Integrity Magazine - 1951 - Silent Apostolate
Jun 7, 2018 11:34:46 GMT
Post by Admin on Jun 7, 2018 11:34:46 GMT
archive.org/details/Integrityfebruary1951Vol.5No.5
When I first read these lines by the New Zealand poet, Eileen Duggan, I thought they were written just for me! In those days I used to skip class sometimes on spring afternoons and walk for miles along the abandoned railroad tracks that ran in back of the college. From this retreat, remote and
peaceful, I viewed life and all human experience with an inspired and penetrating gaze.
Words came so easily to me then. They would fit almost any subject with hardly an effort. I could interpret love, death, loss. God help me, I could all but explain His Mysteries!
Afterward it was different. When I had to face life itself I found myself lost on a windy street with no lights in any window, dust blowing into my face, all my little wisdoms wasted. A bitter time, failure, disappointment, necessities unsatisfied!
One day after months of bewilderment I took out the note-book in which I had been scribbling down thoughts that came to me from time to time. Looking at the pages I suddenly knew that Almighty God did not like what I had written there. Although I could not understand or accept what was happening to me, I sensed dimly that I could not at that moment express my thoughts without displeasing Him.
Words had turned traitors. They mocked what they intended to convey. I saw with terror that in my bitterness I might even make a mockery of the divine plan.
Furiously I tore out the pages and threw them away. The empty notebook I tossed into a corner of my drawer. For years it lay disregarded under a pile of clothing. I would not try to describe what I endured until I knew why I endured it.
By a mystery of providence, my life thereafter was to consist in living out pain by pain, loneliness by loneliness, failure by failure, what I had so unerringly described with a sort of intuition in my early poems. But this time the glamor of the happy phrase was missing. The inspiring music that makes scenes of crisis so dramatic on the movie screen was played no more.
Since then I have never undertaken to write anything without having to overcome sharp rebellion, the most exquisite mental and physical torture. Worst of all are the endless well meant queries of those whose ivory towers I so summarily deserted: Where are all those lovely poems you used to write?
I remember years ago asking some question in religion class with all the pride of youthful conceit: "Suppose God had . . . could He have . . .?"
Our teacher, tall and formidable in his black cassock, came down the aisle with giant stride and a voice of thunder as if to annihilate me where I stood. "Never," he shouted, "never, never, never speak about Almighty God like that again!" I realized what he meant. I knew that the Israelites of old
•did not even name the Almighty, but they called Him Nameless — He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named.
When God told us about His dearest creation, He chose to use very few words. He cast about the Blessed Mother a veil of silence in which her immaculate beauty and purity might remain forever safe from prying eyes.
She moves through the Scriptures in deepest secrecy, her coming heralded in paradoxes: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son: and His Name shall be called Emmanuel." Her praises are sung in delicate metaphors: "Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun." Her comings and goings are hidden and humble, often in darkness. We read of the vision of Saint Joseph, who, after being warned by the angel, "arose and took the child and his mother by night and retired into Egypt." Her words are so few we hardly hear her speak.
God evidently did not wish her to be interviewed at crucial moments in her life. Her thoughts, joys, griefs, even her glories remain mysterious to us. Artists have painted tears on the face of the Pieta. Poets have tried to elaborate the Magnificat. But Mary is "a garden enclosed." Her presence through the ages remains unchangeable, quiet, peaceful, unexploited.
Only the innocent see her when she appears on earth. Sophisticates marvel or doubt — their eyes probably blinded by their own impurities. She trusts neither reporter nor photographer, but the uncorrupted eyes of some simple person whose poor and plain vocabulary is so maddening to our articulate generation.
When the young Jew, Alphonse de Ratisbonne, stood before her statue, Our Blessed Lady did not even need to speak. She did not plead with him to receive the faith. She explained no doctrines. She did not even move. She merely looked at him, and that look was so expressive, so compelling, that presence so real that he was converted immediately.
Words may clarify, it is true. But they may also corrupt. To use too many words is not merely bad taste. It is impure. The senses crave endless satisfaction. Our imagination calls up picture after picture, blurring, obscuring, often defiling the subject with its outpourings.
