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As I sat fidgeting in front of my laptop on Shrove Tuesday, I could feel my anxiety rising. I had done all the usual things to calm myself before teaching online: I had stilled myself and sat in silence for a little bit. Normally, being silent reduces my anxiety. This time, however, it did not work so well. The reason was that what I was about to do was not, strictly speaking, teaching. Nor was the group of people I was about to meet the tired-looking (and occasionally hungover) nineteen- and twenty-year-olds whom I normally teach. Instead, when I pressed the “admit all” button there appeared on my screen the cheerful faces of nearly thirty Franciscan sisters, mainly Poor Clares, all smiling and waving at me.
This was the opening session of a six-week online Lenten retreat which I had designed for Franciscan religious women. It took as its basis St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio’s little work On the Perfection of Life to the Sisters. The plan was that every Tuesday afternoon during Lent, the sisters and I would meet online for an hour or so to read, discuss, and pray over one or two chapters from Bonaventure’s text. While I had started the first session with a sense of anxiety, the sisters quickly put me at ease, and we settled into a weekly cycle of prayer, discussion, and, it must be said, no small amount of laughter.
On the Perfection of Life to the Sisters is Bonaventure’s only work devoted to female Franciscan spirituality. Written in 1259, the text was composed for the Poor Clare community at Longchamp, France, their abbess having written to Bonaventure requesting that he share his thoughts on how she and her sisters could deepen their spiritual lives. In the text, Bonaventure reflects on what he sees as the seven virtues that a Poor Clare must possess to pursue her religious vocation properly—namely, self-knowledge, humility, poverty, silence, regular prayer, devotion to Christ crucified, and perseverance. Each of these virtues, Bonaventure counsels the abbess, is a “stepping stone” on the spiritual journey that the devout Poor Clare must strive to take.
For the most part, Bonaventure comes across in the text as gentle and humble. He begins, for example, by telling the abbess—his “beloved Reverend Mother”—that he feels unworthy of the task that she has set him: “I consider myself rather deficient to give you such instruction, especially since in me the outward life is not resplendent, nor is there devotion aflame within.” Every now and again, however, a different side to Bonaventure emerges, one that is surprisingly curt. In his chapter “On Prayer,” for instance, Bonaventure tells the abbess that any Poor Clare sister who is not “assiduous” in her prayer life is “miserable and useless.” Indeed, she carries around in her body a “dead soul,” which is repellent to Christ and stands in danger of damnation.
When I designed the retreat, statements like these worried me. How would the sisters respond to them? Much to my relief, they handled Bonaventure’s occasional acidic outbursts very well. Indeed, they were more than willing to push back at him. As one Irish Poor Clare put it, with a wry smile: “Ah sure! He knows us! He knows our strengths and our failings, but we know his!” What the sisters really struggled with, however—what they even took Bonaventure to task for—was his understanding of silence.
In his chapter on silence, Bonaventure counsels the abbess of Longchamp that a good Poor Clare must always be silent. “It causes great disorder to the feminine sex,” he writes, “and is most unbecoming for consecrated virgins, not to watch over their mouths and not to discipline their tongues.” A Poor Clare should “speak rarely, with few words, and only briefly.” Bonaventure invokes the example of the Virgin Mary to support this claim. “It is quite obvious,” he writes, “that the blessed Virgin was quite taciturn.” After all, Mary speaks only a handful of times in the gospels, and when she does speak it is “with few words.” A Poor Clare should be the same: “Look to your mistress and mine,” Bonaventure writes, “look to the mirror of virtues, Mary, and learn from her the discipline of silence!”
The wise sister, Bonaventure continues, “stitches up” her lips with the “thread of discipline” (filo disciplinae). This, Bonaventure insists, is something which the Abbess herself ought to do:
Listen, my talkative friend; listen noisy and garrulous virgin!… Put your finger over your mouth, so that you may learn to keep silence, because it is most unbecoming for a spouse of Jesus Christ that she should desire to speak with anyone but her spouse.
As we read these lines out loud, I could sense the mood among the sisters changing. They clearly felt Bonaventure had crossed a line. “What’s eating him?” one sister asked. “He sounds like a bad-tempered schoolteacher!” Another sister, herself an abbess, added: “Stitch up our lips? Garrulous virgin? Who does he think he’s talking to?” After they had overcome the shock of Bonaventure’s sudden change of tone, the sisters quickly diagnosed what they saw as the chief malady at work in his “bad-tempered” words: a “rose-tinted” and “privileged” understanding of silence that, as one sister put it, “only a man could articulate.”
As another sister observed, it was very unlikely that anyone ever told Bonaventure to be quiet. He was, after all, the minister general of the Franciscan order and as one of the foremost theologians of his day. His own experience of silence was no doubt a positive one; he probably associated it with prayer, peace, and rest. The result, the sister noted, was that Bonaventure, like many in authority, had a “blind spot” as to how silence often masks and reinforces marginalization and disempowerment. She noted, for example, that it was very jarring to hear Bonaventure lauding silence as a virtue for a Poor Clare like herself, while he, as a friar, would have been able to speak freely through his teaching and pastoral activities. Poor Clares, the sister stated, have long struggled to get access to the same level of formation and education as their friar counterparts.
Another sister, clearly disturbed by what she saw as Bonaventure’s naïveté, reinforced this point. She noted how the important work done by Poor Clares has long gone unnoticed, including within the wider Franciscan family itself. Bonaventure’s insistence that a Poor Clare must be silent reinforces the already disenfranchised state in which many Franciscan religious women—and indeed female religious in general—find themselves. The sister added that silence is the one thing common to all the various scandals that have shaken the Church recently. Some within the Church have refused to speak out when things were clearly going awry. She explained: “Silence can and does destroy lives.”
As the sisters wrestled with Bonaventure’s thinking, they settled on a response to him: silence can be understood properly only if it is rooted in love. Only a love that is properly ordered—a love that celebrates the other, be it God or another person, by putting them first and making its own needs second—has the maturity needed to use silence correctly. As one of the sisters succinctly put it: “Love—and love alone—knows when to be silent and when to speak.” When love sees the abuse or marginalization of another, it cannot be silent but instead speaks out loud and clear, even if others tell it to be quiet. Likewise, when brought into the peace of God’s presence in prayer, love knows to fall silent and to be still.
As I listened to the sisters, I became acutely aware that I, like Bonaventure, had a rather privileged and “rose-tinted” view of silence. As a lay male theologian, I can speak freely, without fear of being told to be quiet. Silence is, for the most part, something I seek out willingly, not something imposed on me. As the sisters rightly noted, for a great many people the reverse is true—silence is an unwelcome guest and a painful symptom of marginalization and vulnerability. Social hierarchy, gender, race, lack of education, forced separation, sexuality, illness, poverty, and bereavement—these can all force people into silence. One of the sisters said: “Silence has many faces, and not all of them are pretty or welcome.” But she added that in all the different faces of silence, both the good and the bad, God is to be found, and his voice can never be silenced.
In the months that followed the retreat, my own relationship with silence changed. I tried to become more attentive to those places where silence is a symptom that something isn’t right. Identifying those places, I confess, is not always easy. It takes time for our hearts to become attuned to the silence of those who struggle to make their voices heard. The sisters were able to teach me something of this attentiveness, because, unlike Bonaventure, they knew something of silence’s less attractive dimensions. In doing so, they also helped me develop a much more mature theology of silence. If we wish to meet God in silence, we must first attend to, and seek to help liberate, those whom our society has unjustly silenced, for it is in their voicelessness that God dwells most fully and calls to us each day.
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