The power of faith

I visited the parish library at my church for the first time after Mass today and I picked out three books: The Eternal Year, by Karl Rahner; Letters to Contemplatives, by William Johnston; and By Way of the Heart, by Wilkie Au. This last book was the prize of them all; for a class a couple of years ago I read some chapters of it which deeply moved me and every now and then I’ve thought I needed to read the whole book. That will come.

But first I opened Rahner’s book which starts with a chapter on Advent – appropriate, I thought, since a week from today is the first Sunday of Advent. In this opening chapter, Rahner reflects on the true meaning of faith. The heart of the Christian faith, he writes, is more than just a list of facts – e.g., the incarnation, or the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus – and it is not enough for the Christian merely to think about these facts and to intellectually assent to them. The object of faith is not a series of events that happened external to us long ago. Rather, at the heart of the Christian faith is “an event that still endures” (14; one could, I suppose, also say that at the heart of the Christian faith is the person of Christ, still alive and active in the world through his Spirit), and “faith is God’s grace working to assimilate the very reality of the event thought about” (15).

Rahner continues:

By means of faith the salvation of the believer really takes place in the believer himself. Salvation itself comes out from the past into his present, into him, and it becomes present in his time. Christ lives in him. The believer becomes subject to the inner law of each event that is believed. In a mysterious way he becomes a contemporary of the incarnate Son of God. He dies and lives with him. The reason is that through faith Christ lives, in the Holy Spirit, in the believer. Furthermore, in all truth and all reality, this Spirit is gradually shaping the life of the believer into the image of the life and destiny of the incarnate Word of the Father (15).

Again, Rahner says we assimilate the very reality. This is powerful stuff. We assimilate Christ. We assimilate the Holy Spirit. The events of salvation, through faith, become a part of us; Christ and his Spirit become part of us. They work their way into our hearts and transform us from within.

The prayer of Jesus

“…when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…” (Luke 3:21).

Jesus, our model, who has, through his baptism, stood in solidarity with us in our human state, who has entered into full participation of our weakness and finitude, teaches us to accept our own weakness, to embrace everything about our frail humanity. God, in the person of the Son, Jesus, knows, intimately and from the inside, all there is to know about what it means to be human, all the beauty and nobility, the potential openness to the divine and the capacity for God, the hunger and thirst for meaning, the howling emptiness within, the longing for love, the weakness and the ease with which we bow to cravings and fears that are beneath us, the tendency to lose ourselves in mindless pursuits and on paths that lead us far from God. God, in the person of Jesus, has lived in the very heart of this tension as one of us, has felt the stretch between the allurement of God and the inertia that threatens to pull as back into the nothingness from which we came. Jesus Christ, who is God, who is one with the Father and one with all humanity and all of creation, knows and understands our struggles. He is there with us in the very pith of our humanity, in the pit of our stomachs, in the cold grip of fear, in the flush of love, in the desert of boredom, in the chemistry, electricity, and subatomic emptiness of our bodies, in the silence of our spirits. He bears all that we are, all that we experience, all that we rejoice in and all that we suffer. And he does more than merely bear it; he embraces it and absorbs it into himself; he lives it – he lives us – as us. In his own being – as humanity and as each particular person – he offers who and what we are to the Father, to the living and loving Source of all that is. This is his prayer. This is the Son in prayer before the Father. And by embracing our own humanity, in all its strengths and weaknesses, we enter into the prayer of Jesus. We do not so much pray to Jesus as we pray in his person, in his embrace, to the Father. So intimate is the union between Jesus and ourselves that in the depths of prayer we do not – dare I say cannot? – relate to him as an object, as one before whom we stand and to whom we address ourselves. Rather, we take on his subjectivity before God; we relate to God as Christ, as the Son or Daughter of God. And God looks upon us as the Beloved, looks upon us and sees an only Child of God anointed by the Holy Spirit.

