation, our healing (8). Let’s study each element in more depth.
(1)The journey.It references an itinerary that a person goes through; they move through it (with the intention of evolving, growing and maturing). Personally, I prefer the word itinerary over process. Itinerary implies a free person that decides to start walking with a goal and make decisions about the path to follow. The word “process” seems more related to inanimate objects that are subdued to a series of tasks to achieve an end which is extrinsic to them. That is why the human spiritual journey is an itinerary and not in a process, in which we are oriented by our reason, our freedom to make decisions and our quest for the meaning of life. This itinerary is a part of our quest for re-connection (religare) between our life experience and the Absolute that gives harmony and direction to everything that is.
(2)Practical. Mystagogy’sitinerary is more practical than theoretical. Is not as important to speculate about the journey as it is to start it and experience it. Every mystagogy offers a number of practical elements to properly open us up to the perception of the Absolute. These are not abstract concepts but actions and dispositions that each person can make real in their daily lives.
(3)Experiential.The traveled itinerary has repercussions in the life of the traveler. They are not the same personever again. Remember that the word experience that we use in the expression “experience of God” comes from the Indo-European root «per-»which means “try, test, risk, hurt, mark,” placed with the prefix«ex-»that connotes “out, outside, to go looking for,” which leads us to the experience of personal learning done when we go beyond ourselves to meet something (someone) who leaves a deep mark.
(4)Help.Mystagogy is simply a tool in our search for the encounter with “the definite,” with God. This tool can never substitute the encounter itself. They are simple enablers that allow us to cultivate an inner disposition to perceive the subtle voice of the divine communication.
(5)To come closer to the Mystery. We could say that mystagogy takes us closer to the encounter. Nevertheless, every encounter between people implies the use of freedom from both sides. Hence, when two subjects meet it has to be willingly. Mystagogy helps us to put all our efforts towards the communication with God, but in the end, this meeting is a “grace,” a gift which God grants us freely. We do everything we can to place ourselves in God’s tuning and we wait to distinguish what the Mystery wants to transmit us.
(6)Introducing us to God’s life. Every mystagogicaljourney leads to this meeting, that implies a submersion in the Mystery (in which we live, move and be). God enters us to hisdynamism of Love, making us participate of his life, which is precisely Love.
(7)As an experience of communion. We Christians believe in a God which is not a solitude overturned on itself, but a community of Love (three persons [hypostasis]: Father, Son and Holy Spirit with mutual, free and complete conveyance in one nature: God.) We are the image of that God (cfr. Gen 1:26), therefore we are also people (hypostasis) drawn to form one nature (human nature) through Love; that is to say,giving yourself completely, freely and mutually with Christ as center and bridge to the trinitarian community. To live the communion is to live in God’s way. Communion with God, with others, with ourselves. This is every spiritual itinerary’s goal.
(8)This is our healing, our salvation. True life, definite (zoé in Greek) is precisely to access communion. Loving as God teaches us is healing. It is fair to say that we are saved because we have reached the goal to which we all aspire: the encounter with the Loved One, without division or confusion.
- God’s experience and life in communion
To experience God is to “be-with”, of “living-with.” It is focused on the perception of a Presence in relationship with us, omnipresent but never obvious. In it we experience that the deepest and most intimate of us comes from Someone else, it is a donation (it is God). Saint Agustine said: “Oh old beauty always new, You were in me and I was out of myself.”
God’s experience, mystagogy’s goal, is not the experience of an “I am” in front of a “you are,” but rather of a “we are,” or better yetof a “being together,” without division or confusion.Playing with language: being in God is noticing that the expression “I am” is illusory;the only true expression is “I are,” or else, “we am.”God integrate us to His own Dynamism of “love that is given, love that is received, love that is shared.” Respecting our identity, he shows us how to beourselves to the fullest, with God and from Him. That is what Paul expressed in that beautiful phrase that described his experience with God in Gal 2:20 “I live, but I don’t live [alone], Christ lives in me.”
