Word, Silence, and Understanding by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

What would life be like without the glorious superfluities of flowers in your hair, of poetry, or simply of the candle we light at a festive meal?

Confrontation and interaction of the great spiritual traditions with one another is going on all around us.  It may one day be recognized as the dominant theme of the age in which we are living.  At present, it is at any rate a topic that concerns each one of us.  Our understanding of what is really happening will depend on the way in which we tackle this topic.  There are basically two approaches, one from the outside, the other from the inside.  All we can do from the outside is to examine and compare forms; the living experience which creates and sustains these forms is accessible only by entering into it. It is this approach from the inside which we shall make our own here.

Our Quest for Meaning

We may start out with a general question: What is the driving force behind the great variety of religious expressions (those labeled as such and those possibly more truly religious for having escaped the label)?  The answer: The driving force is our quest for meaning.  This may serve us, in fact, as a working definition of religion (religion, of which the religions are so many different expressions): our quest for ultimate meaning. Spirituality is, then, no more and no less than meaningful living, religion realized in daily life.  The challenge is; then, to understand our own quest for meaning and so to get at the root from which all the different spiritual traditions grow.  There is nothing esoteric about all this.  We are not speaking of mystical depths accessible only to the few.  Our quest for meaning is so simple that it is at once personal and universal. Call it our quest for happiness (which is precisely what it is) and it will sound much less formidable.   

Happiness and meaningful life are inseparable.  You may know people who appear to have whatever good fortune can give and are nevertheless desperately unhappy.  And there are others who in the midst of raw misery are deeply at peace and – well, genuinely happy.  See if you can find where the difference lies. When we go deep enough we find that the ones have found the one thing which the others are lacking: meaning in life.  But we should not call meaning a ‘thing.’  It is, in fact, the one reality in our life which is nothing.  Nor should we say that someone has found meaning, as if, once found, meaning could be safely kept for darker days.  Meaning must be constantly received, like the light to which we must open our eyes here and now, if we want to see.  One can strive for meaning; happiness is always a free gift, a surprise.

Our Need for Meaning

It is important at this point that we distinguish clearly between meaning and purpose.  We must distinguish without separating them.  The purpose of anything we do is determined by its usefulness; not so the meaning.  What a thing or an action means to me is determined not by its usefulness, but by my appreciation.  Meaning is the value of even the useless.  The things most meaningful to us are often superfluous.  What would life be like without the glorious superfluities of flowers in your hair, of poetry, or simply of the candle we light at a festive meal, though there is plenty of electric light for utility? A mere operator has no appreciation for this.  But again, we must distinguish without separating purpose from meaning.  We need only watch a gondolier guiding his gondola through the traffic of a Venetian canal to realize that the perfect operator is a perfect dancer.  There is nothing  more universally meaningful.         

We must go one step beyond usefulness and appreciation in distinguishing purpose and meaning.  In order to accomplish a given purpose I must be able to control the situation.  And in order to be in control I must first grasp what it is all about: ‘to grasp’ – that is the right word with regard to purpose.  I must grasp all details firmly, take hold of them as of so many tools. But when it comes to meaning, what is there to be grasped? On the contrary, I must allow myself to be grasped by whatever it is, before it can become meaningful to me.  As people sometimes say: “How does this grab you?”  Only when it “grabs” you will it mean something to you.  But there lies a risk.  As long as I am in control, not much can happen to me. As soon as I allow reality to “touch me,” I am in for adventure. The quest for meaning is the adventure par excellence, and happiness lies in the thrill of this adventure.

Meaning and Word 

We in the West usually conceive of meaning as the significance of a sign or word.  “This tells me something,” we say when a thing, an action or a situation has meaning for us.  “It speaks to me,” and thus it becomes, in the widest sense, a “word.”  In fact, we find it difficult to imagine that someone could focus on anything else when speaking of meaning.         

The close association of meaning and word in the mind of Westerners has deep roots.  It goes back to two key intuitions, one Jewish, one Greek, which fuse and so strengthen one another.  The Greek one hinges on the notion of Logos (which is broader than our notion of “word,” but certainly includes it); this is the notion that we can understand because we somehow have a share in the Logos, the root and origin of everything that is to be understood.  Understanding is possible because both existence and knowledge are governed by the same principle, the Logos.  The Jewish intuition, which came to reinforce the word-aspect of this Logos notion, is as basic to Jewish religion as the Logos is to Greek thought; its simplest formula is “God speaks.”         

Martin Buber tells of Rabbi Zusya, one of the great Hasidic masters, who was never able to quote the sayings of his teacher.  For when Rabbi Zusya heard the introduction to the Scripture passage which his teacher was about to expound: “And God spoke…,” he was so overcome with ecstasy and carried on so wildly that he had to be taken out.  And then he stood in the hall or in the woodshed, it is told, beating against the walls and crying: “God spoke! God spoke!”  And the story concludes: “One word is enough, for with one word can the world be uplifted, and with one word can the world be redeemed.”  The Old and the New Testament are linked together by this one Word.  For if God really speaks, this implies that God is, so to say, involved with the world, and it follows – not out of any external necessity, but with the inner logic of the heart – that the Word should be made flesh, should reach a distance from God beyond imagination, should enter into the very “bowels of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).  God goes all the way.

Meaning in Silence 

The notion of “listening to the Word” is so fundamental to our Western concept of meaning that we must almost leap over our own shadow to realize the possibility of finding meaning not primarily in Word but in Silence.  And yet, there is a whole vast tradition of spirituality in which meaning hinges not on the Word but on Silence.  Just as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of spirituality is contained as in a seed in the one insight that “God speaks,” so the key intuition of Buddhism is summed up in the celebrated saying, “I have heard the sound of no-sound.” There is no aspect of Buddhist spirituality on which this dictum will not shed light.         

We point, in the West, to a vase or an ash tray and ask: “What is this?”  No matter how manifold the answers we receive, they will generally conceive of the thing as a certain material formed in a particular way: glass pressed or blown into a certain shape, clay shaped on a potter’s wheel, fired and glazed.  Of course. It never occurs to us that someone’s bent of mind could be so different that the answer centers with the same directness on the empty space of our vase or dish.  Surprise.  “Empty space? Is that all?”  “Well, of course, the emptiness has to be defined by this shape or that.  But this is less important.  What really matters is the emptiness of the vessel.  Isn’t this what makes it a vessel?”  We must admit it, strange as this approach may seem to us; as strange as the “sound of no-sound,” to which it is closely related.         

When we look more deeply into it, we find that all this is not quite so strange as it may at first appear.  After all, we too are aware (or should be aware) of the intimate relatedness of silence and word to each other.  The word would not be word without silence.  The word is not truly word unless it is born of silence, embodies silence, returns into silence.  Only the word that comes out of silence is more than chatter.  And it must be received by silence, as seed is received by the silent furrows. Inexhaustible silence, always still greater, though it pours itself forever into word, comes to itself only in the word.  Silence would not be silence without the word.

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