The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

by Dorothee Soelle

Overview

Exploring the religious impulse known as mysticism - the "silent cry" at the heart of all the world's religions. Mysticism, in the sense of a "longing for God," has been present in all times, cultures, and religions. But Soelle believes it has never been more important than in this age of materialism and fundamentalism. The antiauthoritarian mystical element in each religion leads to community of free spirits and resistance to the death-dealing aspects of our contemporary culture. Religion in the third millennium, Soelle argues, either will be mystical or it will be dead. Therefore, Soelle identifies strongly with the hunger of New Age searchers, but laments the religious fast food they devour. Today, a kind of "democratized mysticism" of those without much religious background flourishes. This mystical experience is not drawn so much of the tradition as out of contemporary experiences. In that sense, each of us is a mystic, and Soelle's work seeks to give theological depth, clarity, and direction. This, her magnum opus, conjoins Soelle's deep religious knowledge and wisdom with her passion for social justice into a work destined to be a classic of religious literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800632663
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	04/17/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Dorothee Soelle was Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, for thirteen years. Among her many influential writings are Great Couples of the Bible (2005; 0-8006-3831-X), Theology for Skeptics (1994; 0-8006-2788-1), and The Silent Cry (2001; 0- 8006-3266-4). She died in 2003.

Read an Excerpt

From the Foreword (pre-publication version):
"What is more splendid than gold?" asked the king.
"The light," replied the serpent.
"What is more refreshing than light?" the former asked.
"Conversation," the latter said.
-Goethe, "The Fairy Tale"

When I began writing this book, Fulbert Steffensky read the first pages of the manuscript and spontaneously made some critical comments. I responded and the following spousal conversation ensued.

Fulbert: What bothers me about mysticism is that it's really not something for simple folk. I can't imagine that my mother or my father could get anything from what you're trying to do here.

Dorothee: (humming)
Into his love [In seine Lieb versenken]
I will wholly plunge myself, [will ich mich ganz hinab,]
my heart is to be his [mein Herz will ich ihm schenken]
and all that I have. [und alles was ich hab.]

Fulbert: Piety, yes, but mysticism?

Dorothee: I suppose that mysticism is always piety, even when it takes on utterly degenerate forms such as Satanic Masses. If I understand the meaning at all of this Christmas carol by Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635), then I can also talk about syntheresis voluntatis. Your mother wouldn't have known what to do with that, but perhaps it could be useful to her clever grandchildren, who live without Christmas carols but not without philosophy.

Fulbert: Back again to my mother. I believe that she can appropriate every sentence of the New Testament tradition as nourishing bread on which one can live a normal and burdened life. But what is she to do with the curious religious ingenuities of a Jacob Böhme,or John of the Cross? Surely, the Gospel itself deals more with the simple and sensible desires of people: to be healthy and not having to despair of life, to be able to see and hear, to live for once without tears and to have a name. It's not about spiritual artistry but about the possibility of simply living.

Dorothee: But aren't mystics concerned precisely with the bread of life? As I see it, the problem is that people, including your mother, but certainly her children and grandchildren, encounter not just the Gospel but something that has been distorted, corrupted, destroyed and long been turned into stone.

Mysticism has helped those who were gripped by it to face powerful but petrified institutions that conformed to society; it still helps them today, albeit in a manner that is often very odd. What you call spiritual artistry may figure in it, but the essence of mysticism is something very different. One evening, without knocking first, I entered your mother's room. And there she was, the old lady, sitting on her chair with her hands folded--no needlework! I don't know whether to call what she was doing "praying" or "reflecting." But great peace was with her. That is what I want to spread abroad.

Fulbert: Perhaps my reticence towards mystics is not meant so much for them as it is for a certain craving for mysticism prevalent in the present religious climate. The high regard for categories of religious experience is in an inflationary growth rate. The religious subject wants to experience the self without mediation, instantly, totally and authentically, in the manner she or he shapes personal piety. Experience justifies substance and becomes the actual content of religiousness. And then direct experience stands against institution, against the slowness of a journey, against the crusty, dark bread of the patient dealing with oneself. In this craving for experience, everything that occurs suddenly and is direct rather than institution-mediated becomes ever so interesting; everything that's oriented to experience and promises religious sensation. I know, genuine mysticism is completely different from this. But that's how it's perceived.