Speech into silence

I started to think that perhaps silence is God. Perhaps God is silence – the shining, spinning ring “of pure and endless light.” Perhaps God speaking is a “verb,” an act, but God in perfect self-communication, in love within the Trinity, is silent and therefore is silence. God is silence, a silence that is positive, alive, actual and of its “nature” unbreakable. Perhaps the verb “God” – speaking, creating – is one more reflex of the infinite generosity, the self-giving abandonment, the kenotic love of God. Perhaps the incarnation of the Word is but a secondary expression of that “for our hardness of heart.” Far from “all silence is waiting to be broken” perhaps all speech is crying out “like a woman in travail” to be reabsorbed into silence, into death, into the liminal space that opens out into the presence of the everlasting silence.

– Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence, 221-222.

(I posted earlier about Maitland’s lovely book here and here.)

The foundation

In the sixteenth century, Ignatius Loyola developed his Spiritual Exercises, a collection of prayers, meditations, and reflections based on his own personal experience of the spiritual life and on the experience of those who came to him for guidance. Based also on the Gospels and designed to be given as a retreat over the course of thirty days of silence, the Exercises focus the participant on God’s love manifested in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Considering this love and looking for signs of its presence in one’s own life, the retreatant, it is hoped, will arrive at spiritual freedom where decisions are not shaped by fears or disordered attachments but arise spontaneously out of the fertile ground of love.

St. Ignatius realized that not everyone could drop their responsibilities for thirty straight days of silent retreat, so he made provision for his Exercises to be extended over the course of several months so that busy people (and there were busy people even back in the sixteenth century!) could participate in them a little at a time in the midst of their daily lives. An organization here in the Puget Sound area offers one such adaptation of Ignatius’ program, running through one Saturday a month from September to May, and I have enrolled in these Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life (SEEL).

Though our third SEEL meeting will be later this morning, it feels like today really marks a beginning of the retreat. The first time we met was for an orientation session in mid-September. Our first Saturday together, three weeks ago, served as an introduction to Ignatius of Loyola and to a general outline of the course of the Exercises. Today we will be assigned to small groups that we’ll continue to meet with over the next seven months, and I’ve been led to understand that the theme for this morning’s talks and reflections is what Ignatius called the First Principle and Foundation, namely God’s initiating, creating, and sustaining love, given to us and to all creation freely and unconditionally.

As I head into this morning, still not entirely sure what to expect, excited and eager, I am thinking of another Ignatius, not the sixteenth-century creator of the Spiritual Exercises and founder of the Jesuits, but the late-first/early-second-century martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch whose feast is today, October 17. Sentenced by the Romans to be thrown to wild beasts for his refusal to renounce his Christian faith, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, as he was led to Rome by armed guards, wrote letters to seven local churches to inspire and teach the Christians there. Perhaps the most famous of these letters is the one he penned to the church in Rome, in which Ignatius pleads with the believers not to interfere with his desire to die for Christ:

[W]illingly I mean to die for God if you do not hinder me! Show me no false kindness. Let me be the food of wild beasts, for they shall bring me to God. I am God’s wheat, and the teeth of beasts will grind me into Christ’s pure bread…. The pleasures and kingdoms of the earth are useless to me, for I would rather die in Christ Jesus than rule the world. I seek him who died for us. I want him who rose for us.

I seek him who died for us. I want him who rose for us. Though I can’t yet say I’m courageous enough to be thrown to the beasts for Christ’s sake, I am inspired by Ignatius’ singleness of vision, by his focus on and desire for Christ. And I pray that Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius of Loyola will today help me in the seeking and enflame me in the wanting of Christ.

God’s promise

Praying through the story of John the Baptist’s birth in the Gospel according to Luke.

Elizabeth’s neighbors and relatives, who come to rejoice with her at the birth of her son, had “heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her” (1:58). What did they hear? Certainly they heard that she who was considered barren was going to give birth. But Luke says first that they heard that God had shown mercy to her. This is the underlying meaning of the event, the essence of what has happened. This is what God has done. Here, first and foremost, is the kernel of news worth hearing. Here is the essence of the message being proclaimed – not that a woman is pregnant or that a child is about to be born who will be uniquely blessed by God and be a blessing to the people, though all of these are true and flow out of the essential thing. But the essential thing is that God is merciful and that divine mercy is at work in the lives of God’s people.

