A Book of Silence (35 page)

But – this is the point – despite the whole literature being set up this way, the hermits’
joy
keeps breaking through. When I first read Athanasius’s description of Anthony finding his final hermitage in the Inner Mountain, I wept. I wept because Anthony’s delight was so patently revealed. I think perhaps I wept with longing for myself as well, but what it seemed to be (and I believe was) was a kind of moved sharing in the simple sweetness of his delight in his homecoming.

Despite the privations, the discipline and the sheer hard work, hermits like their lifestyle. They find joy there.

Charles de Foucault wrote in a private letter:

(Being Charles de Foucault, he does his ‘hagiographic work’ on himself by immediately turning to a self-denying piety and continuing, ‘But the will of the Beloved, whatever it may be, must not only be preferred but adored, cherished and blessed.’)

Thomas Merton’s pure pleasure, after waiting so long, at being in his little hut in the woods, alone in silence, has something of the same quality about it:

Dalrymple gives a lovely example of this in
From the Holy
Mountain
. He was staying with an Egyptian hermit:

It is about joy – and love and happiness and beauty. The Chinese poet Jia Dao wrote, ‘On Looking in Vain for the Hermit’ in which the poet goes to massive efforts to track down a hermit but never finds him.

The last night I was in Sinai I kept an all-night vigil, just sitting and watching and listening to the silence. I watched the moon cross the sky casting sharp shadows, so clear that I could see the shadow of wisps of my own hair that had escaped from my plait, and changing the shapes of everything. It seemed to tow an indigo sky with very bright stars in its wake. Later the moon turned yellow like an egg, and slipped over the horizon; as the glow of it faded I watched half an hour of dancing stars, with Venus hanging huge in the east, and then the grey light moving towards sunrise and a spectacular performance of colour as the rising sun moved in a visible sharp line down the rock faces and they changed colour from grey to pink, to red and then to gold.

Through the whole night I listened – listened to
nothing
.

The silence was very pure. Down in the camp, all the sounds were precise breaks in the silence, very distinct, separate from each other. There was no ambient sound, no background. Just noises laid on to the silence – like pebbles on a still pond. Or rather not
like that, because there were no outspreading ripples, just a single sound ‘chomp’ (camel); ‘rustle’ (sleeping bag) or my cigarette being inhaled. Round like a stone – and then the silence returned unbroken, each individual noise carrying very clearly, but without any ‘residue’. The sounds seemed to alight quite gently on the silence – and the silence gobbled them up, or swallowed them down.

It was absolutely still, absolutely silent. The desert night was not very dark and the sky was
deep
– the stars did actually ‘twinkle’, and I had a sense of their distance – some are nearer, seem nearer, as well as larger or brighter. The sky was not a black ceiling, but an infinite recession. In the night the starlit silence, the time, the distance – the infinite. Yet underneath my hand when I reached out from the sleeping bag, the sand was made of
tiny
grains, very cool and clean, fine-textured, soft against my fingers. It was probably the most profound silence I had ever engaged with. It was this intensity of silence that I had come to listen to; this was the silence that the desert hermits sought here in this desert, while they engaged in their enormous courageous battle against ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ and their own noisy selves.

Through that desert night I conceived a vast, lovely and awestruck sense of God. God, in this desert context, does not say be safe, be cosy, here’s a woolly blanket, a tidy cocoon, a place of refuge. God says, ‘If your eye offends you pluck it out; if your hand offends you cut it off.’ Bend and break the will, discipline and scourge the flesh, face blindly the unknown, the enormous, the terrifying. Love your life and you’ll lose it. Risk it and maybe, just, you’ll totter into heaven – the place of both annihilation and total knowledge; the place of beauty and joy. The risk is absolute, you’ll get nothing else out of it, not pleasure, not health, not affection, not comfort and certainly not safety. Just the beauty of God.

Later in the night I began to hear John Cage’s ‘sound of silence’ in a new way. It was not my nervous system or my circulation; it was not the last murmurs of almost silenced chatter, nor the shifty movements of the tectonic plates. I thought I heard the singing of the
spheres. The classical and early Christian world believed that the heavenly bodies sang as they spun through their orbits; each had its own unique and perfect note that reverberated in perfect harmony with the others. With a geocentric universe there were eight such spheres – the sun, the moon and the six visible planets (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto cannot be seen with the naked eye, so they were not known until there were telescopes); this created the perfect eight-note scale. The singing was silent and could only be sensed or imagined at moments of heightened and joyful awareness. The sound of silence, in that desert night, was the song of
jouissance
, of bliss.

In the desert I realised that there is something hideous, especially to a contemporary Western sensibility, about a systematic and determined attempt to break down, or thin out the boundaries of the self and become open to, participate in, the undefined, illimitable freedom of the divine. It is also very hard work. One of the Zen monks at Throstlehole remarked to me once, ‘It is strange, everyone says they want to
meet
a saint, but no one actually wants to
be
one. It’s too tiring even to think of it.’ The experience of both East and West is that silence is the ground for this work.

Whether or not silence is also the goal of the task is a slightly different question.

In the desert I learned that silence is more for me than a context for prayer, or a way of creating more time (though those are important). It is, in itself, a form of freedom; it generates freedom, free choices, inner clarity, strength. A freedom from one’s self and a freedom to be oneself.

I started to think that perhaps silence
is
God. Perhaps God is silence – the shining, spinning ring ‘of pure and endless light’. Perhaps God speaking is a ‘verb’, an act, but God in perfect self-communication, in love within the Trinity, is silent and therefore is silence. God is silence, a silence that is positive, alive, actual and of its ‘nature’
unbreakable
. Perhaps the verb ‘God’ – speaking, creating – is one more reflex of the infinite generosity, the self-giving abandonment, the kenotic love of God. Perhaps the incarnation of the Word is but a secondary expression of that ‘for our hardness of heart’. Far from ‘all silence is waiting to be broken’ perhaps all speech is crying out ‘like a woman in travail’ to be reabsorbed into silence, into death, into the liminal space that opens out into the presence of the everlasting silence.

Did I dare to find out; did I dare to give the absolute a whirl?