Dorothee: I'm also concerned when immediacy becomes the chief category. I think that the great figures of the tradition of mysticism have chewed on some of your crusty, dark bread. As Huxley once said, there is no "instant Zen-Buddhism." The "now" of the mystics is an experience of time that is no common experience. This has nothing to do with a teenage sense of life, the "right this moment" of wanting a certain kind of sneaker or ice-cream.

I cannot agree with your covert pleading for the institution--as if the bread it baked were edible! I think there must be a third entity, next to voguish "religious sensation," and the homespun institutions that are in charge of such things. You are seeking something like that yourself, except that you call it spirituality.

Fulbert: When I speak of spirituality I always rule out the ideas of particularity and extraordinary experience. It's the name, more than anything else, that makes "spirituality" so alluring. What spirituality itself actually is has much to do with method, order and repetition. It's a matter of constituting the self, in the midst of banality and everydayness. And everyone who is not utterly beaten down by life can work at it. Spirituality is not a via regia, an elevated pathway, but a via laborosa, a labor-intensive regimen for determining one's own vision and life-options. And so I stick doggedly to the notion that something is important only when it's important for everyone.

But it's possible that in mysticism, what manifests itself in dramatically concentrated form and artistic expression, so to speak, is what constitutes the nature of piety and faith. This would mean that mysticism may in fact be neither the road of all nor of many. Rather, it may be that in poetic density the nature of a faith that is meant for all is revealed within mysticism.

Dorothee: My most important concern is to democratize mysticism. What I mean to do is to reopen the door to the mystic sensibility that's within all of us, to dig it out from under the debris of trivia--from its self-trivialization, if you like. An older woman in New York told me about meeting a guru. When she told her black minister about this, he asked only one question. It's a question I too want to ask: "Didn't he tell you that we're all mystics?"

From the Introduction (pre-publication version):
Why, when God's world is so big,
did you fall asleep in a prison
of all places?
-Rumi

For many years I have been drawn to and borne by mystical experience and mystical consciousness. Within the complex phenomenon of "religion," they appeared to be central. All living religion represents a unity of three elements that, in the language of the great Catholic lay-theologian Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925), we may designate as the institutional , the intellectual and the mystical . (Cf. I 3.2) The historical-institutional element addresses itself to mind and memory; in Christianity it is the "Petrine" dimension. The analytical-speculative element is aligned with reason and the Apostle Paul. The third element, the intuitive-emotional one, directs itself to the will and the action of love. It represents the "Johannine" dimension. The representatives of all three elements tend to declare themselves to be absolute and to denigrate the others as marginal; however, without reciprocal relationships among the three elements, religion does not stay alive. Reciprocity between institutional, intellectual and mystical elements of religion may take the form of polarization, or, the exchange may be dialectical.

What enticed me to the life-long attempt to think God was neither the Church, which I experienced more as a stepmother, nor the intellectual adventure of a post-Enlightenment theology. I am neither professionally anchored nor personally at home in the two institutions of religion-the church and academic theology. It is the mystical element that will not let go of me. In a preliminary way, I can simply say that what I want to live, understand and make known is the love for God. And that seems to be in little demand in those two institutions. At best, what Protestant theology and preaching articulate in what they designate as "Gospel" can be summed up as: God loves, protects, renews and saves us. One rarely hears that this process can be truly experienced only when such love, like every genuine love, is mutual. That humans love, protect, renew and save God sounds to most people like megalomania or even madness. But the madness of this love is exactly what mystics live on.

