Sermon for Gaudete Sunday

The following sermon was given by Fr. Richard Cipolla on Gaudete Sunday, Dec. 12 at St.  Mary Church, Norwalk

At that time, the Jews sent to John from Jerusalem priests and Levites to ask him: “Who are you”?

Who are you, they asked.  A good question.  For he was impressively strange, or strangely impressive. And his answer:  a voice crying in the wilderness, crying out: make straight the way of the Lord!  Aha, they said: if you are the voice, then you are the Messiah, the one we have been waiting for, the one we have longed for, the one who will save us. But no, he tells them: I am the voice, not the word.  But they do not understand, because they do not know the difference between the voice and the word.  I am the voice, not the word. What is the difference?  The voice is he who cries, who cries out from the desert into the world, from the silence into the noise. And those who are in the noise always confuse the voice with the word. And they confuse the two because they do not notice within the noise that the voice dies out; in a while there is no voice. But they do not notice this, that the voice disappears, because they are surrounded by noise, the noise of their lives, the noise of the world, the noise which masks all attempts to hear anything at all except the static of the self, of the clamoring of the self shouting against and with the clamoring of the world. 

But under what circumstances could they have distinguished between the voice and the word?    Under only one condition:  the condition of silence. If they were surrounded by silence, or, more to the point, if they were silent, they would have heard the voice die out into the silence, and then, they would have heard the word, not with their ears, for the word is never heard with the ears: it is heard with the heart. For that is where the word, the meaning, the heart of the matter, is heard.

If I say something to you, my voice dies out; but the meaning, the heart of what I said to you, remains with you.  Cor ad cor loquitur.  But suppose I am filled with noise: my head, my heart, my mind. Then I do not notice that the voice dies out and this lack of attention because of the noise prevents me from understand what is being said, the word. It is only when I listen for meaning, when I have cleared out the noise of voices that blocks out meaning, can I distinguish the voice from the word and that I can understand what the voice has said. And so it is with us in this Advent: we hear the voice today, the voice that cries out of the silence of the wilderness into the noise of the world: prepare ye the way of the Lord: make straight the way of the Lord.  But we mistake the voice for the word. We mistake a reading at Mass for the Word.  The voice, the sound of the words,  blends in with the hustle and bustle, the business of our lives, the constant murmur of the world that masks any attempt to hear the word, and especially the horribly false silence  of the cyberworld of the internet chatter.  And we run from voice to voice, the latest voice, the newest voice, the voice that makes us feel good, the voice that satisfies, but we never notice amidst the noise that all these voices die out.

How can we distinguish between the voice and the word, the sound and the meaning, the movement of the molecules of air that dance on the receptors in our ears and heart of what is being said to us?  In only one way: by silence.  It is only in silence that we can hear the voice dying out and the word coming into our mind and heart.  I must decrease so that he may increase.  The irony of our situation is that the very feast we prepare to celebrate has at its very heart silence, and yet what surrounds this feast is so much noise that we do not notice the silence.  That wonderful introit for the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas points us in the right direction:   Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia:  While all things were in the heart of silence and the night was in the midst of her course, Thy almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven from Thy royal throne.  The Incarnation of the Word of God takes place in silence and that is why almost no one noticed.  The Roman powers did not notice, the Roman literati, did not notice. The Jews of that time who were waiting for the Messiah: they did not notice.  The only ones who noticed were some shepherds tending their sheep who were probably asleep and had stopped their constant bleating and baa-ing.  They noticed because they were silent. 

But this radical necessity for silence in order to hear the word, in order to distinguish between the voice that fades and the word, is grounded not merely in the human condition that revels in the noise that masks sin and therefore makes us so found of voices.  Silence is necessary to hear the word because silence is at the very heart of God himself.  St John of the Cross says that silence is the first language of God.  The communication within God, the communication between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit happens, is, in silence. The very heart of God is silence, a silence that is eternally fruitful, for it is out of this silence that the Word of God comes. The Logos speaks from the silence of God, and leaps down from his royal throne to be silent in the small darkness of the womb of Mary, and from the silence of her womb comes that Word in the flesh, and from that silence comes the baby’s cry and her response to that cry out of silence is the silent lullaby of her breast that gives food to Him who is the bread of angels.  The communication between this mother and her son reaches its fulfillment in that terrible silence at the cross, where both broken hearts communicate that terrible love that lies at the very center of the heart of the suffering and glorious God. 

