16th December, 2024
Andrew Norman, Silence in God (SPCK, 1990), 123.
Image: Selvan B, unsplash.com/@selvan548
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'Silence is a primordial quality. Scientists speculate that before the big bang that marked the beginning of the universe, there existed a centre of intense mass and energy. Our minds imagine a surrounding environment of utter emptiness. Christian thinkers have reasoned even more fundamentally that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. Thus "older than the mountains" must be the silence of the primordial nihilo. Both the scientist and the theologian might say that we, and the whole natural world, have emerged out of silence. Others will continue – though not the Christian – by saying that in death we return to a total silence. But to us all the underlying existence of this primordial nihilo may seem frightening, threatening to crush our fragile human forms. Nevertheless, I have tried to suggest that silence is actually a medium in which we may come to experience God. But in doing this I have not wanted to pretend that silence is always comfortable and positive. It seems to me that often it is frightening. Silence has an unknown depth. The apparent loss of form and language easily makes us panic, for our feet can no longer feel the bottom, and we fear that we will drown in a gulf of meaninglessness. It is not surprising that we instinctively tend to cover our silence and hide from it. However, if God can be described as the ground of our being, it may be in silence that we are able to come closest to that primordial source of all life.
So it is that we may find silence to have a purity, a special transparency of God, which is simply self-diminishing for us to deny. Silence allows us access to a form of experience which, far from being merely an esoteric concern for the mystically inclined, is fundamental to what it means to be human. Silence puts us in touch with that from which we have emerged, that in which (however unknowingly) we are rooted.'
Page 123.