Making Silence

Walking the Labyrinth—July 31, 2009—Today the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St Ignatius Loyola, while the Eastern Christian calendar venerates St Eudocimus of Cappadocia. Both were soldiers; Ignatius was a 16th century Spanish knight and Eudocimus rose through the ranks to become the military governor of Cappadocia (eastern Turkey). St Eudocimus became renowned for his acts of private charity, many of which were discovered only after his death. St Ignatius founded the once-feared Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. In their heyday, they cornered the popular market on mysterious codes and secret handshakes much as the Templars do nowadays with people whose knowledge of history comes from the backs of cereal boxes. (The Jesuits haven’t completely disappeared from the fringes of imagination—there are at least two websites online as I write that claim Shakespeare was a Jesuit [shakespeareunmasked.com], or, at the very least, a secret Papist. As proof, the authors offer the anti-Catholic, anti-Jesuit dialogues in the Bard’s plays. Only a Jesuit, they reason, would be duplicitous enough to deflect questions about his crypto-Catholicism by attacking Catholicism!) Surely this is a record: today in 768, a monk named Philip was dragged from his monastery by one of the political factions in the city of Rome and forced to undergo the ceremonies which made him Pope. But Philip didn’t want to be Pope. After the excitement of the day quieted and the crowds went home, he laid aside the papal vestments, wrote out his resignation, and returned to his hermitage. Nothing more is known about him; we have a record of only that one day in his life. The author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, the English satirist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe, was pilloried today in 1703. Defoe wrote an anti-Tory, populist pamphlet, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, for which he was sentenced for three days in the stocks at London’s Charing Cross (now Trafalgar Square). So popular was Defoe with the crowds however, that instead of throwing the customary tomatoes and rotten vegetables at him, the platform was surrounded by friends who pelted him with flowers and drank to his health. On July 31, 1875, the seventeenth President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, died of a stroke. He was the first President to succeed an assassinated predecessor (Abraham Lincoln) and the first President to be impeached. Those two facts are what most people know about him, but in his lifetime, Johnson was well-known for something else: his fondness for a stiff drink. On the morning he was to be sworn in as Vice President, Johnson stopped outside the Senate Chamber where the ceremony was to take place. He called for a “tumbler” of whiskey, which he promptly downed. He said he had a hangover from the night before and called for another. After drinking a third tumbler, he entered the chamber, where he was met by President Lincoln and the erstwhile Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin. While Hamlin gave his final address to the assembly, Johnson showed more and more signs of agitation. He stumbled through the words of his oath of office and proceeded to deliver a long, rambling, sometimes incoherent speech about his humble origins. Americans can take heart from this. The incoherent speeches and resolutions we hear coming out of Congress today have a precedent that goes back more than one hundred and fifty years! On this day in 1921, in the small town (pop. 300) of Sterling, Connecticut, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, it began to rain. Along with raindrops, though, the skies dropped frogs. By two thirty, the town was smothered with millions of small frogs measuring from half an inch to an inch and a half in length. The streets and fields were covered with hopping, squirming, belching frogs. The people of Sterling were beside themselves; nobody worried so much at the time why it had rained frogs as they did what they were going to do with all of them. But if Nature provided a conundrum, she also provided a solution. While the townspeople tossed the frogs out from their yards by the shovel-full, ducks from Moosup Lake (which borders the town) and the Mossup River descended on the town and roamed the streets, feasting on the new arrivals. After two days of duck-gluttony, not a ribbet was heard. Twenty-eight years after the Rain of Frogs in Sterling, Mother Nature again reminded us who was in charge. At a State League baseball game in Lakeland, Florida, on the afternoon of July 31, 1949, the second baseman, shortstop, and third baseman of the visiting team were all killed by a single lightning bolt, which struck the backstop, then shot around the infield “as though completing a double play,” the local newspaper somewhat insensitively observed. The game was delayed two weeks, but the home team still won. In the annals of the Royal Navy, today is known as “Black Tot Day.” By order of the Admiralty, the final “rum ration” was issued on this day in 1970. Since 1655, the call “Up Spirits” drew British seamen on deck to receive their daily ration of a shot (or “tot”) of rum. In 1740, the ration was a half-pint of rum, to which was added sugar and lime, to combat scurvy. The officer in charge of mixing and dispensing the rum was called the purser. Over time this led to calling the officer “pusser” and the rum “pussers.” The name stuck and “Pusser’s” has long been one of the most popular brands of English rum. Today is the 212th day of the year, 153 remain. On the ancient Roman calendar, today is the pridie Kal. Aug. The old Celtic calendar celebrates today as Lughnasadh, one of the four principal holidays of the year. Lughnasadh marked the beginning of the harvest season, the ripening of first fruits, and was traditionally a time of community gatherings, market festivals, horse races and reunions with family and friends. Among the Celts it was the favored time for “handfastings”—trial marriages that would generally last a year and a day. St Patrick put a stop to that.