And  more: this manifestation of God’s mercy is no isolated event. Zechariah, now no longer mute, speaks out in praise of God, “Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham…” (1:72-73). These verses, and the similar verses in Mary’s Magnificat – “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever” – always touch me. I hear in them the assurance not only that God is merciful but that God has promised to be merciful and remembers that promise.

God’s faithfulness has accompanied us all our days; it lives in the world – in our hearts – and always has, and always will. There is continuity with the past; connection and solidarity with the ancestors, with those who have lived and struggled in faith, stretching all the way back to Abraham (and probably anonymous figures before him). We are living a story that began millennia ago with men and women long gone, a story that continues to this day. And through all the changes of culture and place, through all the births and deaths, through all the changing and developing images and notions and understandings of God, one thing remains constant and abiding, and that is God’s faithful love. The entire Bible is a witness to this. God never forgets. God has promised mercy and healing and life beyond our imaginings; and God is true.

Soul of Christ

This is a beautiful paraphrase, by David L. Fleming SJ, of the ancient prayer Anima Christi, or Soul of Christ (found in Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits):

Jesus, may all that is you flow into me.

May your body and blood
     be my food and drink.

May your passion and death
     be my strength and life.

Jesus, with you by my side 
     enough has been given.

May the shelter I seek
     be the shadow of your cross.

Let me not run from the love
     which you offer,

But hold me safe from the forces of evil.

On each of my dyings
     shed your light and your love.

Keep calling to me until that day comes,

When, with your saints,
     I may praise you forever. Amen.

Awakening, or Lighten up!

I facilitate a men’s faith sharing group at my parish. A couple of months ago we started reading and reflecting on a series of books entitled Bridges to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton, edited by members of The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living. The eight-volume series, designed for use in small groups, pairs readings from Merton’s works with excerpts from other spiritual authors, along with prayers and dialogue questions, in order to attune participants to the presence of the divine in their ordinary lives, to lead them, in other words, to a more contemplative life.

Our faith sharing group started the series, out of sequence, with volume two and only today began reading volume one, Entering the School of Your Own Experience. In the introductory paragraph to the first chapter, the editors write:

Living a life that is contemplative opens us to ourselves, our neighbors, and, at deeper levels that we do not often experience, to God who, Merton would say, has been present to our lives and experience all the time.

This is an attempt at describing what contemplative living does. But what is contemplative living? What is contemplation? For one thing, it’s an elusive concept, one that resists precise definitions and the meaning of which Merton himself tries to suggest, as elsewhere, in New Seeds of Contemplation:

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith…. It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts…. It is awakening.

But how does one awaken to such wonder, such awe, such knowledge? I want it! How do I get me some of that? There are ways to prepare oneself for this awakening, to avail oneself of the experience of contemplation, certain practices one can follow, but ultimately contemplation cannot be reduced either to a series of techniques or to the necessary end result of those techniques. It is, I believe, pure gift. It is a momentary spark (and it usually is momentary, fleeting, here and gone before we can do anything with it) in our relationship with the living and free God who is the source and giver of the very spark of contemplation.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition and the author juxtaposed to Merton in chapter one of Entering the School of Your Own Experience, writes in her book Start Where You Are:

We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and “get it,” but actually the truth sinks in like rain into very hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soften up slowly at our own speed. But when that happens, something has fundamentally changed in us. That hard earth has softened. It doesn’t seem to happen by trying to get it or capture it. It happens by letting go…. Moment after moment let yourself die wholeheartedly.

In the group this morning we talked a lot about Chodron’s words. I love her metaphor of the hard earth slowly soaking up the rain and gradually softening. When I reflect on my own moments of contemplation, my own experiences of awakening, I think of a mirror image metaphor, that of water welling up from underneath the hard earth to soften it. Either way, something is done to the hard earth. It’s as if the earth undergoes a sort of transformation. We are the hard earth. I am the hard earth, and when I open to the gentle rain of grace I become something different. I see differently, even if only for a moment. And the “me” that wanted to awaken, that wanted to get me some of that, is momentarily gone.

