When a man and woman meet and fall in love they begin to talk. They talk and talk and talk all day long and can't wait to meet again to talk some more. They talk for hours together, and never tire of talking and so talk late into the night, until they become intimate—and then they don't talk anymore. Neither would describe intimacy as “the sacrifice of words” and a monk is not inclined to speak about his intimacy with God in this way.
Thoughts on Silence
Here is an interview with a Trappist monk on the virtue he finds in what is popularly called the vow of silence.
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Hmm. Well, it's true that I tend to be silent to third parties about what goes on between my husband and me, beyond the conventional surface contact. I guess that's silence about intimacy, and analogous to a Trappist's monk silence to me about his intimacy with God.
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So its all about sex?
It's a strange sort of metaphor, which you hear now and then from the religious orders. Nuns are supposed to be in some sense married to Christ; priests are supposed to be in that sense married to the Church.
Sometimes I think it's just a rough analogy, to help the ordinary people imagine what it might be like to have a direct and ongoing experience of the love and presence of God. Sometimes I think they mean it as a metaphor: if you think of the way that you loved the woman you loved the most, the most elevated love you ever felt, God's love has something of that purity and intensity.
Sometimes I think they are saying something else, which I don't quite understand. It always catches my eye, though, because the metaphor seems so imperfect.
Yes, the metaphor is imperfect.
I wonder if they have a different view of marriage such that the metaphor seems natural to them.
Also, the metaphor itself comes from the Bible where the metaphor of the Church as the bride of Christ is used, so maybe they're just extending the biblical metaphor rather than extending the metaphor of marriage, if that makes sense.
I think a good depiction of part of what the monk is trying to communicate is in second section of "The Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic. And then there's the fact that while a mortal spouse's little quirks might get in the way of an idealized, wordless intimacy (socks on the floor in front of the hamper AGAIN; spouse forgetting how to back the car straight AGAIN) G-d probably doesn't do that. I say probably because I was out this AM picking up after G-d pruned a lot of plants via a squall line last night, and left the bits and branches laying around. :)
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