Fr Robin Gibbons: Chasing the Silence

How did you keep the two minute silence both on Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day today? The practice of keeping the two minutes silence at 11 o’clock on November 11th seems to have returned from a period where it had fallen into disquietude, in fact we owe it to the British Legion who petitioned for it to be restored in 1995. Perhaps I am just growing old, but as the years move onwards this simple act of stopping what we are doing and being still grows ever more powerful in my emotional memory.

I think this is partly because we are an age of ‘wordage’, noise, where everything has to be explained and explored especially in the media and all have to put forward their own opinion. Yet there are things that can never be described in words, where silence is the only language of poignant communication. The horrors of war are one such area where journalists and reporters are often at a loss for words to describe what they see, but it occurs in ordinary life too and doesn’t have to be a negative response either.

The national two minute silence was proclaimed to be kept on Armistice Day by George V in 1919, later after the Second World War, this commemoration was transferred to Remembrance Sunday and the silence with it, but the 11th of the 11th kept its poignant symbolism and I for one am glad it has returned.

We need moments of silence in our lives, not a sterile absence of noise but that living breathing silence of life itself speaking beyond our words.

The ancient monks of Cluny kept a very rigid silence at one point in their monastic history, not as a penance but because they understood the language of God and heaven to be found in that silence, and for all of us involved in any life of faith the language of our heart’s communication with the Holy One is beyond words, in the depths of silence.

Our busy world needs people who can chase silence and help others appreciate what it brings, it can be healing , loving, forgiving, where we need not say anything at all . It can challenge us deeply and alter our perspective as perhaps this silence on Armistice day does . It can be uncomfortable because it asks of us the question, ‘who am I?” but it is more essential now than ever before.

This is what the Manchester Guardian said of that first silence on November 11th 1919:

Everyone stood very still…The hush deepened. It has spread over the whole city and became so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain…And the spirit of memory brooded over it.

Manchester Guardian Nov 12 1919

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.