We often berate ourselves – at least I know I do – for not being able to see things clearly more often, for not being more awake to the presence of the divine in our lives. As I said above, there are things we can do do prepare ourselves for such vision and awakening, but they amount more to a letting go than to an achievement of something. Letting go, for example, of attachments, grudges, grievances, judgments. This is the death that Chodron speaks of, the death of the false self that Merton writes about so often. This dying is our part. But the awakening – the rising! – is something God leads us to and gives us. And it is the true self that awakens, that is the good, soft earth. When I berate myself for not being more awake, it is the false self that is doing so, the false self who has no control over the awakening other than to practice letting go. Both the “I” doing the berating and the “me” being berated are passing away. Perhaps this is one reason why the spiritual life can be so difficult, why spiritual growth can be so painful: “I” must submit to something that “I” cannot enjoy; the false self must die and must do so knowingly in order for the true self to be born.

That sounds harsh, but I find it a liberating realization, one that helps me to be more gentle towards and accepting of my halting attempts at spiritual “progress,” one that even helps me be more patient and loving towards the “old man” who must pass away, and finally one that helps me take myself less seriously.

Luminous mysteries

I have a breviary, Benedictine Daily Prayer, that I use from time to time. On Wednesday, the feast of Mary, Our Lady of the Rosary, I dipped into it and sat with the reading for the day, an excerpt from the Apostolic Letter from 2002 by Pope John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, “On the Most Holy Rosary.” In it the late pontiff writes:

Christ is the supreme Teacher, the revealer and the one revealed. It is not just a question of learning what he taught but of “learning him.” In this regard could we have any better teacher than Mary? From the divine standpoint, the Spirit is the interior teacher who leads us to the full truth of Christ. But among creatures no one knows Christ better than Mary; no one can introduce us to a profound knowledge of his mystery better than his Mother.

Inspired by the feast and by this reading on the role of Mary in the Christian’s growing intimacy with Jesus, I prayed the rosary yesterday and today. I must admit that my beads tend to gather quite a bit of dust. Centering prayer, lectio divina, and the Psalms are what ground my spiritual life; they are the bread and butter of my praying. But every now and then I feel drawn to the rosary. And when I allow myself to be lead through the ring of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, through meditation on the mysteries of the life of Jesus, a unique savor infuses my prayer; it is then as if I toasted my bread and spread on it butter and the purest honey.

It was in that same Apostolic Letter on the rosary that John Paul II suggested adding to the traditional joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries five new mysteries for meditation while praying the rosary. These he called the mysteries of light, or the luminous mysteries. They are: Jesus’ Baptism; his self-manifestation at the wedding at Cana; the proclamation of the Kingdom and the concomitant call to conversion and promise of forgiveness of sins; the Transfiguration; and the institution of the Eucharist. I found the text of Rosarium Virginis Mariae on the Vatican’s web site earlier this evening, and after reading the section where John Paul offers his addition to the rosary, I took my beads in hand and prayed the luminous mysteries.

Some thoughts as I did so.

Through Jesus’ Baptism and the wedding at Cana it seems the light of Christ is dawning on the world gradually, in stages. The light doesn’t burst upon us all at once. It initially comes quietly, humbly, and in secret through the annunciation to Mary and the birth of Jesus. A small light flickers forth in the deepest darkness. Then In the Baptism the light first shines in public and the voice of the Father from the rent heavens announces its presence and commands us to heed it. At the wedding in Cana it seems that Jesus is in no hurry to shine forth. He even seems reluctant to do so. But at the bidding of Mary, his mother, he consents. And Mary, anticipating the voice of the Father at the Transfiguration, tells us to do whatever he tells us. The light now shines a little brighter with this first of Jesus’ signs.

