By Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
When Moses asks God to provide a name that he might share with the enslaved Israelites in Egypt, “God replied to Moses: ‘I am who I am.’ Then He added: ‘This is what you will tell the Israelites: I am has sent me to you.’ God spoke further to Moses: ‘This is what you will say to the Israelites: The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14-15).
I like very much the scholarly opinion that God responds to Moses’ request for a name by refusing to give a name. Compared to Aton, Ra, Isis, Horus, and Osiris, the Egyptian gods Moses surely knew from his youth, what sort of names are “I am who I am” and “the One who is,” a fairly literal translation usually rendered in English as “the Lord”? From the burning bush, the God of Israel points Moses beyond the limitations of names that essentially function as labels created to summon a deity to do the bidding of the requesting person. God, according to this reading of Exodus 3, refuses to be boxed in by a name, reminding Moses instead of the constant divine presence as the source and goal of all life and time. As we learn in Exodus 32, the Israelites have difficulty worshiping “the One who is”; the golden calf idolatry expresses the human craving to pull God down to our level, to make a god that is tangible and easily manipulated, indulging and catering to our selfish passions.
Long after the wilderness journey, on the same mountain where Moses encountered Him, the Lord appears to the fugitive prophet Elijah. The awesome sovereign of all creation reveals Himself not in the majesty of rock-crushing wind or the fearsome power of an earthquake or a mesmerizing and destructive fire, but in a “still small sound” (1 Kings 19:12).
These Old Testament stories remind us that God does not speak or act as we do. The Totally Other, the utterly transcendent One who simply exists without limitation or constraint, can only be worshiped properly by our silence. The author of Ecclesiastes is perfectly correct: “God is in Heaven, and you are on earth; therefore, let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:1). Ben Sira writes beautifully of this same truth: “More than this we need not add; let the last word be, He is the all” (Sirach 43:27).
Awe at the infinite immensity of God is easily lost in our vocalized inanities; from frivolous heaps of gossip to worthless social media banter to prayers uttered as robotic formulas, we are terribly prone to ignoring the overwhelming grandeur of the God who calls us quietly.
Yet that is precisely where the God of infinite mystery wishes to meet us and love us.
In his splendid book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Robert Sarah writes beautifully of the necessary link between silence and prayer:
“There is a great risk that Christians may become idolators if they lose the meaning of silence. Our words inebriate us; they confine us to what is created. Bewitched and imprisoned by the noise of human speech, we run the risk of designing worship to our specifications, a god in our own image. Words bring with them the temptation of the golden calf! Only silence leads man beyond words, to the mystery, to worship in spirit and in truth. Silence is a form of mystagogy; it brings us into the mystery without spoiling it.”
If “God is, above all, the great silence,” as Joseph Ratzinger once wrote, let us meet him there. In the fleeting silence that bridges Heaven and earth, we experience the eternal Word that God is, and we listen to that Word as a quiet and calming gift. The silence we create for God also attunes us to the divine frequency that governs the created cosmos and speaks a Word in the human words of Scripture.
No one captures this relationship between silence and the Word better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great Christian martyrs under the Nazi regime:
“We are silent before hearing the Word because our thoughts are already focused on the Word, as children are quiet when they enter their father’s room. We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and living and dwelling within us. We are silent early in the morning because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to bed because the last word also belongs to God. We remain silent solely for the sake of the Word, not thereby to dishonor the Word but rather to honour and receive it properly. In the end, silence means nothing other than waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing.”
Father Thomas Esposito, O.Cist., is a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
