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“In Silence” by Thomas Merton

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you?
Whose silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on fire?”

Thomas Merton claims that silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence. Those who have experienced the sacrament of failure are more likely to know the emptying power of silence.

            These circumstances, this exhaustion, this sacrament of failure, could easily describe the situation facing the prophet Elijah. Having fled the wrath of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, he finds himself back on Mt. Sinai, where it all began with Moses generations before. He is now huddled in a cave, perhaps only a cleft in the rock, barely protected from the forces of nature. God speaks: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah cries out his anguish. He has been zealously faithful to God in every way. And now he says, “I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Here is a person who is spiritually and physically exhausted.

            So what does God do? Now comes one of the most interesting and highly mysterious passages in the Bible. God tells Elijah to step out into the open “for the Lord is about to pass by.” First comes a ferocious wind that threatens to tear the mountain apart. “But God was not in the wind.” Then an earthquake. “But God was not in the earthquake.” Then a kind of firestorm. “But God was not in the fire.” Then comes this curious verse. The Hebrew is obscure; the translators are a bit baffled by it. Our NRSV says then came “a sound of sheer silence.” KJV says “a still, small voice.” Yet others, “a gentle little breeze” and “the sound of a light whisper.” What is meant here? Is it that God is speaking so gently and quietly that you have to be silent and listen hard? Perhaps. Yet, the scripture does not say that God was or that God was not present in the silence.

            I certainly don’t have a clear answer to this. But somehow I think this is about the very mystery that is silence itself. Much spirituality, Eastern and Western, is about attaining inner silence, a silence that is defined as what is left when your thoughts are quieted; a silence necessary for the knowledge of God. “Be still and know that I am God.” The Hindus teach that if you attain the deepest levels of silence you can actually hear the universe humming along. To know God in silence is somehow to know God when God does not seem to be speaking. For Elijah God was not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. But what if God was not in the silence either? Or that God was in the silence, but because God was silent, God did not seem to be in the silence. Are we being asked to know God in the very experience of the absence of God? Know God as unknown?

            We are told that the ancient sages of India engaged in a ritual in which, gathered around the sacred fire, they would debate for hours and hours about the nature of God. They would enumerate God’s attributes and virtues; they would assemble all the possible names for God they could think of; they would list all the ways God could act in the world, and on and on. Eventually, they would run out of words, and in spiritual and physical exhaustion, the conversation would collapse. No words were left. Nothing more could be said. And they would sit there reduced to silence. And when that pure and utter silence came upon them, then they knew the presence of God. In the silence of their mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion, God became present.

            A way to listen to God is to embrace and listen to your own exhausted silence. How do you do that? That returns us to Merton’s poem. What can the silence of the stones, perhaps in the tiny and sparsely furnished cell of a monk, teach us about how to listen for God?

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

            The way we know God is by embracing the unknown God. The way God knows us is by inviting us into what is unknown within us – the unknown you. It is what we think we know that blocks out God. It is what we think we know that causes us to fear. But in encountering the unknown God and the unknown you, possibilities begin to dawn in us. Then, in the midst of our exhaustion, we experience hope. And when hope comes, we know that God really is in everything - the wind and the earthquake and the fire, in the stones of the monk’s or even the prisoner’s cell, in all things living and not living, and in the silence – all on fire. God is aflame in every sub-atomic particle and in every fiber of our living being. God is at this moment transforming each of us and every thing in all creation into love itself. And in embracing that living hope, we come to know that all will be well. AMEN.

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