How many times we observe and actively experience God’s silence when facing all sorts of injustices we somehow all go through in our lives.
As human beings we tend to rebel and ask God the ever pertinent yet unanswerable question: “Why me?”
God is a mystery. Many a time He is neither felt nor understood. Nevertheless He is present. And, for those who trust in him, his presence undoubtedly enlightens, protects and reassures. Contrary to our habitual craze and crave for efficiency and the desperate obtaining of concrete results in order to calculate our human capabilities, divine silence remains the best medicine for our physical, psychological and spiritual well-being. Divine silence helps us to detach ourselves from the hustle and bustle of everyday life so as to listen and revisit the “pillars” which sustain and nurture our lives as well as of those whom we love and care for.
Silence has been the bread and butter of Jesus’ earthly life. In the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, ‘Verbum Domini,’ Pope Benedict XVI made an interesting allusion to the Golgotha scene which powerfully portrays the role of silence in Jesus’ life. “Here we find ourselves before the ‘word of the cross’ (1 Corinthians 1:18). The word is muted; it becomes mortal silence, for it has ‘spoken’ exhaustively, holding back nothing of what it had to tell us” (§ 12). In front of this tragic silence of the cross, Saint Maximus the Confessor puts upon Mary’s lips the subsequent expression: “Wordless is the Word of the Father, who made every creature which speaks; lifeless are the eyes of the one at whose word and whose nod all living things move.”
The cross of Christ unveils a God who communicates through the vehicle of silence. In ‘Verbum Domini’, the Holy Fathers teaches: “The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word. Hanging from the wood of the cross, he lamented the suffering caused by that silence: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46). Advancing in obedience to his very last breath, in the obscurity of death, Jesus called upon the Father. He commended himself to him at the moment of passage, through death, to eternal life: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46)” (§ 12).
Silence accompanies and deepens the power of the word. Verbum Domini says: “Rediscovering the centrality of God’s word in the life of the Church also means rediscovering a sense of recollection and inner repose. The great patristic tradition teaches us that the mysteries of Christ all involve silence.
Only in silence can the word of God find a home in us, as it did in Mary, woman of the word and, inseparably, woman of silence” (§ 21). Openness to God’s Word broadens the heart to embrace God’s silence as the golden road to get to know him personally. In his 7 March catechesis ‘On the silence of Jesus’, the German Pontiff said that “the more we are open to His silence and to our silence, the more we begin to know Him truly.
This supreme confidence, which opens way to a profound encounter with God, matures in silence”. Imbued with this divine interior silence we can prayerfully affirm with Saint Francis Severio: “I love you Lord, not because you can give me heaven or condemn me to hell, but because you are my God. I love You, because You are You”.
Fr Mario Attard
OFM Cap