The Silent Cry Quotes

“The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence.

"And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The basis of spiritual renewal is not the guilt feelings that frequently arise in sensitized individuals in rich industrial societies. Instead, it is a crazy mysticism of becoming empty that reduces the real misery of the poor and diminishes one's own slavery. Becoming empty or "letting go" of the ego, possession, and violence is the precondition of the creativity of transforming action.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The connection between radical attentiveness, prayer, and joy pervades Jewish mystical thinking in its diverse phases but never so brightly, so every-day-related, and so clearly as in Hasidism. Melancholy is the dust in the soul that Satan spreads out. Worry and dejection are seen to be the roots of every evil force. Melancholy is a wicked quality and displeasing to God, says Martin Buber.

Rabbi Bunam said: "Once when I was on the road near Warsaw, I felt that I had to tell a certain story. But this story was of a worldly nature and I knew that it would only rouse laughter among the many people who had gathered about me. The Evil Urge tried very hard to dissuade me, saying that I would lose all those people because once they heard this story they would no longer consider me a rabbi. But I said to my heart: `Why should you he concerned about the secret ways of God?' And I remembered the words of Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz: 'All joys hail from paradise, and jests too, provided they are uttered in true joy’ And so in my heart of hearts I renounced my rabbi's office and told the story. The gathering burst out laughing. And those who up to this point had been distant from me attached themselves to me." (a quote from Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber).

Joy, laughter, and delight are so powerful because, like all mysticism, they abolish conventional divisions, in this case the division between secular and sacred. The often boisterous laughter, especially of women, is part and parcel of the everyday life of mystical movements.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“When he was twenty-three years old, he (George Fox) saw the inner light in a vision. For him it symbolized the spirit against the letter, silence against chatter, experience against dogma, and equality against all who build inequality on authority and power, be it of the state or religion. His mistrust of the official Anglican Church was immense. He spoke with disdain of the "towered houses" and was tormented by the ringing of church bells. He frequently interrupted preachers, standing in the church's doorway, a hat covering his head, and uttering threatening words toward the pulpit, causing great excitement in the gathered congregation. It often resulted in Fox being beaten up, banished, and, later on, jailed for years.

What aroused his ire, above all, were the priests who, without ever having experienced or even looked for illumination, presented themselves as servants of God but, in truth, comprised a "society of cannibals." It is "not enough to have been educated in Oxford or Cambridge in order to become capable for and efficient in the service of Christ.

To this day it is difficult for many Friends to speak of "Quaker theology." The Friends believe in Scripture - George Fox knew it by heart - but they also believe that the Spirit transcends Scripture and that the inner light is experienced by all human beings without human mediation. "The inner light," "the inward teacher" are names that the early Quakers gave to their experiences of the Spirit. They believe that everyone can meet the "Christ within," even though he has different names in different ages and places and is not tied to any form of religion. This light is open to everyone and, yet, it is not simply the natural light of reason.

In a conversation that Fox had with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he vigorously resisted this rational interpretation.

In every human being is "that of God," hidden, eclipsed, often forgotten. Linguistically a clumsy expression at best, "that of God in everyone" is the foundation of human dignity. In addition, it is the admonition to believe in it, to discover it in each and everyone and to respond to it. Fox said, "Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The topic of disinterested, non-calculating, and purposeless love for the sake of love is central to mysticism as such. To love God, not because of powerful institutions, or even because God commands it, but to do so in an act of unencumbered freedom, is the very source of mystical relation. To love God is all the reason there needs to be . . . The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards - images of hell and heaven resting on that authority. In technologically advanced centers of the world, authoritarian religious systems are in sharp decline. Mystical perceptions and approaches to God, however, are entirely different: "God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty" (Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy). Mysticism may he regarded as the anti-authoritarian religion per se. In it, the commanding lord becomes the beloved; what is to come later becomes the now; and naked or even enlightened self-interest that is oriented by reward and punishment becomes mystical freedom.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Among the first questions a native mother asks her child in the morning is: what did you dream? When I heard this for the first time I felt ashamed because I used to ask my children only: Did you do your mathematics homework? Do you have your lunch? The experiences of other cultures may not be immediately helpful to us, but they do at least make us aware of the deficits of our own culture . . . I want to remind us of the buried mysticism of childhood. There are for many of us - I almost want to say for every one of us - moments of heightened experience in childhood in which we are grasped by a remarkable, seemingly unshakable certainty. Mystics of the various ages have called upon this buried experience.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“In such mysticism of prayer, the relationship of domination between God and humans has been transformed into one of love. That is precisely the mystical transformation that happens to prayer of supplication. The feudalistic patriarchal understanding of supplication often starts from the assumption that human beings have to go and knock on God's door and awaken "him" in order to present their petitions. The feudal lord then answers or refuses. If "he" has refused often enough even the most necessary things, the supplicant will go away and perhaps look elsewhere for salvation . . .

