Silence and Reparation

The Silent Fullness of the Holy Trinity Alone Can Save Humanity

Today, I write in reparation for blasphemy committed in Paris and celebrated around the world with the opening ceremonies for the Olympics. Even as the Church in America celebrated the gift of the Eucharist at our Eucharistic Congress, the technocrats of Olympic Games mocked the Christian faith with lewd display. When their efforts met with consternation from religious leaders around the world, the initial reaction was to defend themselves as the misunderstood victims of the radical right. Yet, the secular history of France, its tendency to shed the blood of the prayerful, reveals the spectacle intended to mock sincere believers no matter how liberal or conservative. The eventual apology struck many as sardonic. Yet, it was heartening to see in the midst of rolling blackouts that followed, Sacré-Cœur shining over the city. It was also heartening to see multitudes coming out in the streets of Paris to pray and to show their faith. What these people of faith did was what is known as an act of reparation, an expression of faith and solidarity in the public square that boldly declares the truth about God and man to society. This is a solemn act that brings together silent prayer and praise, the mystery of the Trinity and the state of society, the disharmony of sin and the harmony of grace.

Broadcast boorish blasphemy is a grave crime against all of humanity. To remain silent is to let stand something out of whack in the world. So believers turn to God since He alone can rebalance it. He is the just judge who will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. When He came the first time, He did not come to condemn the world but so that our faith in Christ should bring us to salvation. What does faith look like in the face of blasphemy? Whether we march in the streets or huddle in our Churches or kneel in the solitude of our room, reparation involves silent reverence before the Just Judge who is coming in glory. Those who believe in Him find standing in his presence. Those who reject Him reject all that is good, holy and true. Without this, what is left? Only His Divine Silence provides ground solid enough to bear the weight of human freedom and dignity, and it is time to find this ground again.

To illustrate what I mean by silent reverence and divine silence, I turn to Tolkien’s Silmarillion. What I am trying to say about a reverent return to silence before God, he describes in terms of music. In his story, creation emerges from divine silence in a great musical movement, a symphony of new harmony. Tolkien also describes, after the initial movement of harmony, a rebellious cacophony. This rebellious melody is a loud, repetitive, and mesmerizing counterpoint to the music of creation, and is a metaphor for the cosmic satanic rebellion sewn into the structure of things. This accounts for why evil always seems to have the upper hand and is so difficult to resist. Tolkien’s tale, however, does not end on this catastrophic note for the silence from which true harmony comes is never thwarted in his works.

If he describes how catastrophe unfolds in the beginning of things, Tolkien presents another primal element of human experience that he calls “eu-catastrophe.” This is the hoped for happy ending. In some unexpected way at the least likely moment, there is a change in events. This new music heals the wounds of catastrophe, restores order and opens up a bright horizon for the future. Its hidden melodies come in the nature of a surprise, a moment that exceeds anything that could be imagined. In Tolkien’s narrative, the original music of creation is not overcome by the cacophony of angelic rebellion. Instead, Tolkien describes a third movement of eu-catastrophe. This is a higher melody which takes up both the original harmony and its discordant counterpoint into even more meaningful melody.

When we talk about reparation for blasphemy, we are talking about this very eu-catastrophe. It is an act of faith that says that evil has a limit. It is an act of confidence in the mercy of God. It is an act of hope that good will triumph even over blasphemy. Silent prayer reverently offered to God is all about offering the blasphemy and lewdness of our culture to the Savior so that He can take it up into a mystery so meaningful, the whole social reality of our lives is transformed. His love bears away the hostility of the world when we join ourselves to Him by faith. Such is the restoration of the original harmony of creation and the perfection of what God has begun in the human heart.

Making space for God’s harmony to be restored: if reparation in the face of blasphemy is about a reverent silence, it is also about praise. Praise precedes all activity for human existence issues out of an act of eternal praise in the heart of the Trinity. Accordingly, the highest purpose of humanity is to worship God. Or, in the language of the Silmarillion, worship joins the music that made us. This makes worship more than a private exercise. It is a public social reality, an act that makes known the greatness of God and also reveals that nothing but God has absolute claim over humanity. Here, alone does the heart and society as a whole find its rest. Reconciliation becomes possible on this common ground. Such is the greatness of human dignity - it stretches out to make known the glory of God and when it is frustrated, the heart remains restless.

This means that public disrespect for God disrespects man. A new totalitarianism, however, sees this egregious behavior as justified. A weird combination of government bureaucracies, political organizations and commercial interests are driven together by psychological and sociological impulses whose nihilism remain largely unexamined. In some combination of fear, resentment and greed, these conspire to trample on religious rights through the social communication industry and its emerging technologies. The result is a digital echo-chamber of tired and repetitive discordance disguised in superficial smiles, sardonic quips, and boorish curiosities.

All of this is a foretaste of hell. Public blasphemy against Christ aims making hell normative for humanity. The goal is to overwhelm and nudge the consumer into compliance. As a poet friend of mine observes, you must become a zombie or you are condemned as a weirdo. This accounts for why entertainment and news media outlets, driven to protect the commercial interests of the Olympics, eagerly align themselves with lewd religious bigotry and even defend it as they offer mock apologies.

