Silence, Mystery, the Mass

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.

-Kierkegaard


A friend I've never met sent me a worderful gift -- Max Picard's book The World of Silence (Thanks, Rachel!) The writing is poetic in places, more or less aphoristic throughout, and I don't know what to make of some of it. It's the kind of writing that needs to be pondered, prayed over, digested slowly. The above quote from Kierkegaard closes the book. Picard has profound things to say, things that we all need to hear today. Here are some of his thoughts on prayer:

"God became man for the sake of man. This event is so utterly extraordinary and so much against the experience of reason and against everything the eye has seen, that man is not able to make response to it in words. A layer of silence lies between this event and man, and in this silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself. Man and the mystery first meet in the silence, but the word that comes out of this silence is original, as the first word before it had ever spoken anything. That is why it is able to speak of the mystery.

"It is a sign of the love of God that a mystery is always separated from man by a layer of silence. And that is a reminder that man should also keep a silence in which to approach the mystery. Today, when there is only noise in and around man, it is difficult to approach the mystery. When the layer of silence is missing, the extraordinary easily becomes connected with the ordinary, with the routine of things, and man reduces the extraordinary to a mere part of the ordinary, a mere part of the mechanical routine.

... Prayer is the pouring of the word into silence. ... In prayer the region of the lower, human silence comes into relation with the higher silence of God; the lower rests in the higher. In prayer the word and therefore man is in the center between two regions of silence. In prayer man is held between these two regions.

"Elsewhere, outside prayer, the silence of man is fulfilled and receives its meaning in speech. But in prayer it receives its meaning and fulfillment in the meeting with the silence of God.

"Elsewhere, outside prayer, the silence in man serves the word in man. But now, in prayer, the word serves the silence in man: the word leads the human silence to the silence of God."


Part of the problem with the Novus Ordo, at least as it is most often celebrated, is that silence does not have sufficient space. And, as Picard says, one can only approach a mystery as awesome as the Eucharist in silence. Part of the attraction of the old Latin mass is that it makes abundant room for this necessary silence. It does what Kierkegaard suggests as a remedy for the world's ills: it creates silence. But a lot of people today, confronted with silence, are at a loss as to what to do. Silence bores them, perhaps even frightens them. This is a sad state of affairs. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, if I were a parish priest, I would try to instill in my congregation a love for silence. There is more than enough noise in the world outside. Let there be silence in Church.