Contemplative silence as a response to violence

By Sister Lucy Waigwa, SSND

Violence is defined as “behavior involving physical force, intended to hurt, damage or kill someone or something.” It is disturbing that violence is done consciously and with a lot of intentionality, leading to disastrous consequences. The singer Cat Stevens puts it very well in his song, “Where do the children play?” We live in a world where it isn’t safe to be a child. A world that abhors what is innocent and pure, a world where violence begins right from the womb. Where mothers are supported by some governments to choose to legalize the termination of life of defenseless unborn infants who cannot speak for themselves.

Mahatma Gandhi once stated that, “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it’s most vulnerable members.” It is unfortunate that children all over the world have become targets of unprecedented violence. A case in point is the children of Uvalde, Texas, where 19 innocent children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School were ruthlessly massacred by the hands of a gun wielding 18-year-old teenager armed with an AR-15 rifle.

If the most vulnerable in our society cannot be protected, and if access to guns and other weapons of mass destruction has become so easily accessible, then it means that we have lost the essence of what it means to be human. Simply put, we have forgotten how to love. A thought goes to Salvador Ronaldo Ramos, the 18-year old teenager responsible for the Uvalde shooting.

What could have been going through his mind? Had he lost the meaning of the core of his existence? Could it have been a cry for help? Could he have been reacting to an unhealed trauma? Was it a desperate attempt to be acknowledged? Who attends to the psychic wounds of perpetrators of violence? What can be done to prevent others who would be prone to engage in such acts of violence? What are the red flags? Could this be more than mental illness? Could it be possible to have illnesses of the soul and who attends to such? The way forward lies in getting to the core of who we are as human beings. What the world seems to have lost is a contemplative silence.

There is too much noise, such that any form of silence is either filled with unnecessary words, background music, blaring sirens or persistent honking from vehicles. Somehow, silence seems to frighten us. Silence is welcome when people pass away, and they are invited to a moment of silence to honor the dead. The fruit of contemplative silence is that we honour the truth of our deepest motivations. We can never run away from the basic core of who we are, no matter how many distractions we occupy ourselves with.

Maybe this is what frightens us about silence; the possibility that we may find emptiness in our introspection, and we hurriedly try to fill it with any noise that can deafen the truth of what we find inside. What if all that is buried at the core of our being could be surrendered to God, who is the healer of our souls? Since God is the creator of the universe, then being one in Him in stillness can help us to rediscover the essence of our being. In this way, rather than rely on weapons to protect us, we can overcome the hatred that chooses violence and leads to death by remembering that we all come from one race, and that is the human race. When we choose to love, then God, who is the source of love, becomes the transforming power that heals all shapes and forms of violence