The Silent Crucible

Blaise Pascal said “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” For myself, I think what he is expressing is that feeling that one gets when you loft a prayer to the almighty and find yourself sitting there, post communion, thinking “is anyone getting this?”

I imagine that, for anyone who prays, in moments of despair that have catapulted the faithful into prayer, there is inevitably a moment when one wonders, “when are my prayers going to be answered?” What follows is the long wait. Queue the Shirelles singing “the longest wait is right before dawn.” Long, because I am waiting for god’s will to align with my own.

These times are the most insidious, as there nothing but the waiting to support me. Consumed by my own impatience, I am plunged alternately into fear and insecurity. It is what St. John of the Cross calls, “the dark night of the soul.” Faulkner joked that it usually began around 3 a.m. It is a period of loneliness and isolation. It is a period of suffering, one that is the crucible of faith. I say this perhaps without really knowing what that means. My wife has a saying that “pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth.” For myself I try to avoid pain and suffering. When I am pain, all I can do is think about how I can get out of pain. If I have caused myself pain, all I can think about is chastising myself until I am sufficiently humbled. If someone else has caused me pain, all I can think about is how I can pay back the pain and suffering that has been visited on me. Pain, for me, when looked at in this light, seems like nothing more than the touchstone of selfish and self-centered thinking.

I think this is what Pascal is trying to express when he says that he is filled with dread. I think he knows that there is this great well of despair that forms from our own human propensity to be self-defeating and that this silence, unexamined, becomes the gulf between man and god, or even just between myself and my serenity. Pascal draws our attention to this that we should know the despair. In Buddhism the equivalent is found in a path called the sixteen stages of insight. Number six is “Knowledge of the fearful nature of mental and physical states” or more simply “knowledge of fearfulness.” The idea being that instead of recoiling from the fear, the pain and the uncertainty, there is a step that one must take in which we learn to just sit with these feelings. In knowing them we learn how to deal with them, so that when these feeling arise again, we know how to act, and not just react to our situation.

I don’t have to wait long to find these moments of pain in my life. Certainly I don’t have to wait for moments of prayer and meditation to feel isolated and alone. I can feel this way anytime, particularly when life isn’t going my way. I think about how often I can get irritated in a single day. How often do things not go my way, how many little infinite silences abut my sense of order? The other day, as I unfolded a bag of coffee beans, I several spilled on the floor. I cannot imagine how these beans leapt from the bottom of the bag and through the opening to find their way to the ground. My immediate reaction was one of frustration. Again I found myself waiting for the universe to align itself with my will. In that moment there is this terrible space that nothing can fill and so I fill it with frustration and even anger.

There are some things that I can control and other things that I cannot. I cannot, for example, control what you think and do. Ultimately the things that I can control fall to myself. I may not be able to control my feelings of sadness or fear, frustration or anger, but I can control how I react to them. I can learn to sit with them, or I can push them away. I might add again, just for arguments sake, that pushing these feeling away has typically lead me to selfish and self-centered thinking. However, having lived this way for a long time I find these reactions more and more distasteful, and while the thought of sitting in total discomfort is unappealing, the thought of alienating my sense of peace and calm is infinitely worse.