5th December, 2024
Andrew Norman, Silence in God (SPCK, 1990), 34.
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'Silence … connects easily with a sense of presence; it is an appropriate sign that may then sacramentally mediate the holy presence of God. But silence also connects easily with a sense of meaninglessness. It reminds us of what are perhaps our deepest anxieties – the terror of utter chaos, the fear that there can be no meaning, our fundamental alienation from the possibility of ultimate fulfilment. It is no wonder that in the practice of silent prayer one typically comes to the point at which it seems profoundly repellent. …
Such feelings may offer part of an explanation for the frenetic pace of modern life. We use our constant activity as a means to avoid contemplating the underlying meaninglessness. Perhaps, though, there is a more subtle and reciprocal link between our frenzied activism with its rapacious consumerism and our fear of chaos. The psychologist C. G. Jung wrote, "Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend."* Perhaps, then, this begins to reveal the importance of silent contemplation in our angst-ridden age? It may be that the fear of chaos needs to be faced squarely and not continually evaded. The keeping of silence would certainly be an effective means for breaking through the vicious cycle of restlessness which begets meaninglessness which begets restlessness.
It must be accepted, then, that silence entered into will necessarily have an ambivalent, bitter-sweet quality. Silence is merely a feature of our workaday world. We may not particularly seek it out – by, for example, deliberately waking in the middle of the night as some contemplative religious orders still do. But if we do we may discover that silence, ordinary as it is, has a particular power in alerting us to God’s presence. … such moments of Divine disclosure will always be set in the midst of long stretches when the silence seems remorselessly dull and mundane. … More disturbingly, silence may also alert us to deep feelings of alienation and a profound fear of chaos. The highest moments of religious ecstasy cannot be separated from corresponding moments of human despair.’
Pages 33-34.
* Carl G. Jung, The Structure of the Dynamics of the Psyche (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 815.