Words have become our temptors, no longer our servants. We participate in a sort of perpetual Gallup poll. We must be ready at all times, whether waiting on the street corner for a bus or peeling the potatoes for dinner, to give views for publication on world politics, antibiotics, atomic fission. Millions earn their living in our society by frantically condensing events so that we can all have a talking acquaintance with the universe. To be
able to speak well, to say much about many subjects, is a criterion of social success. The unfortunate popularization of psychological terminology has led to a morbid emphasis upon subjective reactions to all situations.
Even the Ineffable comes under the scalpel of our little minds. We continually snatch at meanings, no matter how holy, how much to be revered, grabbing at transcendent significances with our clumsy and destructive phrases.
But truth itself is chaste. Only the chaste pen captures it. Escaping the nets of our literary constructions it takes refuge in a few simple words that have entirely lost their meaning for us, and so conceal all meaning. Goodness. Love. Peace.
If we would tell the truth, we must learn the value of silence, for silence is the purity of language, the sole explanation of life's deepest meanings.
It's so hard for us to accept this limitation of language. We always find we have so much to say. We rush about in a flurry of words, explaining ourselves, talking about many subjects, making endless remarks, smiling at our own verbal victories. We wish above all to make ourselves clearly understood, to explain our very being almost, if that were possible.
Then suddenly our mouths are stopped by an intruder's hand. We are cast into a frightening and unaccustomed silence. Immovable, imprisoned, transfixed, we grope for the words which used to serve us so readily. They blunder in darkness and trail off hopelessly. They express nothing of what we really feel. Experience becomes too sharp, too significant, too piercing, too comprehensive. A kind God perhaps wishes to paralyze our tongues
for a while so that we may hear Him.
But we do not know this yet. We feel ourselves cut off like lepers from other men. As if suffering alone were not enough of a stigma, we must also be ashamed because we are inarticulate, like strangers in our own land, dumb objects of ridicule. Up until now, we never dreamed it existed — this silence that is now visited upon us like some relentless gaoler. We crave to be understood, to receive sympathy. In our pride we want to make excuses
To the saints silence is precious. They desire more than anything else to be taken for fools. It is an admirable disguise which leaves them marvelously free to pursue the divine conversation. Our Blessed Lord very often sees to it that His loved ones are quite hidden. He wishes no doubt to spare His love from human stares. He hides them down in the kitchen among the pots and pans. He hides them behind a grotesque face or a dull personality, in extravagantly foolish clown suits and in beggar's rags, in old housedresses, and, with a rather humorous touch, he even hides them in monasteries and convents so that their fellow religious don't recognize them.
"Whatever will Reverend Mother find to say about Sister Therese when she is dead," wonders the nun in the Carmel at Lisieux as she reflects on the customary eulogy given by the superior whenever one of the community dies. "There is really nothing noteworthy about her!"
You see the Bridegroom will go to any length to be alone with His Beloved!
The question arises: That's all very well for them. But what about us? If we accept this silence that is forced upon us, doesn't this mean that we shall be withdrawing from our fellow-man, denying him the companionship, the consolation, the services that charity demands?
I think it is just the opposite. Of course we are not talking about the silence of the stoic, or of the moody, or of the defeated. Not that tragic silence of those who are turning away from life " altogether to the desolation within. We don't mean never speaking either, because for us who live in the world that would mean denying charity.
We are describing an attitude, a pattern, a discipline rather than its opposite, which is noise, pride, confusion, endless explanations to keep face before men.
We are trying to point out the horizons of speech.
Here is something I tore out of a magazine years ago, Commonweal I think, from an article by Father Jean de Menasce:
Francis was a poet as well as a saint. Yet he never wrote a poem, I think, about the fiery Seraph he met on Mount Alvernia, who came down to make visible on his body the wounds of the Passion that Francis had so long borne in his heart. Assisi was not told of this. Francis tried to hide it. Didn't he scold the worried brother who came to look for him?