What drew me to mysticism was the dream of finding a form of spirituality that I was missing in German Protestantism. What I was seeking had to be less dogmatic, less cerebral and encased in words, less centred on men. It had to be related to experience in a two-fold sense of the word: how love for God came about, and what consequences it has for life. I was not looking for what Thomas Müntzer refers to as "made-up, fictitious faith," that is, something that is fine for the head and keeps the institution functioning. Instead, I searched for the mystical element of faith; in the Bible and other sacred writings, in the history of the church, but also in the everyday experience of lived union with God or the divinity. The distinction between the ground of being perceived in personal terms, or, in transpersonal terms, need not occupy us here. For are "mindfulness" or "pure attentiveness" of Buddhist tradition not other words for what the Abrahamic traditions call "love for God?"

Often an expression like "longing for God"-which could be a different rendering of "mysticism"-evokes embarrassment; yet, tradition declares that our greatest perfection is to need God. But it is precisely that longing that is taken to be a kind of misguided indulgence, an emotional excess. In recent years, when two of my women friends converted to Roman Catholicism, I could not approve. In the first place, the denominational divisions of the 16.century are no longer substantive for me. Secondly, in the Roman institution-with its unrelenting "nyet" to women, to a humane sexuality and to intellectual freedom-I only find in double measure the coldness from which both my friends were fleeing. But what these women were seeking they found, above all, in the liturgy of the Catholic church. They experienced being made to feel at home through mysticism. That is what I am looking for, too and that is what this book is about.

The history of mysticism is a history of the love for God. I cannot conceive of this without political and praxis-oriented actualization that is directed toward the world. At the beginning of the seventies, I wrote Die Hinreise [E.t. Death by Bread Alone; the German means "the journey towards somewhere/something;" transl. note], a book with autobiographical undertones. Many of my friends on the political and Christian left became worried. "Dorothee is leaving," I heard them say in Holland, "will she ever return?" But that was not my worry; what I was particularly trying to do was to hold together what Roger Schütz, the founder of the Protestant monastic community in Taizé, calls "lutte et contemplation," struggle and contemplation. I did not want to travel on two distinct pathways. What in the late sixties we named "politicization of conscience," at the time of the Political Evensong of Cologne, has in the meantime become widely generalized. More and more Christians and post-Christians understand the connection between setting out and then coming back again (Hinreise and Rückreise.) They need both.

