The Taste of Silence

At the age of nineteen, Belgian writer Bieke Vandekerckhove was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS (a degenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Doctors gave her two to five years to live. Though she became paralyzed from the waist up, the condition unexpectantly went into remission, and she lived another twenty-seven years, hampered by disabilities, requiring help from many, including her husband. During that entire time, the distinct likelihood of relapse and death was ever present. Bieke Vandekerckhove died in September, 2015.

After her diagnosis and for over twenty years, the practice of Benedictine spirituality and Zen meditation became, as Vandekerckhove said, the two lungs through which she breathed. Before her death, Vandekerckhove wrote a hauntingly honest book, The Taste of Silence, translated from Dutch and published by Liturgical Press in 2015. Vandekerckhove’s silence “tastes” if you will, of two perennial, impossible to pin-down components of spirituality: wisdom and mystery. She writes of wisdom, almost by way of mantra, that wisdom rests in silence, courage, compassion, perseverance, humor, and of course in many guises, pain. She writes of mystery beginning with a quote from Thomas Merton: “There is more consolation in the heart of stillness than in an answer to a question.”¹ Like stillness, mystery does not answer questions which in any case “can only diminish mystery.”² Wisdom, likewise, does not seek answers; wisdom seeks healing, well-being, and kindness. The consolations of wisdom and mystery are never assured: both may engage in a life-long absence; both can come unexpectedly, like a revelation. The consolation of reading Vandekerckhove is, similarly, like an unexpected shower of revelation: with a taste of silence, she illuminates what you knew but did not know you knew.

Unfortunately, ours is a culture uncomfortable with uncertainty and thus is equally uncertain with mystery and wisdom, which together do not seek answers in yes or no, in certain or uncertain form. If acquired at all, wisdom and mystery are to be found in illusive, secret places of divine incomprehensibility. That these secret places are often found in divine incomprehensibility made luminous in human and ecological suffering should come as no surprise. Vandekerckhove seeks those secret places in the silence. Specifically she solicits mystery and wisdom in the taste of silence, a relatively unusual sense by which to encounter wisdom or mystery, the holy or the divine (though “savoury knowledge” is used by Jean Gerson, and one finds this spiritual sense in Song of Songs, 1:3–4 and in Psalm 23 as “taste and see that the Lord is good”). Augustine and his mother Monica, for instance, famously reach out and touch mystery. Thomas Keating and others focus on smell, writing that the first experience of the presence of God is analogous to fragrance, to perfume, while in 2 Corinthians 2:15 we are said to be “the sweet perfume of Christ to God.” Vision has always been a spiritual sense occulated toward mystery, toward wisdom, toward God. Hearing holds the honor of complementing silence.

What is not so unusual about Vandekerckhove’s taste of silence, her taste of mystery, her taste of wisdom, is that it is through her disease and her fear, her discomfort and loss of hope that she is able to cultivate the coordinates of mystery and wisdom at all. She is able first to enter formation in the cultivation of mystery and wisdom through the practice of attention: “Sometimes we push through to a power that borders on the unbelievable—only to slump into gloom afterward, when the crisis has passed. It’s as if suffering intense pain sharpens our attention.”³ Sharpened attention in turn cultivates the probability of acquiring the tastes of silence.

So we find courage, we practice compassion, we persevere in the journey on the path of mystery; we persevere in the journey on the path to wisdom. We persevere because, always, there are new fears, new pains. “It’s not the winter, not the crisis per se, that breaks a person but the duration—without hope that it will ever end. The long duration pulls you down...