A  priest said recently: what I hate most about the traditional Latin Mass is the silence.  A truly damning statement.  For if silence does not lie at the heart of the Mass, the pure worship in spirit and truth, then it must be false. If voices lie at the heart of Mass, if chatter is what the Mass is about, then all is lost, for how can one praise the God whose heart beats in silence if silence is not at the heart of the worship of this God?  But the silence of God is not the silence of man.  Words are not merely voices, verba non sunt voces solae.  This is one of main reasons why music is so important to the celebration of Mass.  Because liturgical music in its very nature resonates with the silence of God.  The Church’s chant is neumatic silence, where austerity and terrible ecstasy are distilled into a vehicle that allows the heart of man to sing the very silence of God.  Polyphony is a cascading waterfall of sound that is transparent to that silence that must lie at the heart of Catholic worship.  This is how one must understand liturgical music:  the question always is:  does this come from  and support and is true to the silence of God that lies at the heart of the Sacrifice of the Mass?  This is why the sentimental and shallow music that is so commonly sung at most celebrations of the Mass in most parishes is a denial of the Mass itself: for it comes from the voices of the individual, from the voices of the world at a particular time.  This music is voices, not word and has no place in the Mass.  But this is not merely a matter of taste.  Because even the best Protestant hymns that are now sung in the Catholic Church, hymns that I admire so much: Lo, he comes with clouds descending, one of the great Advent hymns:  For all the saints, The Church’s one foundation. All great texts, all good tunes.  But in the end they are voices that fade away. They are grounded in not in the silence of God but in the congregation who sings them, and therefore they are always foreign to the Roman Catholic Mass. 

But the heart of the role of silence in the traditional Mass, that is, the Mass until the reform of the Second Vatican Council, is in the Canon of the Mass, the prayer of consecration.  The custom of saying the Canon silently is an organic development in both the East and the West.  All sorts of rationalistic and historical guess reasons are given by liturgical historians for the silent Canon. None of them are definitive.  But is it not obvious that the Church realized that this prayer, which lies at the very heart of the oblation that is the Mass, is not voices but is word and therefore had to be protected by silence.  Medieval and baroque theologians offer many mystical meanings to the silent canon. There is nothing wrong with these ex post facto mystical meanings, but is it not more important that the Church understood organically through the centuries that the prayer of silence is demanded precisely when the Word made flesh comes once again to us in the form of bread and wine?  One of St Birgitta’s most intense and well-known visions is of the birth of Christ.  If you look at Christian art before these visions, the birth of Christ is always depicted in the then traditional position of Mary lying on her side to give birth.  After St Birgitta’s revelation, at least in the West, the artistic depiction of Christ’s birth always shows what she was shown.  Mary delivered Jesus in prayer in silence and the first act of Mary and Joseph after the birth of Jesus is to kneel in prayer and adoration.  Mary’s active participation in her giving birth to Jesus was silent prayer. There were no voices at the birth of Jesus, for how could there be, for how silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given, so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. 

My friends, Christmas is approaching. We will hear the carols, we will hear the trumpets, the Gloria in excelsis Deo, the often rote greetings of Merry Christmas, when this is allowed by the secular gulag police, we will hear the hawksters of the crass commercialism of this season. We will hear all these sounds, these voices, we will hear all of this and if these are only voices, our hearts will not be moved. But if we empty out our lives by deliberately going into the silent desert that lies at the heart of God, then we will hear the Word and the Word will come into our hearts and we will be filled with a joy that we did not even imagine could exist.

               Elected Silence, sing to me

               And beat upon my whorled ear,

               Pipe me to pastures still and be

               The music that I care to hear.

               Shape nothing, lips;be lovely-dumb

               It is the shut, the curfew sent

               From there where all surrenders come

               Which only makes you eloquent.

               Be shelled, eyes, with double dark,

               And find the uncreated light;

               This ruck and reel which you remark

               Coils, keeps and teases simple sight,

               Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,,

               Desire not to be rinsed with wine:

               The can must be so sweet, the crust

               So fresh that come in fasts divine!

               Nostrils, your careless breath that spend

               Upon the stir and keep of pride,

               What relish shall the censers send

               Along the sanctuary side!

               O feel-of primrose hands, O feet

               That want the yield of plushy sward,

               But you shall walk the golden street

               And you unhouse and house the Lord.

               And, Poverty, be thou the bride

               And now the marriage feast begun,

               And lily-coloured clothes provide

               Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