Into great silence

One night I woke up to a strange noise. It seemed that such as a rat had tumbled above the ceiling. But I could not be sure. The noise, which came during sleep, did not return. But I gave it time and as yet did not go back to sleep.

Whatever it was, assuming that I did not just dream but actually heard it, notwithstanding that sleep had all but totaled me, the origin of the noise forever kept its peace for the rest of the night, because I was not ever disturbed again after I declared my waiting over and resumed my snoring.

In fact after a few minutes, even after I suspected that the thud or crash would not come back, I decided to prolong my waiting and just relish the silence. I could hear the wife’s breathing, which had the gentle register of a baby’s snore. A neighbor’s dog bayed, prompting a distant rooster to crow before time. There were other sounds, mysterious and unidentifiable, but they seemed harmless, of a piece with everything else. Indeed, if it were not for silence, I would not have known the language of the night, which speaks through the casual, insignificant, minor, negligible, paltry, trivial, unimportant the  things that usually go unnoticed.

Then I said a prayer, remembering the words of St. Bruno, “Our supreme quest and goal is to find God in solitude and silence.”

Of course, St. Bruno, who founded the Carthusians, a religious order committed to a life of isolation and quiet, was addressing his monks. In 2005, Philip Gröning made the prize-winning film “Into Great Silence,” a documentary of the Carthusian Monastery in Chartreuse, France. For four and a half months he lived in the monastery and with his camera, in as unobtrusive a manner as possible, followed the monks as they went about their duties.

And so in the film we espy a monk in meditation; we hear the bell calling the hermits to prayer. We see the holy water cistern, hear the tap of shoes on wood and stone, and as bells chime see birds in flight and heads and knees bending in prayer. Gardens are cared for, wood split for the fire, food prepared and served, the Bible opened like a window to the light, and, not to forget, the famous liqueur—Chartreuse—brewed according to tradition. All this is done in silence, in which alone the interior life can thrive.

I crave that silence for myself too, though I live in a world as far from Chartreuse as night is from day, and I feel that St. Bruno’s words are likewise addressed to me. In fact, it was an invitation to solitude that Jesus extended when he said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves.

“For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

If I come to Christ, I come to silence because the purpose of silence is, according to St. Bruno, “to let the Lord utter within us a word which is equal to Himself.” Such a word is no less than the Word, the Word become flesh, Jesus himself.

When I got up that morning, it was not the sound above the ceiling that I remembered, but the silence, which, because of the wife’s breathing, the baying of the dog, the crowing of the rooster, the other little nameless unobtrusive noises, was not really an absence. Someone was speaking to me, in words that precede speech, which was why quietly, more breathed out than uttered, I answered with a prayer. How correct St. John of the Cross is. For truly, “silence is God’s first language.”