Five years on the streets of New York made me aware of the need for some method of bringing native New Yorkers to friendship with Puerto Ricans. Minister, teachers, social workers, all were submerged in a Spanish-speaking crowd. They needed to learn the language, but even more they needed to attune their ears and open their hearts to the anguish of a people who were lonely, frightened, and powerless.
Quite evidently the mere study of Spanish was not enough. The man who can construct sentences with words and grammar may be much further from reality than he who knows that he does not speak a language. I saw how intensely Puerto Ricans rejected the Americano who studied them for the purpose of “integrating them” in the city. They even refused to answer in Spanish, because behind his benevolence they sensed
the condescension, and often the contempt. A program was needed to help native New Yorkers to enter into the spirit of poverty.
In 1956 I became Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and this gave me a chance to prepare people for work in the Spanish ghettos. We offered workshops combining the very intensive study of spoken Spanish with field experience and with the academie study of Puerto Rican poetry, history, songs, and social reality. Many of my students came at great personal sacrifice. More than half were priests, mostly below the age of thirty-five. They had decided to spend their lives among the poor in the inner city. It is now difficult to remember how the Catholic clergy then felt about its duty. It was hard to convince an Irish-American pastor to permit his curate to spend his time on people who never came to church. The Spanish language was a potent tool for curates who wanted to use their time and the resources of the Church for work among the poor. Because—presumably—the Spanish language identified those poor who were born Catholics, and to whom the Church under no circumstances could deny cm equal share of its ministry. When seven years later the war on poverty broke out, a substantial number of recognized leaders and critics were these men who had met each other in Puerto Rico. With this group of students I could explore the deeper meaning involved in the learning of a foreign language. In fact, I believe that properly conducted language learning is one of the few
occasions in which an adult can go through a deep experience of poverty, of weakness, and of dependence on the good will of another. Every evening we gathered for an hour of silent prayer. At the beginning of the hour one of us would offer points for meditation. The following is one of the sessions recorded by a participant.
The science of linguistics has brought into view new horizons in the understanding of human communications. An objective study of the ways in which meanings are transmitted has shown that much more is relayed from one man to another through and in silence than in words. Words and sentences are composed of silences more meaningful than the sounds. The pregnant pauses between sounds and utterances become luminous points in an incredible void: as electrons in the atom, as planets in the solar system. Language is as a cord of silence with sounds the knots—as nodes in a Peruvian quipu, in which the empty spaces speak. With Confucius we can see language as a wheel. The spokes centralize, but the empty spaces make the wheel.
It is thus not so much the other man’s words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him. It is not so much our sounds which give meaning, but it is through the pauses that we will make ourselves understood. The learning of a language is more the learning of its silences than of its sounds. Only the Christian believes in the Word as coeternal Silence. Among men in time, rhythm is a law through which our conversation becomes a yang-yin of silence and sound.
To learn a language in a human and mature way, therefore, is to accept the responsibility for its silences and for its sounds. The gift a people gives us in teaching us their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than of its system of sounds. It is an intimate gift for which we are accountable to the people who have entrusted us with their tongue. A language of which I know only the words and not the pauses is a continuous offense. It is as the caricature of a photographic negative.
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missioners, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they “speak with the accent of natives” they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be. Just as with our words, there is an analogy between our silence with men and with God. To learn the full meaning of one, we must practice and deepen the other.
First among the classification of silences is the silence of the pure listener, of womanly passivity; the silence through which the message of the other becomes “he in us,” the silence of deep interest. It is threatened by another silence—the silence of indifference, the silence of disinterest which assumes that there is nothing I want or can receive through the communication of the other. This is the ominous silence of the wife who woodenly listens to her husband relating the little things he so earnestly wants to tell her. It is the silence of the Christian who reads the gospel with the attitude that he knows it backward and forward. It is the silence of the stone—dead because it is unrelated to life. It is the silence of the missioner who never understood the miracle of a foreigner whose listening is a greater testimony of love than that of another who speaks. The man who shows us that he knows the rhythm of our silence is much closer to us than one who thinks that he knows how to speak.
The greater the distance between the two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love. It is easy for most Americans to listen to chitchat about football; but it is a sign of love for a Midwesterner to listen to the jai alai reports. The silence of the city priest on a bus listening to the report of the sickness of a goat is a gift, truly the fruit of a missionary form of long training in patience.
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God. Only when this distance dawns on consciousness can the grateful silence of patient readiness develop. This must have been the silence of the Virgin before the Ave which enabled her to become the eternal model of openness to the Word. Through her deep silence the Word could take Flesh.
In the prayer of silent listening, and nowhere else, can the Christian acquire the habit of this first silence from which the Word can be born in a foreign culture. This Word conceived in silence is grown in silence too.
A second great class in the grammar of silence is the silence of the Virgin after she conceived the Word—the silence from which not so much the Fiat as the Magnificat was born. It is the silence which nourishes the Word conceived rather than opening man to conception. It is the silence which closes man in on himself to allow him to prepare the Word for others. It is the silence of syntony; the silence in which we await the proper moment for the Word to be born into the world.
