Open mouth, already a mistake.—Zen Buddhist saying
Silence is golden. Open mouth, insert foot. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. These and many other proverbs carry the wisdom that sometimes we should just shut up and listen.
To me, the greater insight to be gained from using fewer words, not more, is to realize that the problem with language is language. By naming everything we can experience through our senses, everything we can do with our bodies, and everything we can think or ponder with our imaginations, language reveals its own limitations. It brings our ability to contemplate that which is beyond us to a screeching halt.
And so the questions we all wonder about—and the questions I sometimes hear as a minister—can’t possibly be answered using the same means with which we asked the questions. It’s a rhetorical Catch-22, kind of like when Einstein said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”
Is there a God? What happens after we die? What existed before the Big Bang? Why does my dog do that?
We can’t answer these questions because we’re trying to do it using the same language that created the questions. If anything, the best we can do is to try asking better questions—and even then we are limited, even with some of the words theologians turn to, such as ineffable (incapable of being expressed in words), immutable (not capable of or susceptible to change), immanent (being within the limits of possible experience or knowledge), or a synonym for immanent, indwelling.
This is one reason monks, nuns, and mystics seek silence: to reach, in the words of the great Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda, beyond what words can teach. By definition, there are no words to describe the indescribable. And that gives me hope, for it is precisely because language is so lacking that I believe we greatly underestimate the thing we call love.
In my experience, there is nothing more described or expressed or explored in our lives than love. We have countless poems, songs, stories, prayers, novels, paintings, plays, sonnets, sculptures, movies, TV dramas, operas, and even the occasional blog, all attempting to get a grip on love. Yet it defies definition. It can’t be contained. Even to say “God is love and love is God” brings us right back to square one: What do we mean by God?
Maybe something as infinite as love, something that, time and again, eludes the trappings of language—but something we instantly recognize when we feel it—is in fact something beyond us but is constantly reaching in, something we experience only in a teaser form for a short time here on this tiny pin-prick of a planet. Love in its limited form. Imagine what that might mean for our eternity.
Imagine, yes. Just don’t use words to do it. Close your mouth and open your heart, and let the universe pass through. You just might arrive at a better question. That alone would be something.
Sitting in silence. Thinking about love. Thank you!