Nevertheless, to get to this goal we cannot spare the journey. Like any path, Mystagogy or spiritual itinerary has a sequence and a direction: there is a beginning, a development and an end.There are stages to go through and stages that require that we consolidate the previous one. It has come to my attention that in every mystagogy I have crossed paths with the first step is always to rehabilitate the preceptive capacity of the human being, its contemplative mood.
4. Rehabilitate our capacity of perception, of contemplating.
The human being is naturally contemplative. It is enough to witness the observant attitude of babies and infants. They seem to be totally absorbed “intaking” perceptibly that which lays before them.In this stage of our lives, our perception was not distortedfor what later on will become our “pre-judice,” a collection of expectations that lead us to judge (evaluate) the sensory stimuli that we receive, to catalogue them as agreeable/desirable or disagreeable/undesirable.
There is nothing wrong with this valuating quality, per se. The problem is that these judgements go turning into “pre-judice,” hidden interests that distort what we make out. Unconsciously we catalogue some reality data as undesirable (or at least useless) and we don’t even “see it.” The prejudiced mind is literally blind to some reality data just because it does not pair with their expectations. We want reality (circumstances, things and people) to fulfill our desires (prejudice) and if it does not happen this way we just ignore it.Our discriminatory perception has formed a fake image of God and everything that fails to comply we simply ignore it unconsciously, “we don´t perceive it.” That is why, at times, we feel like God “is not talking to us anymore.”
God’s experience is basically to stop tending oneself (of ego and its prejudice) to start paying attention to the others, which Presence and communication transforms us, “hurts” us, “marks” us.It is to take the risk to receive a gift, to give oneself. The experience of God is “God giving Himself.” He already said that God is always there, but it is not obvious. It requires of us an attitude that allows us to perceive Him. We have to learn to tune in the “frequency” in which God “broadcasts.”
5. God is a person, you cannot find Him as if it was a “thing”
We perceive God when we find ourselves in a “theopathic state” (from the Greek theós, God and pathos, feel) that is also known as “theological attitude.” This is an inner disposition that enables us to perceive God’s “subtle” communication.This delicacy inherent to the divine communication is due to the fact that we are not meeting with an object. God is not an object, He is a subject. Any pretention to relate to God as an object leads to the disappearance of the perception of his presence.
Usually, when we want to know something, we approach it guided by reason, to see if we found an object, we capture it and apprehend it. Having that approach as the only way of “being in reality” translates into an epistemology (way of knowing/learning) that leads us to believe that we can know someone or something without loving it. This attitude can bring along serious consequences in the way that we perceive the world; it becomes fatal when we try to apply it to subjects; to other people in which we count God.
Pauline anthropology tells us that we are constituted by three estates:
- body (soma)
- mind (psyche)
- spirit (pneúma, nous).
The first two are material (object); the last one is spiritual (subject). Among us we can access some data of the identity of the other in a purely somatic or psychic way, like, for example, age details, genera, health, mood, etc. Furthermore, there are identity elements that I cannot perceive unless I engage in a loving relationship with the subject.
God is a “pure subject” that cannot be experimented as an object but only as a “relationship” of donation between subjects.To manifest (or deepen) it requires our consent as an embrace and answer. In other words, God’s presence is revealed when you love him.It becomes very difficult to perceive without this attitude of loving embrace.
6. Theological attitude:
Develop sensitivity to interact with people
Theological attitude is an inner disposition that allows us to break free from our prejudice and selfcentering to open oneself to the encounter with the Other that is willing to communicate with us. It is an inner state that makes us perceptive and that one can cultivate through practical exercises. For a better understanding we can approach some of its fundamental characteristics:
1.Cultivating Solitude and Silence. (exercising the capability of listening). It is here where the original issue of our discussion is located: silence. The title is described as part of the atmosphere to cultivate a relationship with God. The believer doesn’t look for silence alone, nor solitude by itself. We look for them because they are necessary to communicate deeply with our interlocutor. Solitude and silence are necessary to counteract the dispersion that prevails in our lives. We believe in the fallacy that we can attend diligently several things at once, this is a pernicious attitude in interpersonal relationships. Dispersion equals superficiality. This “chronic distraction” stops communion. An environment of solitude allows us to focus allour attention on the other and silence helps us remove distractions tolive the true attention, essential for the encounter.