What to call this new totalitarianism? Perhaps Marx and Engel’s “technocracy” speaks into this new blend of emerging technologies, commercial interests and political power? Whatever it is, it hates innocence, faith, and life. It avidly promotes the perversion and mutilation of children, the silencing and burning of churches, and euthanasia and abortion even to the point of infanticide outside the womb. If there is a veneer of social consent to all of this, but this is only an appearance. In technocracy, bureaucracies sacrifice human dignity and freedom on the altars of consumerism, production and profit to secure for humanity everything ancient cultures identified with Hell.

Hell is the home of those who have lost their freedom and dignity, of those with no standing before God, of those who reject the harmony of God’s plan, of those whose restlessness is as a burning fire. In short, it is where zombies reside. To fight against hellfire, to resist its cacophony, to help us find firm ground to stand on, the Church proposes acts of reparation. If this sounds weird, perhaps it’s time to consider whether the zombie disease has bit you too. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are the traditional big three penances that one takes up in the face of sin. Each is an act of faith in the Risen Lord and Just Judge. If we fail to push back against the myths generated in news cycles with these kinds of acts of faith, we cannot discern the truth that He has come to give. If we have forget the power of prayerful silence before God, all kinds of irrational enchantments lead our whole society into a fall from good order, into massive social displacement, anarchy and totalitarianism. Not knowing one’s place in society and anarchy, in fact, create the traumatic conditions in which totalitarianism is finally embraced.

To be reverently silent before God is to refuse to surrender to the totalitarian claims of any government or entity. To pray filled with compunction over the state of the world and our families is to stand against industries and interests who would otherwise intimidate us into unbelief through their mockery and blasphemy. Yes, this means to be counted as weird in the world - but the world needs this weirdness. God created us to be free with His own freedom. To believe in the Trinity is to believe that there really is a harmonious silence that lifts up humanity and gives it its proper place in the world. This silence is filled with love and meaning. It comes from the Trinity who is love and meaning itself. The piercing beauty of this love and meaning protects the whole social order from the most external political activities to the most intimate of relations. That is, this silence of God prevents us from falling out with each other, from the disorder that diminishes our freedom and undermines our dignity.

While there are many kinds of silence, we need the great silence in which divine harmonies live. The Catholic faith comes from and leads into this great silence. There are men and women who devote their whole lives to this silence. I think of the Carthusians and the movie Into Great Silence. In the Catholic tradition, the practice of silent prayer is a surrender of one’s whole life and, by prayer, even the sins of the world into these same divine harmonies. Such surrender, such prayer strives to be vulnerable to the love, truth and life of the Three Divine Persons whose plurality in unity is the source of creation’s whole multitude of creatures and whose distinctness in relation is the ultimate end of the human heart. Because the prayerful heart hears this silence, it has a wisdom that protects it against the enchantments at play in the media and gives it the courage to submit these enchantments to the Trinity’s saving harmonies. For the harmonies of God take up the cacophony of sin into its own melody of meaning. Hearing this and living by it is the great task of being Christian today.

Here, my heart turns to Father and Professor Owen Carroll, an important colleague in my life. At his memorial mass at Christ Our Light Cathedral in Oakland, California, the faithful gathered under an image of Christ the Just Judge. The death of every Christian is a witness to this mystery. Fr. Carroll had devoted his whole life to it. A French-speaking Canadian, he knew Bouyer and von Balthasar, but eventually came to the Bay Area to teach. Because of him and others like Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, the great thinkers of the Ressourement movement stirred hope here on the West Coast even as nihilistic boorishness seemed to have the upper-hand. Fr. Carroll loved France and the Church in France, and considered becoming a Carthusian there early in his career. I crossed paths with him more than once, through our students as well as through our mutual love for the Carthusians and the spiritual gift of silence this community witnesses to in the Church. He believed in that contemplative prayer was the only answer to the noise of post-modern life. Father Carroll also associated this silence with music. Indeed, true music always helps us enter into deep silences that are difficult to find without the beauty of musical keys, rhythms, harmonies and melodies. He ties this together with the Trinity in his work Sufferings and the Glory of Christ (Magnus Press, 2021):

When the light and love, longing and peaceful joy of Mozart’s music is heard and considered, might we not venture to think that the Holy Spirit has raised this music, and that of Bach’s Ich habe genug, for example, beyond the transhistorical (from age to age) to the heights of life with the Blessed Trinity? The Holy Spirit uses such music to attract mankind beyond and above all daily preoccupations, so that mankind can begin to sense the Presence of the Father and the Son in the world, and beyond the world.

If Mozart and Bach can help us hear the divine silence that holds the world together, Father Carroll also reminds us that a new music is taking up the cacophony of our time and making it part of something beyond itself. Of course, social cacophony is catastrophic - but Father Carroll’s life offered a word of hope, a reason not to retreat before the discord, but to beseech God that a new harmony might seize our hearts. Tolkien was wise to see that humanity is defined not by the catastrophe of evil, but the eu-catastrophe of God. No, the belated apologies from the Olympic organizers do not answer the evil that was on display. Holy priests and teachers know that only the sincere newness of divine beauty can do that. This is a beauty that prayer, fasting and almsgiving know. What most defines human history is not the evil of which we are capable. Instead, it is the goodness of God, a goodness that is victorious, a silence that silences sin in a canticle of glory.