“Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.” (Much Ado About Nothing)
~
I wonder if they struggled against the rottenness in their bones; against the savor of their own consciousness, sometimes forgotten but never avoided, too familiar for contempt. If Peter felt his betrayal still creeping his veins like a cancer in the blood, or if John–who, beloved, had leaned upon the bosom of his master–could no longer see that face, even in memory, without the bitterness of having slept in the hour of need. I wonder if the anger in their hearts and the blood upon their hands made each of the eleven as much of a damnation to himself as the twelfth.
I wonder if they were as I am.
~
There are urns on the altar today, and they are filled with flowers. Among them, and the lilies which strew the floor, filling the room like light (as it must have filled that space, crammed with apostolic astonishment, when the first blessing dropped from the lips of the risen Lord), —
is silence.
When I think of joy, or heaven, or God gained, I think always of music, but this–this Peace of God unto us–perhaps this is beyond music, or beneath it; or the shape of it, somehow. They opened the tomb, expecting the reek and slow hum of decay, the stir of fetid dust, and found silence: of expectancy, of Life, of God waiting outside in the dawn. So I can but ask that I, too, may enter into the hollowed, hallowed quiescence of the lilies: that I may be folded, like them, along the perfection of their space, and rest before my God.
There are urns on the altar today, and they are filled with flowers –as though everything, everything, in itself and in its substance, shall be redeemed. As though every particle of our filthy faltering flesh shall not be left to rot; as though every ash shall rise again; as though we shall not see decay.
Perhaps the world must be consumed by fire, only that its bitterness may be resolved, utterly and without remainder, into joy.
~
What a strange thing, silence. The Lord was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, but in the small voice (a voice at all, perhaps, only as a concession to the weakness of Elijah); He shall rejoice over us, and be quiet in his love; my soul is quiet, like a weaned child within me; be still, and know I am God.
Silence, ungodded, is terrifying–because it means solitude, and the stars unstrung; self alone with self, the disciples in the upper room on the evening of the third day. It means Judas with a noose in his hand.
It means that the ocean only roars to spare itself the emptiness of space.
But there is another silence, the silence of God: the silence when gazes meet, when words are weak, when action is coincident with love and the prodigal son is folded, beyond speaking, in his father’s arms. Pax vobiscum: a declaration, a benediction, a command. A hope beyond hoping in this world of noise, of meaningless pauses, of the flotsam and jetsam and thousand screens which hide us from the quietness of His love.
Peace be with you. That blessing hallows all our silences; it ravages the locked room of its sadness and the disciples of their despair. It teaches hope to these hearts (God-willed and God-beloved) which God has begun to redeem.
And so there is Life in the strong silence which surrounds us, like Mary quietly bearing God; like Christ quietly before us, in the flesh, returning to grant us His peace.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
ethelweard 