2.Right attention: Together with solitude and silence, being aware of others is essential to relationships amongst people, to love relationships in God’s way.But it is not any kind of attention, the right attention has at the same time several characteristics that could be described as crucial.The first Christians called this attention with the Greek name Nepsis, which means surveillance, an inner disposition neededto live love as a mutual “presence.” They described it as being totally aware of reality, from which God speaks to us. It has three fundamental elements:
2.1. Relaxed perception: Ability to notice, feel, register what reality presents to me, without anxiety or restlessness.
2.2. Embrace: Learn to accept reality as it is before trying to change it. It would seem as if we were compulsive nonconformers: before knowing what really lies before us we have already judged it and we intend to change it to suit our expectations.We need to learn to embrace reality as it is to get to know it and later we can think if it is ours to transform or not. The task can be summarized as “so it is and so it can be.”This task requires that we learn to “let be.” It teaches us to avoid compulsive rejection.
2.3. Availability: On the other hand, as our nonconformity takes us to shove off everything that we do not like, we try to keep or “freeze” that which we do like. But reality is not like that, it is always changing. It is important to let it flow without pretending to control or possess it. As we learnt to let be we should also learn to “let go.” Thus, we free ourselves from a distractive compulsion, the attachment.
1.Disoriented. The third element of the theological attitude. We could describe it as putting momentarily in parenthesis our costume of being “in control;” of saying what we want; what works for us and working actively to get it. It is about changing our logic and risk entering the gratitude dimension. Place our attention and energy to what is been given to us. The so called “intentional inversion”is useful in this matter; momentarily lay off our orientation towards being “reactive and proactive” and stop worrying, and instead embrace what it is offered and give what is asked of us. This attitude is referred to in John’s First: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” (1Jn 4: 10-19). We are invited to stop pretending to know God and embrace the way in which we are known by Him; not pretending to love God but to perceive how we are loved by God, learn to live our lives as loved. It is the exercise of giving oneself to the “Summoning Presence.” This develops in us an attitude of those who receive life as a gift and quit “appropriating” nothing. This free us of the anxiety of getting, possessing and defending and allows us to learn how to enjoy the present, especially the way in which theOther is donated to us, that is, He loves us giving Himself to us.
2.Peace (Also calledhesiquíain Greek from where the contemplative Christian prayer: “hesychastprayer” is derived), it means tolive in harmony, with a healthy inner balance. To grow in the ability to perceive and ignoring (deactivate) mechanisms that trigger our anxiety. When we are anxious we do not attend our listener. The other person must compete against our “worries.” An important part of spiritual life is learning how to ignore the automatics that control our fears, worries and insecurities that feed them.
3.Gathering, Care not to be “scattered/ dispersed.” It is to draw the attention that the meaning of our term devil/devilish is exactly that. From the Greek diáboloswhich in Spanish means “scattered,” literally “per-verse;” in other words it “spreads” its life where it shouldn´t and waists it. Facing this tendency to desegregation it is important to cultivate gathering, which involves integration and unity, that in Greek is called símbolos.
4.Trust,is to be able to meet the Other in an experience of mutual donation.It is crucial to be in a space where you feel safe and your integrity is not threatened. Thus, in ancient Christianity there was an intention to provide a space in which those who were isolated, the ones that participated in a retreat,were pulled away from the hustle of the daily life, so they could feel protected and out of danger. This experience is fundamental for the seventh element of the theological attitude:
5.Abandonment, be able to “abandon” oneself in the encounter, in better words, in the Other. Living the inner disposition to surrender to communion, trusting completely in He who embraces us.
6.Reverence, an attitude of astonishment, respect and abiding in the face of infinite Mystery. This suggestsrecognizing (making us aware) who this Creator God and Lord of everything that exists is; at the same timeHe is a loving Father that wants to live in profound intimacy with us, that cares about every single detail of our lives. Reverence means abiding, embracing joyfully the invitations that this infinite and close God makes to me to live in consonance with its will that we love as He loves us.
7.The cultivation of the theological attitude develops in us the sensibility that empowers us for the encounter with the Innocent