The Sound of Silence
Introduction:
My father was an Italian immigrant who left behind
a brother and a whole Italian immigrant community here in Milwaukee and
migrated north to Manitowoc. Every
year we would make our annual journey
or pilgrimage from Manitowoc to that far-off metropolis of Milwaukee, which for
him was "Little Italy." That was like a hundred and fifty years ago,
when there were no SUV’s but just model T’s. To get them started, you actually
cranked them. Back in those days a trip
from Manitowoc to Milwaukee was more like a trek or safari. Now days, they "dash" in to Milwaukee from
Manitowoc to take in a movie or a play, or get a good pizza.
When our
visit was over, my father, my sister, and I would bid farewell (by then our mother was already taken from us). And my father would always weep, and I would weep with
him. I was never quite sure what the weeping was all about, but I helped him
along anyway. An Orthodox theologian writes (Nicholas Baerdiev): "Every
farewell has the taste of death about it and is a painful experience of the emptiness of the human situation.”
Maybe that’s why we were weeping.
On Good Friday Jesus bade us farewell.
Crucified, died, and buried, he was
gone. We liturgically symbolized that on Good Friday by stripping the altar
clean of candle and clutter. Then in
simple and silent procession we transferred the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle to some out-of-the-way
resting-place in the sacristy. From the
tabernacle doors flung open, the silent emptiness inside quietly screamed out
at us saying: "He's gone!" And we felt a bit lonely and empty like the tabernacle itself.
After Good Friday came the resurrection. And for
forty days the risen Lord appeared to
the apostles (Acts 1:3). Then he bade them a final farewell. He led the disciples out of the city as far
as Bethany, raised his hands, blessed them, then ascended into heaven to take
his place at the right hand of his Father. From where he sent the holy Spirit
of Pentecost. The ascension put an end
to the visible earthly presence of Jesus among us. That too we
liturgically symbolized in the old days.
After the reading of the Ascension gospel, a server abruptly snuffed out the Easter candle and dramatically whisked it off to some dark closet in the sacristy
where it rested till the next Holy Saturday. That too quietly screamed out at us: "He's gone!" And again we felt a
bit lonely and empty. But we also felt as though we were waiting for something.
Indeed the emptiness inside us was waiting for Pentecostal fullness.
The period between this Sunday, feast of the
Ascension (when Jesus takes leave of us), and next Sunday, feast of Pentecost
(when he returns to us in his Holy Spirit), is theologically a bit awkward. It
seems to be a kind of interim period in which we are without Christ and
without his holy Spirit. There really is no such interim which orphans us from
Christ and which has us twiddling our
thumbs as we wait for his Spirit. It is interesting to note that up until the
fourth century, the feasts of Ascension and Pentecost were but one feast. That
communicated the sense of one divine transaction in which the human visible
body of Jesus ascending into heaven was immediately exchanged for the
descending of the Holy Spirit of God.
An ancient antiphon cries out:
"O Admirabile Commercium!" O
Admirable Commerce! O blessed Deal! O
Wonderful Exchange!
The present interim period is simply a liturgical
creation for us human beings, and is meant to give us a chance to liturgically
sit, as it were, in the emptiness of the human situation, and to wait for fullness from on high.
What we do with nothing.
And as we wait, we ask ourselves this rather
strange but profound question: "What do we do with nothing? What do we do with life’s emptiness? The
cultural answer, of course, is clear:
"What you do with life’s emptiness
is fill it up. Fill it up with this or that, with any old thing, if needs be,
but by all means, fill it up.”
What do you do with the boredom in your life? You fill it up: you jump into car, and go somewhere, anywhere, as long as you go. What do you do
with the loneliness in your life? You fill it up: you go find yourself a gang
or mob. What do you do with the
melancholy in your life? You fill it up: you find yourself a high, or
you fix yourself a fix.
What do you do with the silence in your life?
That, after all, is the emptiness of
sound. For God’s sake you fill it up.
You turn something on and you turn it up: TV or CD or VCR. You fill up
the emptiness with "music" that sometimes is pure noise. On that very hot and humid day this past
week when the windows were open, some young punk out there was revving up the motor of his tin lezzy,
racing around corners, and screeching his tires, over and over again. That’s what you do with silence: you murder
it.
If you’re waiting on the phone (because “all our
operators are busy with other customers, and your call will be taken in the
order it was received”) they switch you on to music, just to make sure you
don’t suffer withdrawal symptoms if the silence get too long (which it always
does). The boom-boxes of the season are the perfect symbol of our
culture’s fear of emptiness, and of its
constant attempt to drown out the
sound of silence and to fill it up with noise.
I believe that salvation will come to the inner
city only when our kids stop filling up the emptiness; only when they stop running
off to other centers outside themselves, instead of to the one down deep
within. I believe that salvation will
come only if they turn off the boom-boxes and stop shooting baskets, and start
hearing the "Sound of
Silence" rising from a center deep within. I believe that in that "Sound of Silence" inner-city inhabitants will be able to hear the secret that will enable
them to break out of their benign despair.
And within the last decade of years, it is becoming
clear to me also that this is equally true of the suburbs. It has an emptiness
all its own, and it has its own ways of filling in the emptiness, more
dignified than boom-boxes or basket
balls. The suburbs has its own kind of noise to turn down, and it too is
in need of turning up the sound of silence to hear the secret that will enable
them to break out of their dolled-up
despair. This seems to be part
of the message coming out of the school
massacres that like to take place in the suburbs.
What the apostles did
with emptiness.
Jesus’ farewell
must have left the apostles feeling empty as no other farewell in their
lives. What did they do with the hollow
feeling left them by the departure of Jesus? They didn’t fill
it up. They didn't head straight for
the nearest bar. They didn't gulp down pills to lift themselves up, or take fixes to fix themselves up. Momentarily orphaned by Jesus, the apostles
returned to Jerusalem and headed straight for the temple, and there, says
Luke, “they remained in constant prayer” (Lk 24:53). They went straight
to the temple to give their emptiness
time to be filled not with any old thing but with something worthwhile
waiting for. They went straight to the temple to give their sorrow time to pass
over into joy.
It's o.k.
Though it is counter-cultural to say it, we say it anyway: It's o.k. to be
emptied and to feel empty. It's o.k.
to be bored or melancholy for a while. It's o.k. to be depressed and
down in the mouth at times. It's o.k. to wonder sometimes what in the world is
life all about, and is it really worthwhile living? It's o.k. to be lonely
every now and then. It's o.k. to be
lost for a while and not know where you are going. It's o.k. to have a problem,
and for the time being have no solution for it. It's o.k. to grieve for a while.
Don't
jump at your fullness; in prayer-filled patience wait for it. Don’t fill
up your emptiness with any old thing.
In peace let your emptiness be
for a while. In the mean-time, go
to the temple, and there pray and there wait for your fullness. There in the temple we get in touch with a
center down deep within ourselves, and there we make the wonderful discovery
that we are not as empty as we thought we were. There in the temple, where we
pray and wait, in due time we are filled with a fullness that is nothing less
than ”power from on high”
(Lk 24:49).