With the proclamation of the Kingdom, which John Paul II says includes the call to conversion and the promise of forgiveness of sins, not only does the light of Christ shine out fully and for all to see, but all people are now invited to come to the light, to turn toward the light and to be enlightened. Let your deeds be done in the light! Be children of light!

The Transfiguration is the revelation to Jesus’ intimates of a foretaste of the glory that was his and will be again. Having come to the light, having entered into its illumination, the three disciples closest to Jesus – Peter, James, and John – are privileged with the radiance that resides at the very heart of the light, at its brightest center. And they are baffled, flummoxed, terrified, and overwhelmed by it.

Finally, in the institution of the Eucharist, the light, just prior to being extinguished in this life, hides itself in ordinary bread and wine to be consumed by the disciples so that they – so that we – may carry the light in the world; that we may be the continuation of its illumination. We are, so to speak, candles lit from the one great fire, to be carried through the darkness of the world, for our own illumination and warmth, and for the comfort and blessing of all those we meet.

These are mysteries indeed. As with the joyful and the sorrowful and the glorious, reflection on the luminous mysteries, these signal events in the public life and ministry, leads us to more questions than answers. Why, if he was the Son of God, God from God and light from light, did Jesus need to be baptized? What did Jesus mean at Cana when he said his hour had not yet come? And if his hour had not yet come, how did his mother prevail upon him to hasten his hour and make himself known by changing water to wine? What is the conversion, the change of heart, that Jesus demands of us? And how would our hearts melt and our lives change if we could truly and completely open them to the good news of the forgiveness of sin? What in the world happened in the Transfiguration and what was its purpose in the life of Jesus and for the disciples? What does it mean that Jesus gave us his body and blood as spiritual food and drink?

The person of Jesus himself is a mystery. The rosary is a means of encountering the mystery of Jesus, of “learning him,” in the company of her who knew him better than any other person. Pope John Paul II writes in the aforementioned letter:

This school of Mary is all the more effective if we consider that she teaches by obtaining for us in abundance the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even as she offers us the incomparable example of her own “pilgrimage of faith.” As we contemplate each mystery of her Son’s life, she invites us to do as she did at the Annunciation: to ask humbly the questions which open us to the light, in order to end with the obedience of faith: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

The less I look at, the more I see

The other night I started reading Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (which I posted about here), partly a record of her journey from a noisy life to one in which silence is a welcome and sought-out companion, and partly, as the dust jacket says, a “cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression.” On the very first page Maitland catalogs the sounds she hears, or expects to hear, from the doorstep of her house in the Scottish countryside: the ruckus of a pair of crows and the chirping of smaller birds; the regular chugging of a train on the other side of the valley; the possible sputtering of her neighbor’s four-wheel motorbike as he checks on his sheep; and not much else. But it is her description of the vista she enjoys from her house that stirred me – evidently unremarkable views, what her friend decried as “twenty-mile views of absolutely nothing.” Maitland concurs; from her doorstep she does in fact look down a valley at nothing, and finds it “wonderful…it is the huge nothing that pulls me into itself.” And with no extraordinary sights to wow her senses, she becomes sensitive to more subtle beauties: cloud formations, the varied responses to the wind of different grasses and other plants, colors that shift with the movement of the sun through the day and through the year. She takes in this view of nothing and, she writes, “with fewer things to look at I see better.”

That phrase reminded me of something I heard Emero Stiegman say years ago: “The less you look at, the more you see.”

I was a monk in those days at a Trappist-Cistercian monastery in California, and Stiegman, a layman and Cistercian scholar, was visiting to share with the community the fruits of his studies. He spoke about simplicity, a virtue the Cistercians have been known for through the centuries and that they have embodied in their prayer, their speech and their silence, their work, their architecture, in short, in their single-hearted focus on the search for God in community and in solitude. Such simplicity orders all the elements of life toward this search and it demands the setting aside of everything that distracts one from this search. All things act like mirrors angled to direct one’s gaze toward the face of Christ.