There has been very little examination of the relationship of mystical experience to social and political behaviour. Social-historical enquiry always recedes-especially in today's mysticism boom-in favor of a "perennial philosophy" (to borrow the name of Aldous Huxley's famous anthology), a way of thinking that is above time. It looks at God and the soul alone, without any social analysis. To say the least, such an approach is an abridgment. What interests me is how mystics in different ages related themselves to their society, and how they behaved in it. Was the demeanor of flight from the world, separation and solitude adequate for mysticism?
Author Bio: Dorothee Soelle studied philosophy, theology, and literature at the University of Cologne and served as Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City from 1975 to 1987. Among her most influential writings are Christ the Representative (1967), Suffering (1975), To Work and to Love (1984), and Theology for Skeptics (1994). Soelle is a peace and ecological movements activist and lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
Part I	What Is Mysticism?
1.	We are All Mystics	9
	Mysticism of Childhood
	Are Mystics Completely Different?
	Mystical Sensibility
	"I Am What I Do": C. S. Lewis
2.	Ecstasy	27
	Stepping Out and Immersing Oneself
	Commotion and Unity: Martin Buber
	Rabi'a and Sufi Mysticism
	Mansur al-Hallaj: Agnus Dei Mohamedanus
	We Have Not Been Created for Small Things
3.	Definitions, Methods, Delimitations	45
	From the Hermeneutic of Suspicion to a Hermeneutic of Hunger
	Pluralism of Methods and Contextuality
	The Distinction between Genuine and False Mysticism
4.	Finding Another Language	55
	The Cloud of Unknowing and the Cloud of Forgetting
	Sunder Warumbe: Without a Why or Wherefore
	A Language without Dominance
	The Via Negativa, the Way of Negation
	The Paradox
	Silence
5.	The Journey	77
	Ladders to Heaven and Stations on Earth
	Purification, Illumination, Union: The Three Ways of Classic Mysticism
	Traces of a Different Journey: Thomas Muntzer
	Being Amazed, Letting Go, Resisting: Outline of a Mystical Journey for Today
Part II	Places of Mystical Experience
6.	Nature	97
	Places and Placelessness
	A Morning Hymn: Harriet Beecher Stowe
	Monotheism, Pantheism, Panentheism
	Sharing and Healing: A Different Relation to the Earth
7.	Eroticism	113
	Heavenly and Earthly Love and Their Inseparability
	The Song of Songs
	Marguerite Porete and the Enrapturing Far-Near One
	The Bitterness of Ecstasy: D. H. Lawrence and Ingeborg Bachmann
	Sacred Power
8.	Suffering	133
	Job: The Satanic and the Mystical Wager
	Between Dolorousness and Suffering
	"Even When It Is Night": John of the Cross
	"Better in Agony than in Numbness": Twentieth-Century Mysticism of Suffering
9.	Community	157
	The Hidden Sacred Sparks: Hasidim
	Community, the Sinai of the Future: An Examination of Buber's Relation to Mysticism
	Without Rules and Poor, Persecuted, and Free: The Beguines
	The Society of Friends and the Inner Light
10.	Joy	175
	The Mystical Relation to Time: Thich Nhat Hanh
	Publicans, Jesters, and Other Fools: The Abolition of Divisions
	Dancing and Leaping: The Body Language of Joy
	The Relation of Mysticism and Aesthetics
Part III	Mysticism Is Resistance
11.	As if We Lived in a Liberated World	191
	The Prison We Have Fallen Asleep in: Globalization and Individualization
	Out of the Home into Homelessness
	Acting and Dreaming: Becoming Martha and Mary
	The Fruits of Apartheid
12.	Ego and Ego-Lessness	209
	The Ego: The Best Prison Guard
	"Go Where You Are Nothing!"
	Asceticism: For and Against
	Tolstory's Conversion from the Ego to God
	Freedom from the "Ring of Cold": Dag Hammarskjold
	Success and Failure
13.	Possession and Possessionlessness	233
	Having or Being
	Naked and Following the Naked Savior: Francis of Assisi
	John Woolman and the Society of Slave Owners
	Voluntary Poverty: Dorothy Day
	Middle Roads and Crazy Freedoms
14.	Violence and Nonviolence	259
	The Unity of All Living Beings
	The Duty of Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau
	Mahatma Gandhi and Ahimsa
	"Our Weapon Is to Have None": Martin Luther King Jr.
	Between Hopes and Defeats
15.	A Mysticism of Liberation	279
	The Death and Life of Severino: Joao Cabral
	Kneeling Down and Learning to Walk Upright: The Theology of Liberation
	"When You Dance with Death, You Must Dance Well": Pedro Casaldaliga
	The Voice of the Mute: Dom Helder Camara
	Learning to Pray and a Different Mysticism
	Afterword: A Conversation	299
	Notes	303
	Bibliography	317
	Index	323

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Why, when God's world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?
RUMI

FOR MANY YEARS I have been drawn to and borne by mystical experience and mystical consciousness. Within the complex phenomenon of religion, they appear to be central. All living religion represents a unity of three elements that, in the language of the great Catholic lay theologian Friedrich von Huegel ( z 8 5 2->=9 z 5 ), we may call the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical (see chapter 3 ). The historical-institutional element addresses itself to mind and memory; in Christianity it is the "Petrine" dimension. The analyticalspeculative element is aligned with reason and the apostle Paul. The third element, the intuitive-emotional one, directs itself to the will and the action of love. It represents the Johannine dimension. The representatives of all three elements tend to declare themselves to be absolute and to denigrate the others as marginal; however, without reciprocal relationships among the three elements, religion does not stay alive. Reciprocity between institutional, intellectual, and mystical elements of religion may take the form of polarization, or the exchange may be dialectical.