This silence too is threatened, not only by hurry and by desecration of multiplicity of action, but by the habit of verbal confection and mass production which has no time for it. It is threatened by the silence of cheapness which means that one word is as good as another and that words need no nursing.
The missioner, or foreigner, who uses words as they are in the dictionary does not know this silence. He is the man who looks up English words in himself when he wants to find a Spanish equivalent, rather than seeking the word which would syntonize; rather than finding the word or gesture or silence which would be understood, even if it has no equivalent in his own language or culture or background; the man who does not give the seed of a new language time to grow on the foreign soil of his soul. This is a silence before words, or between them; the silence within which words live or die. It is the silence of the slow prayer of hesitation; of prayer in which words have the courage to swim in a sea of silence. It is diametrically opposed to other forms of silence before words—the silence of the artificial flower which serves as a remembrance of words which do not grow, the pause in between repetition. It is the silence of the missioner who waits for the dispensation of the next memorized platitude because he has not made the effort to penetrate into the living language of others. The silence before words is also opposed to the silence of brewing aggression which can hardly be called silence—this too an interval used for the preparation of words, but words which divide rather than bring together. This is the silence to which the missioner is tempted who clings to the idea that in Spanish nothing means what he wants to say. It is the silence in which one verbal aggression—even though veiled—prepares the other.
The next great class in the grammar of silence we will call the silence beyond words. The farther we go, the farther apart does good and bad silence grow in each classification. We now have reached the silence which does not prepare any further talk. It is the silence which has said everything because there is nothing more to say. This is the silence beyond a final yes or a final no. This is the silence of love beyond words, as well as the silence of no, forever; the silence of heaven or of hell. It is the definite attitude of a man who faces the Word which is Silence, or the silence of a man who has obstinately turned away from Him.
Hell is this silence, deadly silence. Death in this silence is neither the deadness of a stone, indifferent to life, nor the deadness of a pressed flower, memory of life. It is the death after life, a final refusal to live. There can be noise and agitation and many words in this silence. It has only one meaning which is common to the noises it makes and the gaps between them. No.
There is a way in which this silence of hell threatens missionary existence. In fact with the unusual possibilities of witnessing through silence, unusual ability to destroy through it are open to the man charged with the Word in a world not his own. Missionary silence risks more: it risks becoming a hell on earth.
Ultimately missionary silence is a gift, a gift of prayer—learned in prayer by one infinitely distant, infinitely foreign and experienced in love for men, much more distant and foreign ever than men at home. The missioner can come to forget that his silence is a gift, a gift in its deepest sense gratuitously given, a gift concretely transmitted to us by those who are willing to teach us their language. If the missioner forgets this and attempts to conquer by his own power that which only others can bestow, then his existence begins to be threatened. The man who tries to buy the language like a suit, the man who tries to conquer the language through grammar so as to speak it “better than the natives around here,” the man who forgets the analogy of the silence of God and the silence of others and does not seek its growth in prayer, is a man who tries basically to rape the culture into which he is sent, and he must expect the corresponding reactions. If he is human at all he will realize that he is in a spiritual prison, but he will not admit that he has built it around himself; rather he will accuse others of being his jailers. The wall between himself and those to whom he was sent will become ever more impenetrable. As long as he sees himself as “missioner” he will know that he is frustrated, that he was sent but got nowhere; that he is away from home but has never landed anywhere; that he left his home and never reached another.
He continues to preach and is ever more aware that he is not understood, because he says what he thinks and speaks in a foreign farce of his own language. He continues to “do things for people” and considers them ungrateful because they understand that he does these things to bolster his ego. His words become a mockery of language, an expression of the silence of death.
It requires much courage at this point to return to the patient silence of interest or to the delicacy of the silence within which words grow. Out of numbness, muteness has grown. Often out of the fear of facing the difficulty late in life of trying again to learn a language, a habit of despair is born. The silence of hell—a typically missionary version of it has been born in his heart.
At the pole opposed to despair there is the silence of love, the holding of hands of the lovers. The prayer in which the vagueness before words has given place to the pure emptiness after them. The form of communication which opens the simple depth of the soul. It comes in flashes and it can become a lifetime—in prayer just as much as with people. Perhaps it is the only truly universal aspect of language, the only means of communication which was not touched by the curse of Babel. Perhaps it is the one way of being together with others and with the Word in which we have no more foreign accent.
There is still another silence beyond words, but the silence of the Pietà. It is not a silence of death but the silence of the mystery of death. It is not the silence of active acceptance of the will of God out of which the Fiat is born nor the silence of manly acceptance of Gethsemane in which obedience has its roots. The silence you as missioners seek to acquire in this Spanish course is the silence beyond bewilderment and questions; it is a silence beyond the possibility of an answer, or even reference to a word which preceded. It is the mysterious silence through which the Lord could descend into the silence of hell, the acceptance without frustration of a life, useless and wasted on Judas, a silence of freely willed powerlessness through which the world was saved. Born to redeem the world, Mary’s Son had died at the hands of His people, abandoned by His friends and betrayed by Judas whom He loved but could not save—silent contemplation of the culminating paradox of the Incarnation which was useless for the redemption of at least one personal friend. The opening of the soul to this ultimate silence of the Pietà is the culmination of the slow maturing of the three previous forms of missionary silence.