Mystics have rarely cultivated the prayer of supplication; they have worked at a relationship based on mutuality.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to then" (Henry David Thoreau quotes here are found in Walden or, Life in the Woods, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience). Thoreau criticizes those who are content to have an "opinion," and he calls for "a deliberate and practical denial of (the state's) authority." He envisages conscious and active minorities to whom the government has to pay attention. His political hopes are founded on this active and conscious "wise" minority.

His problem then - and ours today - is that the minorities are themselves paralyzed by a quantitative understanding of democracy. "Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them . . . A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“This kind of unmasking and refusing complicity is part of the simplicity of lifestyle. Simplicity, the rejection of consumerism and opting for possessionlessness, is a modern, social form of what medieval mysticism called "becoming unattached.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“In the Middle Ages, spiritual advisors always warned against a state that had a variety of names but was difficult to describe: inertia, ill pleasure (acedia), nausea, laziness (pigrita), dullness (tarditas). All these terms pointed to a joyless, antimystical condition: an idleness that can be highly busy, a nauseousness with life that has learned the morbid art of seeing only decay and destruction in everything, a laziness of life that makes us too sluggish to look for God's radiance in creation or to make it shine again. Not to he able to cry and to rejoice, to curse and to pray, were regarded at that time as an ill-fortune and disturbance.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The author of the book of job wrestles with such questions. Can faith in God be free of ulterior motives and interests? Can there be such a thing at all? Is there something like pure religion that does not act from fear of punishment and that is not intent on reward? Or is religion always a deal, a transaction where people expect to reap well-being, fortunes here and beyond, health, wealth, and affirmation and enter into certain commitments as a result?”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The trivialization of life is perhaps the strongest anti-mystical force among us. Some people are literally obsessed by the compulsion to trivialize everything . . . For mystical consciousness, it is essential that everything internal become external and be made visible. A dream wants to be told, the "inner light" wants to shine, the vision has to be shared . . . It is so easy to douse the inner light of a human being. And we busily assist in doing just that as we learn to make the world's efficiency our own. We cut ourselves off from our own experiences by looking upon them as irrelevant and not worth talking about or, what is no less cynical, not communicable at all. We are losing dreams, those of the night and those of the day, and increasingly we lose the visions of our life.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“God calls upon the soul to give away its own ears and eyes and to let itself be given those of God. Only they who hear with other ears can speak with the mouth of God. God sees what elsewhere is rendered invisible and is of no relevance. Who other than God sees the poor and hears their cry? To use "God's senses" does not mean simply turning inward but becoming free for a different way of living life: See what God sees! Hear what God hears! Laugh where God laughs! Cry where God cries!

. . . If there is a verb for the life of mysticism, it is praying. This superfluous activity, this unproductive waste of time happens sunder warumbe, (without any why or wherefore). It is as free of ulterior motives as it is indispensable. Prayer is its own end and not a means to obtain a particular goal. The question "what did it achieve?" must fall silent in face of the reality of prayer.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Nonviolence means to forego the desire to win and to avoid the defeat of enemies, which always includes their humiliation. The issues of peace, justice, and - as must he added today - creation are always the enemies' issues as well; they, too, need air to breathe. Their issue is also ours. Every form of the spirit of hostility has to he rejected. (Martin Luther) King called white racists "our sick white brothers," which angered some of his comrades in the struggle.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“The desire to possess is marked by an unceasingly growing, voracious element that manifests itself in the simple desire to have more, but also in the growing dependency on consumerist habits that people do not want to give up. The ego loses its benign distance from things to be used and is ruled by the urge to possess them. This rapidly infects other aspects of life. Like objects that one wants to have available, partners, relatives, and friends come to he seen as having to he possessed.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“What do ego-lessness and becoming unattached mean in connection with today's mystical way in the form of resistance? . . . What is missing is a reflection that shows more clearly how complicit we are ourselves in the consumerist ego that the economy desires. I want to elucidate this in terms of a question that every nonconformist group, every critical minority wishing to contribute to the establishment of a different life has to face, namely, the question of success.