Yet from these wounds hidden on his poor body flowed a stream of love that took in all of creation — men, beasts, flowers. It was a love so prodigal that only the universe could contain it, expressing itself in mountainous stupendous acts of charity.
The conversation between God and the soul must be carried on in silence. Its expression is not words; it is the abundance of charity which goes out to other men and takes their needs for its own duty.
Perhaps when we give up trying to explain ourselves, we begin to understand others better. Considering the inexpressible secrets of our own hearts, we can easily respect the secrets of those others around us, so close, yet so remote. We find ourselves acting toward others in consideration of the inexpressible — and we don't mind taking second place to their primary conversation, which is with God.
The silence of God's will for us becomes a sort of window through which we view other men in a more detached way. We no longer think so much of our own discouragement and heartache. Our wounds no longer demand redress, but those of others become unbearable to us. Even our tears are hidden now, lest sympathy or curiosity cheapen them. How much more hidden are the tears of those who suffer more? In our abandonment our
And in our anguished times what is better than to preach peace? To be peace! Once we have given up that competition with others that makes us feverishly strive to "keep up," we immediately remove one of the main causes of our habitual disquiet. Never mind any more what people will think. They are already too wrapped up in their own various despairs to notice us very much. And just think how good it is for them if we are able to
keep our peace in the midst of so much turmoil, so many opinions and conflicts. Our presence may do more than thousands of words.
Sometimes when we come face to face with holy persons, we are disappointed because they speak about something quite ordinary. They tell some amusing little story. They offer us a cup of coffee. At any rate they seem entirely irrelevant to our burning issues. But later on it comes to us that what they said, what they did, cast more light on the problem than endless discussions we have had with others.
This is the true understanding — implicit, fruitful, reverent. Gerard Hopkins put it tersely in a little quatrain:
Saint Benedict Joseph Labre put it another way, equally terse, one April morning in 1785 when he fell down on the steps of Santa Maria dei Monti in Rome. Some passersby picked him up, carried him next door and laid him on a bed. He was dead in a few minutes. Maybe the shock of lying on a bed once more after thirteen homeless years hastened the end. But when they looked at him they saw only a poor wandering tramp. He hadn't a thing
to his name except the torn coat, the rosary around his neck, the crucifix on his breast, one or two pious books in his pocket. So far as we know, he never preached or wrote a word. He died as silently as he had lived. Yet Rome which has revelled in the eloquence and rhetoric of all the ages took this man of silence and made him one of its special patrons, its holy places holier for having been his home.
I think that is what Eileen Duggan meant in the last lines of that poem I quoted in the beginning.
- Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Excerpt:
The Silent Apostolate
"What is the poet's ecstasy? A flying.
The soul unjessed darts upward, crying, crying..."
The soul unjessed darts upward, crying, crying..."
When I first read these lines by the New Zealand poet, Eileen Duggan, I thought they were written just for me! In those days I used to skip class sometimes on spring afternoons and walk for miles along the abandoned railroad tracks that ran in back of the college. From this retreat, remote and
peaceful, I viewed life and all human experience with an inspired and penetrating gaze.
Words came so easily to me then. They would fit almost any subject with hardly an effort. I could interpret love, death, loss. God help me, I could all but explain His Mysteries!
Afterward it was different. When I had to face life itself I found myself lost on a windy street with no lights in any window, dust blowing into my face, all my little wisdoms wasted. A bitter time, failure, disappointment, necessities unsatisfied!
One day after months of bewilderment I took out the note-book in which I had been scribbling down thoughts that came to me from time to time. Looking at the pages I suddenly knew that Almighty God did not like what I had written there. Although I could not understand or accept what was happening to me, I sensed dimly that I could not at that moment express my thoughts without displeasing Him.
Words had turned traitors. They mocked what they intended to convey. I saw with terror that in my bitterness I might even make a mockery of the divine plan.
Furiously I tore out the pages and threw them away. The empty notebook I tossed into a corner of my drawer. For years it lay disregarded under a pile of clothing. I would not try to describe what I endured until I knew why I endured it.
