Might the Silence Sing?
O Lover,
In my initial engagement with the spirituality of Juan de la Cruz thirty years ago I became enamored by the theme of apophática (“imagelessness”). I subsequently found myself gleaning from his writings imagistic words which, oxymoronically, arced toward formlessness and horizons beyond all form: e.g., emptiness, darkness/night, fire, absence, silence. In time I was able to recognize that all such depictions having to do with You were “un-images” insofar as their undercutting of absolutization constituted both an acknowledgement of Your ineffability and a fence against idolatry. Stated otherwise, all image words for You were both inadequate and seductive, and thus needful of self-immolation. Earlier posts in this blog reflected this view.
However, here again the plot has been thickening. Viewing the above retrospectively, I have been realizing that I was understanding these “un-images” quite negatively, as largely lacking (a la Juan’s “Dark Night of the Soul”) what sense, intellect, imagination and/or emotion could latch onto and clutch. But what if, beyond being a vacuous void or cruel dereliction, a theme like silence, for example, was also a door to a positively constituted alternative mode of relationship with You? Might not silence be viewed as the least inadequate depiction of the Abyss/Depth/Grúnt of You, the ineffably infinite One whom Keating dubbed the “Unmanifest”? Indeed, if Your first language was silence—a notion attributed to Rumi and Juan among others, could it not have a decidedly affirmative thrust?
So where all might such a rehabilitated version of silence point? The interrogative yet again seems most helpful. What more can be said regarding silence in relation to all You have gifted with being? In addition to signing human humility and presupposing the severe limitations of language, does not silence characterize all that You have wrought? Is not ineffability a quality of each atom, apophatic awe the natural stance of the galaxies, muteness attributable to the cosmos at large? Is not the rest of the universe (or multiverses?) seemingly more comfortable with silence than are we humans who, even while intoning “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” repeatedly repair to verbiage?
But returning from the macro to the micro, from cosmology to the personal, how better than in silence might I in whatever “now” of prayer lose myself amid Your Oceanicity? Might not receptive silence be the lingua of choice in all matters involving Your ineffable Doxa, the best available bridge from our finitude to Your Infinitide? Might not those with less clouded eyes of the heart experience in silence precisely the Depth of You for which all of us, beknownst or unbeknownst, have thirsted? Indeed, cannot sharing in the Divine Life in historical time blossom, in the words of Keating, “when silence morphs into Presence”?
What if from the perspective of the transfigured heart perceived darkness is found in reality to be Your Luminosity, perceived emptiness Your tsunamic Plentitude, perceived absence Your Presence, perceived silence Your Song? Or, O Lover, to accentuate the latter with some help from Carl McColman, cannot silence be re-perceived and thus allowed to “sing” You?