LAST WEEK, I WROTE about Agatho’s Stone and the “learning” of silence. This week, I’ve had some discussions about silence with a few friends who read about Agatho that offer thoughts worth sharing. My good friend Jean, in Virginia Beach, said “I’m not a talker; living alone, I have plenty of silence. Still, I try to listen for that ‘small voice,’ for God and His plans…” and Alan, my atheistic pal from Santa Barbara (how can you be an atheist and live in the hills over Santa Barbara?) wrote: “I wish more Christians would be quiet. What they have to say is often poorly thought-out. Mostly it’s just stupid or insulting. Can’t you get all of them to use those rocks?” Paul, a young man I prepared for Confirmation long ago who’s now not quite so young and is considerably more thoughtful, has written me a couple of notes this week. He says, “We aren’t monks who’ve made vows to keep silence. How can we be silent and be part of society? I could understand how this could help in a Trappist monastery but I find it hard to see the usefulness of silence to me.” Jean spends a lot of time in silence just because of her living situation; Alan wants people to keep their half-baked religious notions to themselves; and Paul sees the potential value of silence but finds it difficult, if not impossible, to see a place for it in our daily lives. Our situations are all different, but the need each of us has for silence is the same. Remember why Agatho put the stone in his mouth. It was to “learn” silence. Agatho lived in the desert. He didn’t have much of a chance to talk to anybody in the first place. His point was not “I don’t want to talk” or “Here in the desert there’s nobody to talk to anyway.” It wasn’t even that Agatho thought he didn’t have anything to say worth hearing. He was cultivating silence, cherishing it, growing it.

Paul is right. Most of us don’t live in Trappist monasteries. We can’t refuse to answer questions our boss asks because we’re cultivating silence. But we can learn the profound lessons Agatho himself learned by forming an intention of silence. We can choose to be silent at certain times. We can go for walks or retire to the woods by ourselves or sit on the beach. We can retreat for a few days to a quiet place—a monastery or vacation spot. We need silence. Today everyone is supposed to “be themselves” and “express their feelings,” but Alan the atheist is right: most of the ideas that pass for religion or spirituality that come out of the mouths of those “being themselves” are insipid and trite. A mantra I’ve heard times innumerable in southern California is “I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person.” The sentences which follow this statement invariably show the speaker knows nothing of either religion or spirituality. True religion and genuine spirituality have several components but one most necessary to both is silence. We don’t learn silence by just shutting up. We have to search it out. We learn silence by being silent. We don’t have to do it with the desert fierceness of Agatho, that calling comes to few of us. But whether it’s putting up a fence on a south Texas ranch or turning off the computer and going for a walk every other day, the person who seeks to walk the Labyrinth knows there are some steps that have to be made in complete silence. We must learn to be alone, we must cultivate silence, to have things of value to say. In that pregnant silence, we will hear the Voice that’s been waiting to speak.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I pulled an old book I’ve been meaning to re-read for years. It’s been there for more than a year, its position in the stack moved up and down in relation to others for reasons sometimes unexamined. Now, having read it again, I know what those reasons are. The book is The Conscience of a Conservative, written by the late Senator Barry Goldwater, with help from his friend L Brent Bozell, Jr., William F Buckley’s best friend and brother-in-law. The book is neither subtle in its message nor complex in its argument and is only about 125 pages. So why did it sit, unread, in my stack of books for the last 14 months? Simple and straightforward, the book is distressing. You can read the whole of it in an evening, but if you pick it up, it’s unlikely you will. You’ll be stopping too often to think about what Goldwater said 45 years ago, and how insightful his words are today. The longest chapter in the book “The Soviet Menace,” might seem irrelevant now, but its insights remain valid: “What about the Russian people? We are repeatedly told that the Russian man-on-the-street is woefully ignorant of the American way…is it relevant? As long as the Russian people do not control their government, it makes little difference if they think well of us or ill. It is high time that our leaders stopped treating the Russian people and the Soviet government as one and the same thing.” What would happen if those principles were applied in 2009 to Iran? At its heart the book reminds us that the basic principles on which our country was founded were radical then and they remain so today. They call us to practice freedom. Goldwater warns that the tendency of human beings over the centuries has been to surrender freedom for something else. He pointedly quotes the famous words of Franklin and gives them a startling conclusion: “ ‘What have you given us?’ a woman asked Ben Franklin towards the close of the Constitutional Convention. ‘A Republic’ he said, 'if you can keep it…’ We have not kept it,” Goldwater concludes. In ten chapters the short book reviews some of the areas that most concerned its author, detailing simply but effectively the practical consequences of government programs on the country. But most important, The Conscience of a Conservative reminds us that, regardless of the promises of politicians to justify their reelections by promising us more and more, we lose far more than we receive. In the end, that’s what makes this book important: it recalls its readers to a genuine and ancient hope. The state and, let me add, most of our society, sees men and women in economic and political terms. Those things are useful, but not the end-all of existence. “Conservatism,” Goldwater says at the beginning of his book, “looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.” As I read I couldn’t help but reflect that we have not only failed to advance that principle in the years since it was first written, but have receded far from it. Freedom isn’t something we’re given by the state or society. We have it from our Creator. But we must each of us make it our own. With unsubtle books like this, we can regain that vision it’s so easy to lose.


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.”—St Ignatius Loyola

"Few souls understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves unreservedly to Him and if they were to allow His grace to mold them accordingly."—St Ignatius Loyola

“Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Devil always builds a chapel there; And 'twill be found, upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation.”—Daniel Defoe

“Nature has left this tincture in the blood: all men would be tyrants if they could.”—Daniel Defoe

“Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.”—President Andrew Johnson

“It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”—President Andrew Johnson

AND FINALLY, remembering Black Tot Day, one more from Daniel Defoe:
“Any Englishman will fairly drink as much as will maintain two whole families of the Dutch.”