Dr Mike King is a Reader in Computer Art and Animation, London Metropolitan University (formerly London Guildhall University) http: / / web.ukonline.co.uk / mr.king / mike.king@londonmet.ac.uk Sof 57 January 2003 Christianity without words James Hart, on the cultivation of silence A talkative child (though with occasional glimpses of the mystical when I wasn’t busy talking!), I grew up to love words, studied languages at university, trained to be a teacher and carried my interest in languages into the field of theology when I went into the ministry. I began to ask questions about God and language; about the limitations of language and about the God who lies beyond human language; about the Silence in which God is; about the mystical knowledge of God in the silence. I began to listen to the Silence in me and in others. I began to sit in silence, the silence not of the pre-verbal neonate, but of the one who has gone beyond words. I began for the first time to enjoy just being. I began for the first time not to feel the need to speak to justify myself to others or to God. I began to find rest and happiness in simply being, in the Silence.
Speech is a human characteristic.
It exists in time and space only.
And it needs time and space to exist.
No time, and there is no flow of words.
No space, and there is no transmission of words.
God does not speak, God cannot speak.
Speech requires a voice box and a pair of lungs; God has neither.
It is an anthropomorphism to say that God speaks.
God is both within and outside the dimensions of time and space.
She/he /it is not a product of time and space nor is limited by it.
Human language, on the other hand, belongs of necessity to a particular time and a particular place. It will convey therefore an accent, will carry meaning in its intonation as well as its words, will lose in translation, will degenerate with the passing of time and will shift in meaning from place to place. But God has no voice. In the same way, any attempt to use human words to describe God can at best only fall miserably short, be a temporary substitute for the real thing and at worst become an idol that replaces God.
Human language is provisional and ultimately redundant. It is surely for this reason that spiritual knowledge is communicated at a deeper level than the verbal. In that other dimension we call eternity, there is no time and no space and therefore, no language. God does not speak. That is not to say we can do without language in our search to understand God. We cannot. We begin with it, here, in time and space. sof 57 January 2003 Jesus is seen as God revealed and understood in a human context. He used words. But he is probably best remembered for his word pictures, his metaphors, his parables and his invitation to look beyond the words themselves to the reality they pointed to. Words are a means to an end but they are not the real thing; a road but not the destination; a signpost but not the reality it is pointing to.
A common mistake of some believers (and this is typical of all those religions that base their authority fundamentally on revealed Scripture, on words) is to freeze the words of Scripture in their time setting. Take for example the inability or unwillingness to create fresh, culturally relevant, images for the atonement. The idea of the blood of a lamb being a payment for sin is a non-sense that is surely offensive in today’s culture. Moreover, fundamentalists impose upon Scripture certain presuppositions, such as inerrancy, in an attempt to make it what it is not and make it do what it was never intended to do. They fail to understand the notion of the historical development of religion as it is reflected in the Bible. They look to Scripture rather than to the God of Scripture as a basis for faith and use its literal words as grounds for ethical judgements. They risk becoming idolatrous. "The Bible says..." or "It says in the Bible..." are ways of speaking that make God a slave to Scripture. The Bible has never said anything, ever. I am not debunking Scripture, but the Word of God can only be contained in Scripture and in the reader’s interaction with the language of it. Language is a signpost: it is not the reality.
Before the God, to whom we have been brought by the tradition of the Church and by Scripture, like St Thomas Aquinas after his vision, we fall silent. And that is what I have come to enjoy doing. But not before I have removed two obstacles I inherited from our western culture.
First, the fear of silence, the fear that the letting go of words engenders. Words have been a prop to us for too long. We have felt secure in a faith we can neatly package in words. We have felt secure in a faith whose parameters are clearly mapped out in creeds and assented to in statements of belief. We have felt secure in the group acceptance that the holding of that same verbally expressed faith has brought. We have cherished the feeling of exclusiveness gained by looking beyond the fence to those who did not share our vocabulary. We have felt secure in the knowledge that we have arrived and need only to wait with patience till we are summoned in death to our eternal destination.
But we have ceased to travel and our faith has become no more than any other mindset, a way of seeing the world, a cultural phenomenon, a philosophy. Like a plane that is forever taxiing round the airport, we have not yet taken off.
