The Power of Silence

The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

by Robert Cardinal Sarah

with Nicholas Diat

translated by Michael J. Miller

This book is not a fully-formed, organized treatise on silence. It is instead a conversation between Cardinal Sarah and the reporter, Nicholas Diat. Realizing that about half-way through the book helped me to place it in perspective. I felt like he was circling around the major statements he was making, as if observing "silence" from multiple view-points but not articulating a single coherent thesis....because he wasn't.

Not that you shouldn't read this book. I think Catholics and non-Catholics alike will be gleaning insight from this book for years to come. It's a challenge to us all to eliminate the noise of our lives, both that coming from outside, which is often easy to recognize, and that coming from inside our own minds, which is much more difficult to assess and manage.

This book is presented in five chapters:

1. Silence versus the World's Noise
2. God Does Not Speak, but His Voice is Quite Clear
3. Silence, the Mystery, and the Sacred
4. God's Silence in the Face of Evil Unleashed
5. Like a Voice Crying out in the Desert: The Meeting at the Grande Chartreuse

I read this book over many months, checking it out from the library and returning it when someone else wanted it, then checking it out again. It is the kind of book that benefits from slow reading and (ironically?) required relative silence for me to grant it my full attention. I could not, therefore, read it while children were running around and interrupting me at their whim. This would be an excellent book for quiet reflection in adoration before the blessed Eucharist, reading a paragraph or two then contemplating it while gazing at our Lord.

Looking back, the first three chapters have melded together in my mind without a clear differentiation between them. In those chapters, Cardinal Sarah defined silence in contrast with the modern world, clarified its place in liturgy, prayer, and adoration, and emphasized its role for the benefit of civilizations.

A recurring thought from Cardinal Sarah is the work of God done in complete silence. He talks about the moment of transubstantiation, as the bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Jesus. This miracle happens after the words of consecration, in silence.

Mankind must join a sort of resistance movement. What will become of our world if it does not look for intervals of silence?  Without it, life does not exist. The greatest mysteries of the world are born and unfold in silence. How does nature develop? In the greatest silence. A tree grows in silence, and springs of water flow at first in the silence of the ground. The sun that rises over the earth in its splendor and grandeur warms us in silence.  What is extraordinary is always silent.

Later, he talks about Christ in the Eucharist:

There is nothing littler, meeker, or more silent than Christ present in the Host. This little piece of bread embodies the humility and perfect silence of God, his tenderness and his love for us. 

Another point he mentioned more than once and that resonated with me, a layperson who spends my day listening to my children as I wash dishes or try to help another child, is the importance of silence when interacting with other people. Our interior silence, if we can cultivate and maintain it (we must!) is what allows us to truly hear, understand, and respond to those around us.

In order to listen, it is necessary to keep quiet. I do not mean merely a sort of constraint to be physically silent and not to interrupt what someone else is saying, but rather an interior silence, in other words, a silence that not only is directed toward receiving the other person's words but also reflects a heart overflowing with a humble love, capable of full attention, friendly welcome and voluntary self-denial, and strong with the awareness of our poverty.

This focus is an outward form of our love of others and our recognition of their dignity and worth.

The silence of listening is a form of attention, a gift of self to the other, and a mark of moral generosity. It should manifest an awareness of our humility so as to agree to receive from another person a gift that God is giving us. For the other person is always a treasure and a precious gift that God offers to help us grow in humility, humanity, and nobility.

Cardinal Sarah described an experience at World Youth Day in Madrid with Pope Benedict XVI. Delayed by a storm, Pope Benedict tossed aside his prepared speech and instead kneeled before the Blessed Sacrament.

There were more than a million young people behind him, drenched to the skin, standing in the mud; nevertheless, over that immense crowd reigned an impressive sacred silence that was literally "filled with the adored presence". It is an unforgettable memory, an image of the Church united in great silence around her Lord. 

In chapter 4, Cardinal Sarah addresses the problem of evil: How do we reconcile God's silence with the horrors of the world? Cardinal Sarah has personally experienced the a violent government in Guinea. Despite violence and threats, he does not encourage rebellion. Instead he denounces injustice wherever he finds it, including in western governments.

He has also personally observed how prayer helped displaced people in turbulent times and in poverty. He asserts poverty is not a bad thing, and that the Western world's war against it is misplaced. Later, though, he makes a distinction between a poverty that brings us closer to God and a poverty that is a misery.

In the end, we cannot ever truly understand the evil we see in the world around us.

Without God, man is torn, anxious, worried, agitated, and he cannot arrive at interior rust. True life is not in rebellion but in silent adoration. Of course, we have no answer to the problem of evil; yet our task is to make it less intolerable and to offer a remedy without pride, discreetly, insofar as we can, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta and many other saints did.

The last chapter, Like a Voice Crying Out in the Desert, was my favorite. In this chapter, Nicolas Diat, Cardinal Sarah, and the Prior of the Grande Chartreuse, Dysmas de Lassus, speak together about silence. The Grande Chartreuse is the great Carthusian monastery, where monks pray, live, and eat in the Great Silence within their own cells, rarely speaking to each other.

The Prior speaks about his order's focus on silence and prayer.

We are like children who watch the ocean for the first time. Fascinated by what they see, they nevertheless guess that what is found beyond it far surpasses their gaze and even their imagination. They can simultaneously say that they have seen the ocean, that they know it, and that they have still to discover everything. When we are talking about that ocean without a shore, Gods infinitude, the mystery offers an endless overture to him whom we will never finish discovering.

We are probably a family that seeks and cultivates silence more than most. We have relatively few devices that chirp at us throughout the day and night. We do not watch the news. We spend time in adoration every week. Our vacations are spent at national parks. Reading this book was a natural outgrowth of that lifestyle and was also a challenge to me to deepen our relationship with silence and learn to address the interior silence that often still rages within me.

I highly recommend you read this book but that you take your time with it.

I checked this book out from our library and did not receive anything for writing this post. The Amazon links are affiliate links.