By a mystery of providence, my life thereafter was to consist in living out pain by pain, loneliness by loneliness, failure by failure, what I had so unerringly described with a sort of intuition in my early poems. But this time the glamor of the happy phrase was missing. The inspiring music that makes scenes of crisis so dramatic on the movie screen was played no more.
Since then I have never undertaken to write anything without having to overcome sharp rebellion, the most exquisite mental and physical torture. Worst of all are the endless well meant queries of those whose ivory towers I so summarily deserted: Where are all those lovely poems you used to write?
The Divine Silence
I remember years ago asking some question in religion class with all the pride of youthful conceit: "Suppose God had . . . could He have . . .?"
Our teacher, tall and formidable in his black cassock, came down the aisle with giant stride and a voice of thunder as if to annihilate me where I stood. "Never," he shouted, "never, never, never speak about Almighty God like that again!" I realized what he meant. I knew that the Israelites of old
•did not even name the Almighty, but they called Him Nameless — He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named.
When God told us about His dearest creation, He chose to use very few words. He cast about the Blessed Mother a veil of silence in which her immaculate beauty and purity might remain forever safe from prying eyes.
She moves through the Scriptures in deepest secrecy, her coming heralded in paradoxes: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son: and His Name shall be called Emmanuel." Her praises are sung in delicate metaphors: "Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun." Her comings and goings are hidden and humble, often in darkness. We read of the vision of Saint Joseph, who, after being warned by the angel, "arose and took the child and his mother by night and retired into Egypt." Her words are so few we hardly hear her speak.
God evidently did not wish her to be interviewed at crucial moments in her life. Her thoughts, joys, griefs, even her glories remain mysterious to us. Artists have painted tears on the face of the Pieta. Poets have tried to elaborate the Magnificat. But Mary is "a garden enclosed." Her presence through the ages remains unchangeable, quiet, peaceful, unexploited.
Only the innocent see her when she appears on earth. Sophisticates marvel or doubt — their eyes probably blinded by their own impurities. She trusts neither reporter nor photographer, but the uncorrupted eyes of some simple person whose poor and plain vocabulary is so maddening to our articulate generation.
When the young Jew, Alphonse de Ratisbonne, stood before her statue, Our Blessed Lady did not even need to speak. She did not plead with him to receive the faith. She explained no doctrines. She did not even move. She merely looked at him, and that look was so expressive, so compelling, that presence so real that he was converted immediately.
It seems paradoxical. But Our Lord, remember, did not merely preach the Word. He was the Word. Yet the redemption was accomplished, not on the lecture platform, not in the most sublime poetry, but on the Cross.
Conversation Made in Heaven
Words may clarify, it is true. But they may also corrupt. To use too many words is not merely bad taste. It is impure. The senses crave endless satisfaction. Our imagination calls up picture after picture, blurring, obscuring, often defiling the subject with its outpourings.
Words have become our temptors, no longer our servants. We participate in a sort of perpetual Gallup poll. We must be ready at all times, whether waiting on the street corner for a bus or peeling the potatoes for dinner, to give views for publication on world politics, antibiotics, atomic fission. Millions earn their living in our society by frantically condensing events so that we can all have a talking acquaintance with the universe. To be
able to speak well, to say much about many subjects, is a criterion of social success. The unfortunate popularization of psychological terminology has led to a morbid emphasis upon subjective reactions to all situations.
Even the Ineffable comes under the scalpel of our little minds. We continually snatch at meanings, no matter how holy, how much to be revered, grabbing at transcendent significances with our clumsy and destructive phrases.
But truth itself is chaste. Only the chaste pen captures it. Escaping the nets of our literary constructions it takes refuge in a few simple words that have entirely lost their meaning for us, and so conceal all meaning. Goodness. Love. Peace.
If we would tell the truth, we must learn the value of silence, for silence is the purity of language, the sole explanation of life's deepest meanings.
The Failure of Language
It's so hard for us to accept this limitation of language. We always find we have so much to say. We rush about in a flurry of words, explaining ourselves, talking about many subjects, making endless remarks, smiling at our own verbal victories. We wish above all to make ourselves clearly understood, to explain our very being almost, if that were possible.