In his talk to the monastic community, Stiegman was contrasting the surge in popularity of stained glass windows in the magnificent cathedrals of the middle ages with the early Cistercians’ insistence on using plain, clear glass in their churches. The Cistercians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries built houses of worship in bold, clean lines, without ornamentation – solid stone edifices that were nonetheless full of light. And that brilliant, white light streaming through clear windows symbolized for them the purity and simplicity of God. It also reflected their desire to go to God, and to be met by God, on the most direct route possible, with all distractions and diversions cut out and cast aside. The Cistercians turned their eyes from the world of multiplicity, in which one’s energies are diffused and deflected, and focused them on the one thing necessary: union with God. From one perspective, such intense focus might seem like a narrowing of vision, an impoverishment of life, a rejection of the good things of God’s creation. But the Cistercians’ way, one of many possible approaches to God, represented an attempt to go deeper into the spiritual life by having less to divert one’s attention. Rather than knowing and having experience of many things superficially, the Cistercians devoted themselves to knowing, deeply and intimately, God alone, the God who is the source and perfection of all the good things in the world.

I was a pretty green monk at the time of Stiegman’s talk, idealistic enough to be drawn to such an austere vision and yet young enough to feel my energies straining to embrace the whole wide world in the panoply of its rich beauty. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my life looking at less, and yet Stiegman’s words stayed with me.

Though I eventually left the monastery, I have continued to learn about myself, about the terrain of my spiritual journey, and about what “works” and what doesn’t “work” in bringing me closer to God. And I find the things that bring me closer to God may be characterized as “less” – silence, solitude, routine, walks along the same path day after day through changing light and seasons. These free me and sensitize me to the “more” that abides beneath the surfaces of the world and the self, and confirm the truth of what Stiegman and Maitland say. The less I look at, the more I see.

As a side note, today, October 6, is the feast, in the Catholic Church’s calendar, of St. Bruno (1030-1101), founder of the Carthusians, an eremitical order that began around the same time as the Cistercians. The Benedictine monk and scholar Jean Leclercq writes of Bruno, in The History of Medieval Spirituality: “Unlike most other hermits of his time, Bruno allowed no place for preaching or for the active service of the church in his life and his teaching. He is the man of silence, of that presence to God and that presence of God which is given by the desert and ‘of which only those can speak who have experienced it.’”

The living and the dead

I am enjoying Karl Rahner’s little book Encounters with Silence, a collection of deeply moving and personal reflections — of prayers, really — addressed directly to God. Rahner (1904-1984) is known, perhaps most of all, for his profound and staggeringly dense theological writings. But this slim volume is proof that his erudition was grounded in a vigorous and questioning spirituality, that at the root of his keen intellect was a living and loving heart.

In the chapter “God of the Living,” Rahner is meditating on the dead, specifically those dead whom he has loved and who have taken a piece of his heart, and sometimes, he admits, his whole heart, with them. Grief for the dead, he seems to suggest, persists, though it goes dormant over time; it is “ultimate and definitive” (p. 54). The only reason he no longer weeps for the dead is precisely because a part of his heart has died and is now with the dead who truly live with God.

But if the dead live in God, and if Rahner can say that a piece of his heart is with them, why, he asks, can there be no communication with the dead? Why do we never hear a word from them? Why are the dead, “those quiet and distant ones who have entered into night” (56), so silent? If he loved them and they loved him, and if love endures, how can it be that “not a single sign of their gentle love and kindness comes to warm my heart” (55)? Have the dead forgotten us?

The silence of the dead, Rahner concludes, is an echo of God’s silence. And neither silence, in actual fact, is an absence of communication. And we cannot assume that, because there is no sign from the dead that we are aware of, they do not still love us intentionally and particularly. The dead are, truthfully, no more dead than God. Both “speak” and live and love unbounded by the narrow confines of our finite, earthly existence. They live, while it is we, the “living,” who are dying. And they have not forgotten us. Rahner continues:

Their silence is their loudest call to me, because it is the echo of Your silence. Their voice speaks in unison with Yours…. And thus I am called and commanded by the silence of the dead, who live Your Life and therefore speak Your word to me, the word of the God of Life, so far removed from my dying. They are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me [58].