Decisions about possible actions are weighed in a world governed by market considerations by one and only one criterion: success . . . Whenever such topics are raised, questions like the following are regularly heard: "What's the use of protesting, everything has been decided long ago?" "Can anything he changed anyway?" "What do you think you will accomplish?" "Whom do you want to influence?" "Who is paying attention?" "Will the media report it?" "How much publicity will it have?" "Do you really believe that this can succeed?"

. . . Martin Buber said that "success is not a name of God." It could not he said more mystically nor more helplessly. The nothing that wants to become everything and needs us cannot he named in the categories of power . . . To let go of the ego means, among other things, to step away from the coercion to succeed. It means to "go where you are nothing." Without this form of mysticism, resistance loses it focus and dies before our very eyes. It is not that creating public awareness, winning fellow participants, and changing how we accept things is beside the point. But the ultimate criterion for taking part in actions of resistance and solidarity cannot he success because that would mean to go on dancing to the tunes of the bosses of this world.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“In cultures where asceticism developed and was practiced, people knew that one can suffocate when every option is a readily available one. Without self-limitation, without fixed boundaries - like those given in creation between day and night, summer and winter, being young and growing old-life loses its humanness. Asceticism means to renounce at least for periods of time the options that present themselves . . .

In rich societies, the fundamental idea of sacrifice is highly suspect; it contradicts the basic constitution of the world of affluence. Sacrifice, as well as those who are to do the sacrificing have indeed been much abused. Even so, voluntary sacrifice, freely renouncing status, and limiting career or other options available to oneself can consolidate one's capacity for happiness.

This seems very apparent to me in ecological resistance movements. No one can feel at home in a world that has to be bought and used up. We ourselves as well as the environment are damaged by consumerism; it dulls the senses so that people no longer know how to smell, taste, feel, and see.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Go where you can accomplish something!" seems to he the imperative that has more rationality. What is to be learned from mystical ego-lessness goes beyond this.

John of the Cross speaks of the dark night that we enter into unprotected, without all the security mechanisms that we use for consolation and diversion. "Go where you are nothing" means trying to make manifest what has no lobby for its work, what exposes you in your nothingness, your inconsequentiality, and the negation of the self. And you are not to he ashamed of your nothingness. You are to let go of your fear of being nothing and he free for "the nothing that wants to he everything.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“To he "over-choiced" with thirty different kinds of bread does indeed develop the shopper's awareness of differentiation and sense of taste. However, from the ego that is becoming dependent on such a surplus of choice, it also takes away the time and energy for other life pursuits. The ego is diverted and, with the help of the world of consumer goods, "turned in on itself" (bomo incur-vatus in se ipsum), as the tradition used to depict the sinner.

The least to he learned from the tradition of mysticism is that becoming empty in a world of surplus, learning to switch off, and limiting oneself are small steps in the liberation from consumerism, and that perhaps freedom cannot he imagined without letting go.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Can faith in God be free of ulterior motives and interests? Can there be such a thing at all? Is there something like pure religion that does not act from fear of punishment and that is not intent on reward? Or is religion always a deal, a transaction where people expect to reap well-being, fortunes here and beyond, health, wealth, and affirmation and enter into certain commitments as a result?

. . . the intent of Satan is to unmask religion. Piety, faith, and trust in God are all utilitarian aspects that the enlightened Satan sees through. They stand and fall with the expectation of reward, of a corresponding favor returned. Joh's friends are of the same opinion: suffering is to he understood only as just punishment.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Matthew Fox who, particularly in his new reading of Meister Eckhart, depicts quite early in human history the mystical way of creation spirituality.