Then suddenly our mouths are stopped by an intruder's hand. We are cast into a frightening and unaccustomed silence. Immovable, imprisoned, transfixed, we grope for the words which used to serve us so readily. They blunder in darkness and trail off hopelessly. They express nothing of what we really feel. Experience becomes too sharp, too significant, too piercing, too comprehensive. A kind God perhaps wishes to paralyze our tongues
for a while so that we may hear Him.
But we do not know this yet. We feel ourselves cut off like lepers from other men. As if suffering alone were not enough of a stigma, we must also be ashamed because we are inarticulate, like strangers in our own land, dumb objects of ridicule. Up until now, we never dreamed it existed — this silence that is now visited upon us like some relentless gaoler. We crave to be understood, to receive sympathy. In our pride we want to make excuses
for our actions. We cry out, but the silent winds carry off our voice. Our tears fall, burning and futile, into an ocean of silence. We wish so much to justify our existence. If only we could speak! Yet He holds us there speechless.
Priceless Cloak
To the saints silence is precious. They desire more than anything else to be taken for fools. It is an admirable disguise which leaves them marvelously free to pursue the divine conversation. Our Blessed Lord very often sees to it that His loved ones are quite hidden. He wishes no doubt to spare His love from human stares. He hides them down in the kitchen among the pots and pans. He hides them behind a grotesque face or a dull personality, in extravagantly foolish clown suits and in beggar's rags, in old housedresses, and, with a rather humorous touch, he even hides them in monasteries and convents so that their fellow religious don't recognize them.
"Whatever will Reverend Mother find to say about Sister Therese when she is dead," wonders the nun in the Carmel at Lisieux as she reflects on the customary eulogy given by the superior whenever one of the community dies. "There is really nothing noteworthy about her!"
You see the Bridegroom will go to any length to be alone with His Beloved!
But for us the way to silence is indeed painful. What is offered as a penance may become a gift only if we accept the penance. Have you ever noticed how seldom the poor complain of their lot? No, beneath their crushing burdens they are silent, leaving someone else to speak for them. Silence is their dignity, their last privacy. And so with us. It enables us to keep our peace even when we must appear before the world wearing only our sins and sufferings.
The Golden Tongue of Charity
The question arises: That's all very well for them. But what about us? If we accept this silence that is forced upon us, doesn't this mean that we shall be withdrawing from our fellow-man, denying him the companionship, the consolation, the services that charity demands?
I think it is just the opposite. Of course we are not talking about the silence of the stoic, or of the moody, or of the defeated. Not that tragic silence of those who are turning away from life " altogether to the desolation within. We don't mean never speaking either, because for us who live in the world that would mean denying charity.
We are describing an attitude, a pattern, a discipline rather than its opposite, which is noise, pride, confusion, endless explanations to keep face before men.
We are trying to point out the horizons of speech.
Here is something I tore out of a magazine years ago, Commonweal I think, from an article by Father Jean de Menasce:
It is not easy to live, to love, to act in the invisible, the impalpable, and in silence. This Invisible, this Impalpable, this Silent One is not only the origin and end of our acts, our gifts, our conversations and our love; He prolongs our acts and gives them motion. Yet animated by this Silent One we see ourselves as ridiculous dancers whom no heard music — not even an inner music — explains.
For months, for years, the priest stumbles, trips and dances to this music which no one hears — not even he. Is there a difference between the priest and the lunatic? The lunatic acts, speaks, gesticulates like Napoleon. But he is not Napoleon. Dancing to this imperceptible music I am perhaps a lunatic. Like a lunatic I go deeper and deeper into a fearful solitude, a solitude bound by no walls. But then, in order to reassure his tortured priest, God shows him very simply that he is not a lunatic. For the priest entering deeper into the Silent One, living faithful to the Silent One, is not — as is the lunatic — continuously more isolated and separated from men who smoke, chase girls, go to the movies. The deeper he advances, the more he is
held to men; he becomes a friend, he understands other men, other men trust him. ...
