Once, in the back of a church, as some other groomsmen and I were chatting among ourselves before my brother’s wedding, the priest walked by and said to us unprompted, “Silence is the language of paradise.” We weren’t sure if this was his rather delicate, unassuming way of getting us to shut up or if he was referring to the sudden cessation of music (the organist had been practicing up until then). Either way, it’s interesting to consider heaven as an angelic world of crystalline silence.
For obvious reasons, I’m reminded of a book titled The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah. He writes:
When [man] draped himself in silence, as God himself dwells in a great silence, man is close to heaven, or, rather, he allows God to manifest himself in him. We encounter God only in the eternal silence in which he abides.
The importance of fostering interior silence is likely not new to us, evidenced by the somewhat common Lenten practice of giving up music or podcasts to, presumably, help improve one’s spiritual connection to God. We tend to intuitively know that to foster a deep relationship with God we must step away from the commotion and noise of our lives. This can be especially challenging, though, as our modern culture perpetually bombards us with digital media, advertisements, and news. However, the mere elimination of external noise from our lives is only a first step. The second silence we must strive for is the quieting of our passions and worldly impulses.
Silence of the heart consists of quieting little by little our miserable human sentiments so as to become capable of having the same sentiments as those of Jesus. Silence of the heart is the silence of the passions.
And again the cardinal remarks:
But true silence is the silence of our passions, the heart purified of carnal impulses, washed of all our hatreds and resentments, oriented toward the holiness of God.
In other words, once we eliminate the noise, we suddenly encounter the real noise: the clatter within our own minds and hearts. We experience the swirl of doubts, worries, fears, hopes, imaginings, desires, and regrets. We realize we’re in the middle of a loud and crashing sea of thought and emotion. And this is where striving after silence really takes on another level, so that, by finding true inner quiet, we can encounter the Holy Spirit. It isn’t enough to merely mute the TV or pause the Spotify playlist. We need to silence our very souls.
The mere elimination of external noise from our lives is only a first step. The second silence we must strive for is the quieting of our passions and worldly impulses.
I think the film The Sound of Metal represents an illuminating example. In the film, the main character Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a heavy metal drummer. He and his girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke), tour the country in their RV, playing music at seedy venues and enjoying their bohemian-style wanderings. But then Ruben begins experiencing hearing problems, and after visiting a doctor, he learns he has a degenerative disorder that will cause his hearing to continue to deteriorate. Of course, continuing to play drums for a heavy metal band would only accelerate the process, snatching from him what has been the singular purpose of his life until then. However, he also learns about cochlear implants that, while expensive and not covered by insurance, could help reclaim his hearing. At that point he becomes solely driven to raise enough money to purchase these implants so he can get back to his old life.
Ruben is a former addict, and we see on display the addict’s drive to control reality at any cost. He refuses to accept his situation—that he is going deaf and his life must consequently change. Instead, he wars against this forced descending of “silence.” At one point, he ends up at a shelter for deaf recovering addicts, where the leader Joe (Paul Raci), a man who lost his hearing during the Vietnam War, tries to help him accept this new reality. Of course, Ruben cannot—will not—accept anything other than reclaiming his former life, and he ultimately rejects Joe’s help.
Eventually, Ruben earns enough money to undergo the cochlear implant surgery. But he quickly discovers the implants offer a poor excuse for hearing. The film effectively immerses the audience into the character’s jarring experience, allowing us to hear the world as he does, which is metallic-sounding and harsh. People’s voices are distorted and disjointed, almost alien-like, and it becomes painfully obvious that the dream on which Ruben has rested his hopes will not deliver. He will not reclaim his old life, despite his delusional striving otherwise, and he will remain deaf. In the film’s final scene, Ruben is wearing the cochlear implants at a city park. After he “hears” the distorted, ugly ringing of a church bell, he removes the implants and sits quietly in, yes, silence. And for a brief moment, Ruben finds a measure of peace and stillness, which subtly nods to his finally accepting his new reality.
While the film doesn’t obviously connect this moment of silence to an experience of God or even prayer, it reveals a character who has finally stopped noisily striving to avoid reality—a character who has finally encountered peace within an inner quiet, even if it doesn’t in and of itself relieve him of suffering. This is why interior silence matters: Without it, we cannot accept our reality as given, and it is precisely there where God dwells. Like Ruben, we can be led by an urge to fashion our life a certain way, to secure our desires, to battle against our fears and worries, not ever allowing the inner voice of love to speak truth to us in the quiet of our hearts. The “noise” of our lives can be many things: our refusal to accept suffering, incessant dreams about a better life, avoidance of feeling regret or disappointment, escape from fear and anxiety. And this perpetual interior noise, even if we’re technically surrounded by external silence, keeps us from encountering God. Of course, we cannot simply flip a switch within our minds to make our thoughts or feelings quiet down. Thoughts and emotions often arise without our choosing or control. So, maintaining this inner silence is challenging. But as we seek to do so through prayer and contemplation, with God’s grace we can get better at it.
To be clear, this silence, as Cardinal Sarah explains, is not an empty, void-like nothingness. We need not act as Buddhists and empty our minds of noise to inhabit some ephemeral state of “non-being.” Rather, we quiet the noise of our minds and hearts to create a space for God’s presence. We foster interior silence for the sake of relationship with God. And this means if we know how to foster this interior silence, we can do so even in the midst of a loud, chaotic city street. What ultimately matters is not whether the world around us is quiet. What matters is whether we know how to quiet our souls enough to hear what God wants to say to us.
That is why so many saints and mystics speak of the importance of silence and why we are invited to create an oasis within our hearts: a kind of interior respite from the world, where, like Ruben at the end of the film, we can simply sit with reality as it is given. The more we do this, the less beholden we will be to the anxious thoughts, fears, immoderate passions, and everything else that takes away our peace and muffles God’s invitation to become more and more like his son. As Mother Teresa reminds us in No Greater Love:
Jesus taught us how to pray, and He also told us to learn from Him to be meek and humble of heart. Neither of these can we do unless we know what silence is. Both humility and prayer grow from an ear, mind, and tongue that have lived in silence with God, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.