Fox's way and that of traditional mysticism differ in two aspects. The first is where the way of mysticism is said to begin. In the understanding of mysticism inherited from the Neoplatonists Proclus and Plotinus, purging or purification are always the first step. The beginning of mystical piety is not the beauty and goodness of creation but the fall of human beings from paradise . . . But does this not place the mystical journey at far too late a point in the course of the Christian history of redemption? One of the basic questions Fox asks again and again is whether we ought not refer first of all to the blessing of the beginning, that is, not to original sin but to original blessing? And is it not exactly mystical experience that points us to creation and the good beginning?”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Luther's opponent in the Peasants' War, Thomas Muntzer is deeply rooted in mystic tradition . . . Muntzer calls the first step in preparing for God "wonderment": amazement and fright begin when the eternal Word comes into the human heart. "And this wonderment at whether it really is God's Word or not begins to happen when one is a child of six or seven years of age." . . .

Muntzer's interest in Gregorian chant and his attempt, rejected by Luther, to integrate it into the German mass, may perhaps be understood as a manifestation of his mystical love for wonderment.

In connection with "wonderment," Muntzer quotes from Deuteronomy: "But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart" (30:14 RSV). . . This inward word, heard through God's revelation in the abyss of the soul, speaks to human beings without mediation, even without the Bible.

Muntzer opposed Luther in the understanding of Scripture. Muntzer's view of the living Word of God as being "so very close to you" - and which constitutes the first step of mystical cognition (cognitio experimen- talis) - represents a break with Luther's appeal for sola scriptura, (the Scriptures alone) as the basic principle of the Reformation puts it. What in the controversy over indulgences had served well in fighting the financial manipulations of the Church of Rome's authorities, namely this basic principle and its critical force, soon came to serve the consolidation of a new clerical domination.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“This situation where we are not quite what we do, where we kiss, drink, work, laugh, or meditate only with part of ourselves, is the most normal of situations. We are not wholly present in what we experience; we are still watching ourselves, and we do not attain the self-forgetfulness of being one. We do not play as a child can play; rather, we observe ourselves.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Die Seele braucht das Staunen, das immer wieder erneute Freiwerden von Gewohnheiten, Sichtweisen, Überzeugungen, die sich wie Fettschichten, die unberührbar und unempfindlich machen, um uns lagern. Das wir ein Berührtwerden vom Geist des Lebens brauchen, dass ohne Staunen, ohne Begeisterung nichts Neues beginnen kann scheint vergessen.”
― Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“Center and periphery" is a model for explaining this situation on our one earth. It makes apparent how the minority in the rich countries has rendered the majority in the poor countries dependent in every sense of the word: economically, politically, technologically, ecologically, and culturally. This model shows how the few rob the many and plunder, disenfranchise, and kill them. That this is accomplished not only with a knife or by a military dictatorship but far more thoroughly through structural, systemic violence is well known.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“If we had possessions, Francis would say, we would also need weapons. He held on to the inescapable link of poverty and peace.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“What Francis heard on February 24, 1208, was this: go and preach, even without formation or ordination! No gold, no silver, no money not even for alms! No bag for provisions! One habit only! No shoes, no staff! It was an amputation of every superfluous item, of every precaution for life, and, at the same time, of every protection that an institution like the church could provide at the time. It was also a refusal to he recognized as a regular order, a refusal of the legal privileges associated with such status, and a refusal of priestly ordination. Poverty in the institutional sense means to he excluded from privileges.

. . . "No brother is to hold a position of power or a ruling office, especially not among the brothers themselves. No one in this way of living is to be called prior; instead all are to be known simply as minor brothers. And all are to wash one another's feet" (rule of 1221).”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“What can be learned here is that often making do with less means having more energy and time for other things. Our relation to things becomes more relaxed in that we can look upon them as things that have been given for the short term, on loan so to speak. No longer claiming autonomy, they lose their power over their owners. The Sufis and many other traditions that are radically critical of possessions point to the jubilant leap into freedom.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“One of the oldest longings of all people of mystical sensibility is to be rid of disguises to the point of becoming naked.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

“If asceticism is to he something different today than this pre-modern denial of autonomy and self-determination, it must he conceived of differently and in nonsexist terms. It must start from the existing dependency of the ego on the world of consumer goods, a dependency hailed as autonomy and free choice. The issue today is a different relationship to things, not the mortification of the body. In the context of globalization, asceticism means simplicity in the sense of simplification of lifestyle and needs. This means less, smaller, less often, and more consciously.

We have known for a long time that poverty can destroy the body and render the soul deaf and insensitive. What has yet to be learned is that overabundance of things and enjoyments also devours the soul.”
― Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance