Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman OSB. Elijah bursts onto the Biblical scene without so much as a by your leave. We know nothing of his background or his forbears. We just hear his thunderous voice coming from the 9th Century before the era of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the harsh silence of the desert, his voice is almost as if heaven itself had broken the silence. With Elijah a line was drawn in the sand. On one side is the living God; on the other everything that has replaced the living God. The scene of our first reading this morning has this prophet holed up in a cave at Mount Horeb. He has just murdered 450 rival prophets and called on his God to reveal himself by scattering thunder and throwing down fire. Elijah is complaining that his enemies have it in for him, that life as a hell-fire preacher is not worth living. The message from the living God, both to him and to us, is clear. Turn down the volume and listen for the silence.
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Paul Simon wrote the words of “The Sound of Silence” when he was 21 years old. He was in the bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate. “Because, he says, the bathroom had tiles, it was a slight echo-chamber. I’d turn on the tap so that water would run (I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me) and I’d play in the dark. ‘Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.'” He finished the lyrics on February 19th 1964.
But ‘the vision that was planted
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
When King Ahaziah asked for a description of the prophet whom he had never met, he was told that Elijah was a hairy man who wore rough clothing made from animal skins, that he had a wild unkempt appearance about him.
Elijah was certainly an angry person, ranting and raving, basically a rough diamond. The living God, the God of mercy and compassion, had to slow him down, soften him up, and above all, get him to reduce the volume.
Earthquake, catastrophe, disaster are not the idiom or the media of divine self-revelation. We have to learn the language of stillness and the sound of silence if we want to communicate with the God who is, who was, and who always will be. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
God is God and cannot be otherwise.
God is infinite, eternal, without beginning, without end.
We are the work of God’s hands: we are created, we did have a beginning and we will have an end.
The strange and wonderful possibility is that God, having created the universe, fell in love with it. God wishes to make us part of God’s livelihood, which means being with God forever and ever. So, we must learn a new language, the one that God speaks. We hold ourselves out to the darkness with complete trust and love. We know that the darkness is not such because God is hiding or withdrawn or playing some game. It is the way God is in relation to the way we are. All our normal ways of loving, of expressing love, must shrivel. We hold ourselves, as we are, in His presence. We offer our attention to the darkness. We stand still in the humility of our desire.
This requires that we attune to the difference, acclimatise to the emptiness, adjust to the refinement of this Divine presence, which may register on our radar screens as total blankness [“is dona linn an briseadh seo”].
The butterfly lands in the semi-darkness on our thoroughfare; The leaf falls at our feet in the empty forest. Elijah had to learn, between Mount Carmel and Mount Horeb, that the words of a prophet are heard in ‘the sound of silence.’