For months, for years, the priest stumbles, trips and dances to this music which no one hears — not even he. Is there a difference between the priest and the lunatic? The lunatic acts, speaks, gesticulates like Napoleon. But he is not Napoleon. Dancing to this imperceptible music I am perhaps a lunatic. Like a lunatic I go deeper and deeper into a fearful solitude, a solitude bound by no walls. But then, in order to reassure his tortured priest, God shows him very simply that he is not a lunatic. For the priest entering deeper into the Silent One, living faithful to the Silent One, is not — as is the lunatic — continuously more isolated and separated from men who smoke, chase girls, go to the movies. The deeper he advances, the more he is
held to men; he becomes a friend, he understands other men, other men trust him. ...
Francis was a poet as well as a saint. Yet he never wrote a poem, I think, about the fiery Seraph he met on Mount Alvernia, who came down to make visible on his body the wounds of the Passion that Francis had so long borne in his heart. Assisi was not told of this. Francis tried to hide it. Didn't he scold the worried brother who came to look for him?
Yet from these wounds hidden on his poor body flowed a stream of love that took in all of creation — men, beasts, flowers. It was a love so prodigal that only the universe could contain it, expressing itself in mountainous stupendous acts of charity.
The conversation between God and the soul must be carried on in silence. Its expression is not words; it is the abundance of charity which goes out to other men and takes their needs for its own duty.
Perhaps when we give up trying to explain ourselves, we begin to understand others better. Considering the inexpressible secrets of our own hearts, we can easily respect the secrets of those others around us, so close, yet so remote. We find ourselves acting toward others in consideration of the inexpressible — and we don't mind taking second place to their primary conversation, which is with God.
The silence of God's will for us becomes a sort of window through which we view other men in a more detached way. We no longer think so much of our own discouragement and heartache. Our wounds no longer demand redress, but those of others become unbearable to us. Even our tears are hidden now, lest sympathy or curiosity cheapen them. How much more hidden are the tears of those who suffer more? In our abandonment our
one desire is to console others, for only in this way can we ourselves be consoled. The silence that was at first such a humiliation now becomes our greatest comfort.
Holy Peace
And in our anguished times what is better than to preach peace? To be peace! Once we have given up that competition with others that makes us feverishly strive to "keep up," we immediately remove one of the main causes of our habitual disquiet. Never mind any more what people will think. They are already too wrapped up in their own various despairs to notice us very much. And just think how good it is for them if we are able to
keep our peace in the midst of so much turmoil, so many opinions and conflicts. Our presence may do more than thousands of words.
Sometimes when we come face to face with holy persons, we are disappointed because they speak about something quite ordinary. They tell some amusing little story. They offer us a cup of coffee. At any rate they seem entirely irrelevant to our burning issues. But later on it comes to us that what they said, what they did, cast more light on the problem than endless discussions we have had with others.
This is the true understanding — implicit, fruitful, reverent. Gerard Hopkins put it tersely in a little quatrain:
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely dumb;
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
Saint Benedict Joseph Labre put it another way, equally terse, one April morning in 1785 when he fell down on the steps of Santa Maria dei Monti in Rome. Some passersby picked him up, carried him next door and laid him on a bed. He was dead in a few minutes. Maybe the shock of lying on a bed once more after thirteen homeless years hastened the end. But when they looked at him they saw only a poor wandering tramp. He hadn't a thing
to his name except the torn coat, the rosary around his neck, the crucifix on his breast, one or two pious books in his pocket. So far as we know, he never preached or wrote a word. He died as silently as he had lived. Yet Rome which has revelled in the eloquence and rhetoric of all the ages took this man of silence and made him one of its special patrons, its holy places holier for having been his home.
I think that is what Eileen Duggan meant in the last lines of that poem I quoted in the beginning.
And sound is less than silence now and ever;
A bliss so strung the lightest word might sever.
The poet sings — the saint is dumb forever.
A bliss so strung the lightest word might sever.
The poet sings — the saint is dumb forever.
- Elizabeth M. Sheehan