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The Proper Use of Speech and Silence

We read RB 6, On Restraint in Speech, today (you can listen to it via the Prayer Box on our Vocation page). I see we last commented on it on 24 September 2007 which is either a mark of our own restraint, or more likely, an indication of our difficulty in mastering this most necessary art. Perhaps this morning we could look at the subject from a slightly different angle which ties in with this week's podcast. If you read the Bible straight through from end to end looking at how God speaks, you get a a most wonderful sense of how creative his word is; so that by the time you reach the Prologue to John's Gospel, the presentation of Christ as the Word of God seems utterly "right". (In Hebrew dabar means both word and deed, which helps my argument; when God speaks, he also does.) Christ the Word is the ultimate expression of God's nature, his very being. That is why, for a Christian, words matter. Speech is a divine gift; so too is silence. Words come out of silence and return to silence, showing what is within the one who speaks. This is the background to what Benedict says here and elsewhere in the Rule. Notice in chapter 6 Benedict is not talking about either speech or silence as such, but the proper use of both, for which he uses the word taciturnitas, which means restraint in speech, rather than what we commonly understand by taciturnity. Throughout the Rule he indicates that there are privileged times of silence (night, for example), occasions when silence is to be preferred to speech because of the danger of dissipating recollection (when late for choir, when meeting a guest, when one has been outside the monastery and is tempted to traveller's tales, and so on), but also times when a good word is to be spoken (to encourage a wobbly brother, when one cannot meet a request, to greet someone coming to the monastery, etc.). In short, Benedict expects us to use speech and silence as the gifts they are, not thoughtlessly, not rashly. The trouble is, words tend to tumble out of our mouths before we think! Wasn't it Horace who said that "words once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again"? I wonder how much whistling I'll be doing today.