President Ferlo on Lenten Discipline
♦ February 12, 2015 ♦
It’s no surprise that we think of Lent as a time to cultivate some silence. Like other Protestants, Episcopalians can be a noisy lot, what with all our preaching, hymn-singing, coffee hours, and all-too-public controversies. But like other Catholics, we also prize a bit of silence, even though moments of ritual quiet in our typical Sunday liturgies tend to get cut short, either by presiders used to filling the air with talk, or congregations who start fidgeting because they suspect someone forgot their lines. For all our good intentions, we tend to be ill at ease with silence, perhaps because we tend to be ill at ease with the possibility that God might speak to us in ways that our ears wouldn’t normally want to hear.
There’s a history to this uneasiness, and it’s not always a pretty one. Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the magisterial Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, has now published a shorter, more pointed, and more personal book: Silence: A Christian History (Penguin, 2013). Written with his usual wit, verve and often unsettling candor, MacCulloch’s book tells a double story. What begins as a thorough, balanced, richly detailed and often entertaining history of Christian silence as religious practice, turns in the second half of the book to a startling exposé of the uses of Christian silence to mask all manner of evil and shame, what he calls “building identity through forgetfulness:”
The history of Christianity is full of things casually or deliberately forgotten, or left unsaid, in order to shape the future of a Church or Churches. Institutions religious or secular create their own silences, by exclusions and shared assumptions, which change over time. Such silences are often at the expense of many of the people who could be thought of as actually constituting the Church.
MacCulloch describes in calm and therefore devastating detail many “conscious silences of shame and fear:” silences about the abuse of power, about racial prejudice and the religious defense of slavery, of unspoken misogyny and homophobia, of silence about clerical child abuse amounting to sinful cover-up, silence in the face of genocide and holocaust. These pages are painful to read, but he writes them, in a way, to clear the decks: “as a necessary penitential work of stripping the altars, or, more cheerfully, the anticipatory clearance of the house before the party begins.” I can’t think of a better description of Lenten discipline. MacCulloch exposes the misuse of Christian silence as a step toward its redemption, restoring “an approach to divinity that portrays what God is not, rather than what he is” — a theology that grounds itself in a religion of Spirit that, as Paul said so long ago, lies too deep for words.
May that restored silence be yours this Lenten season. And may we all be bold enough to break our pious silences when justice is at stake.