The second obstacle is the fear of inactivity. I challenge again the view of God that is commonly held. God does not speak, although God is continually communicating. Likewise, God does not move, although he is continually influencing. We do not see him shuffling his feet or scratching an itch. We never hear God running down the road or out of breath. She or he or it just is, in the dignified Silence and Stillness. God does not do anything, though indirectly he does everything in the sense that he is the ground of all being, the cause of all existence. Yet he just is. And we are just to be in that same dignified Silence and Stillness that is the hallmark of his being. Doing implies an activity requiring time and space. God, as traditionally understood, while embracing time and space, is of that eternal dimension where there is no work in the way humans conceive of work because there is no beginning and ending, there is nowhere to go or to take anything.
St Thomas Aquinas knew the difficulty of thinking about God, the problem of not being able to see other than in human terms One who is wholly other. He began his Summa Theologica with the words: "Since we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not, we cannot consider how God is but only how he is not".
We need to stop taxiing round the airport. We need to give up language. We need to take off into the still silence.
To be one with him is to enter into silent mode, to sit totally still and to slow down our heartbeat. That is precisely what happens when we meditate. Meditation is as old as religion, is a feature of most religions, is not just a religious technique but a secular one as well, is recommended by doctors to reduce stress and is practised by mystics to achieve awareness and enlightenment. And awareness is central to meditation. As I teach my students, meditation is concentration, not relaxation. To aid concentration, two things are required, one to keep the body alert and still and the other to keep the mind centred. The first is achieved through posture, the second by the use of a mantra. The posture is sitting cross-legged in the lotus position on the floor or erect on a straight-backed chair. The mantra is a chosen word that is significant to the meditator and which is said over and over in the silence with the rhythm of the breath. We are not talking about emptying the mind but controlling the mind, a mind that is directed towards one end, centred on one purpose, God, the Silence. To reach that degree of concentration, in my experience, is to feel embraced, totally loved and accepted. It is to reach deep down within oneself and to find that, in the words of Thomas Merton, ”God is nearer to you than you are to yourself”. Indeed the distinction between God and self loses its clarity. Is the pleasure which is felt in meditation the enjoyment of God or an enjoyment of one’s selfconsciousness, of the wholeness of one’s being, or both?
And apart from the Silence and the Stillness, we discover that all is one and all is well. In the words of that English mystic, Mother Julian of Norwich, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." This is the profoundest realisation I believe we can make. And it is a revelation commonly shared in mystic experience. All is well because in the love of God which surrounds us as we meditate, we experience the awareness that as all things are in God and God is in all, all things therefore ultimately shall be well.
Now if by Christianity I mean Jesus’ Golden Rule to love God and our neighbour then Christianity without words is experiencing God and serving our neighbour in the Silence. The former is practised in meditation. The latter through a vital shift from words to deeds.
Christianity is a religion founded on words, rather than on The Word made flesh, two thousand years of words. It grew out of a religion that, until the destruction of the Temple, had seen its expression in actions not words. It was principally when the altar was destroyed that the Jews turned to verbal expression in an attempt to make sense of their experiences and to preserve their identity. Christianity had a golden opportunity in the two sacraments that Jesus established viz. baptism and the eucharist, to choose actions. Instead, influenced by the direction Judaism was taking and espousing the opportunities that Greek philosophy offered, Christianity chose words. And Silence virtually disappeared in the deluge of words from the Church. God and the Christian life became definable and predictable. And God, a Church-sized god, became the property of the Church and died with it when, like the Church, it too became meaningless and irrelevant.
Words that should only have been the rudder to guide the ship became the ship itself and all sections of the Church, conservative and liberal, foundered on the rock of transience. Take the marked contrast there is between the way that Jesus dealt with people in the accounts in the synoptic gospels and the way that John uses the material he selects for his later account. The emphasis in the former is on Jesus’ actions, what he did for people, the way he touched them. The Jesus in John meets people with words.
John uses his stories of Jesus’ encounter with others as an excuse to deal with prevalent theological and political issues at the end of the first century of the Common Era.
Already the Church had begun to lose its way. The essential Christianity of Jesus, that love of God and love of neighbour, had disappeared in divisive creedal definitions and pastoral platitudes.
God is best known and man is best served in the Silence of a Christianity without words.
James Hart read languages at Durham and after 10 years of teaching trained for ordained ministry, reading theology at London. After parochial ministry he moved into School Chaplaincy work and is currently Chaplain at Felsted School and an Education Adviser (for post 16 education) in the Diocese of Chelmsford.
The above is a condensed form of a longer article on the Theology and Practice of Silence, copies of which can be obtained from the author, email: revjhart@aol.com.