The Father uttered one Word; that Word is His Son, and He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence; and in silence the soul has to hear it.
St. John of the Cross
The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will be often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us. . .. Rhetoric and fine language about the things of the spirit is a vainer babble than in other matters; and he that thinks to grow in true goodness by hearing or speaking flaming words or striking expressions, as is now much the way of the world, may have a great deal of talk, but will have little of his conversation in heaven.
William Law
He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.
Lao Tru
UNRESTRAINED and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous.
'But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.' Matthew 12:36–37 -
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idle words - empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk
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What does it mean that we will give an account to God?
The reference to us giving an account of ourselves to God means
- that moment of judgment isn't something pronounced against us from on high, the judgment we pronounce on ourselves will be an expression of our own full awareness of who we are, who we have been, and what we have done with our lives.18 Jan 2017
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This may seem a very hard saying. And yet if we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the. course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads:
- words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours;
- words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love;
- words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason,
- but merely for the sake of making a distracting noise.
utter foolishness
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These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind's endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large.247248
All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light. The guard of the tongue (which is also, of course, a guard of the mind) is not only one of the most difficult and searching of all mortifica-tions; it is also the most fruitful.
When the hen has laid, she must needs cackle. And what does she get by it? Straightway comes the chough 붉은 부리까마귀 and robs her of her eggs, and devours all that of which she should have brought forth her live birds. And just so that wicked chough, the devil, beareth away from the cackling anchoresses, and swalloweth up all the goods they have brought forth, and which ought, as birds, to bear them up towards heaven, if it had not been cackled.
All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light. The guard of the tongue (which is also, of course, a guard of the mind) is not only one of the most difficult and searching of all mortifica-tions; it is also the most fruitful.
When the hen has laid, she must needs cackle. And what does she get by it? Straightway comes the chough 붉은 부리까마귀 and robs her of her eggs, and devours all that of which she should have brought forth her live birds. And just so that wicked chough, the devil, beareth away from the cackling anchoresses, and swalloweth up all the goods they have brought forth, and which ought, as birds, to bear them up towards heaven, if it had not been cackled.
Moderniqed from the Ancren Riwle
You cannot practise too rigid a fast from the charms of worldly talk.
Fénelon
What need of so much news from abroad, when all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within us?
William Law
249My dear Mother, heed well the precepts of the saints, who have all warned those who would become holy to speak little of themselves and their own affairs.
St. François de Sales
(in a letter to St. Jeanne tie C/iantal)
A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.
Chuang Tu
The dog barks; the Caravan passes.
Arabic Proverb
It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is needful, and that what is wanting (if indeed anything be wanting) is not writing or speaking—whereof ordinarily there is more than enough--but silence and work. For whereas speaking distracts, silence and work collect the thoughts and strengthen the spirit. As soon therefore as a person understands what has been said to him for his good, there is no further need to hear or to discuss; but to set himself in earnest to practise what he has learnt with silence and attention, in humility, charity and contempt of self.
St. John of the Cross
Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence—
- silence of the mouth,
- silence of the mind and
- silence of the will.
- To refrain from idle talk is hard;
- to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder;
- hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise.
- Physical noise,
- mental noise and
- noise of desire
- —we hold history's record for all of them.
And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.
That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the'radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes.
And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums.
It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas.
And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's central core of wish and desire.
Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence.
Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass-production is universal craving.
Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground.