What enticed me to the lifelong attempt to think God was neither the church, which I experienced more as a stepmother, nor the intellectual adventure of post-Enlightenment theology. I am neither professionally anchored nor personally at home in the two institutions of religion-the church and academic theology. It is the mystical element that will not let go of me. In a preliminary way, I can simply say that what I want to live, understand, and make known is the love for God. And that seems to be in little demand in those two institutions. At best, what Protestant theology and preaching articulate in what they designate as "gospel" can be summed up as follows: God loves, protects, renews, and paves us. One rarely hears that this process can be truly experienced only when such love, like every genuine love, is mutual. That humans love, protect, renew, and save God sounds to most people like megalomania or even madness. But the madness of this love is exactly what mystics live on.

What drew me to mysticism was the dream of finding a form of spirituality that I was missing in German Protestantism. What I was seeking had to be less dogmatic, less cerebral and encased in words, and less centered on men. It had to be related to experience in a twofold sense of the word: how love for God came about and what consequences it has for life. I was not looking for what Thomas Muntzer refers to as "made-up, fictitious faith," that is, something that is fine for the head and keeps the institution functioning. Instead, I searched for the mystical element of faith-in the Bible and other sacred writings, in the history of the church, but also in the everyday experience of lived union with God or the divinity. The distinction between the ground of being perceived in personal terms, or, in transpersonal terms, need not concern us here. For are "mindfulness" or "pure attentiveness" of Buddhist tradition not other words for what the Abrahamic traditions call "love for God"?

Often an expression like "longing for God"-which could be a different rendering of "mysticism"-evokes embarrassment; yet, tradition declares that our greatest perfection is to need God. But it is precisely that longing that is taken to be a kind of misguided indulgence, an emotional excess. In recent years, when two of my friends converted to Roman Catholicism, I could not approve. In the first place, the denominational divisions of the sixteenth century are no longer substantive for me. Second, in the Roman institution-with its unrelenting "nyet" to women, to a humane sexuality, and to intellectual freedom-I only find in double measure the coldness from which both my friends were fleeing. But what these two women were seeking they found, above all, in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. The experience of mysticism made them feel at home. That is what I am looking for, too, and that is what this book is about.

The history of mysticism is a history of the love for God. I cannot conceive of this without political and praxis-oriented actualization that is directed toward the world. At the beginning of the seventies, I wrote Death by Bread Alone (Die Hinreise), a book with autobiographical undertones. Many of my friends on the political and Christian left became worried. "Dorothee is leaving," I heard them say in Holland, "will she ever return?" But that was not my worry; what I was particularly tying to do was to hold together what Roger Schutz, the founder of the Protestant monastic community in Taize, calls "lutte et contemplation" (struggle and contemplation). I did not want to travel on two distinct pathways. What in the late sixties we named "politicization of conscience," at the time of the political evensong of Cologne, has in the meantime become widely generalized. More and more Christians and post-Christians understand the connection between setting out and then coming back again (Hinreise and Riickreise). They need both.

There has been very little examination of the relationship between mystical experience and social and political behavior. Social-historical enquiry always recedes-especially in today's mysticism boomin favor of a "perennial philosophy" (to borrow the name of Aldous Huxley's famous anthology), a way of thinking that is outside time. It looks at God and the soul alone, without any social analysis. To say the least, such an approach is an abridgment. What interests me is how mystics in different ages related to their society and how they behaved in it. Was the demeanor of flight from the world, separation, and solitude adequate for mysticism? Were there not also other forms of expressing mystical consciousness to be found in the life of communities as well as individuals? Did mystics not have a different relation, communally and individually, to the "world," to the whole of society, both in practice and in theory? The prison, of all places, in which we have fallen asleep (Rumi)-is this what we are supposed to regard as the world's eternal condition, unaffected by real history?

My questioning is focused on social reality. This means that for the sake of what is within, I seek to erase the distinction between a mystical internal and a political external. Everything that is within needs to be externalized so it doesn't spoil, like the manna in the desert that was hoarded for future consumption. There is no experience of God that can be so privatized that it becomes and remains the property of one owner, the privilege of a person of leisure, the esoteric domain of the initiated. In my search for concepts that depict the possibilities open to mystics of their relation to the world, I find a series of different options. They lie between withdrawal from the world and the transformation of the world through revolution. But whether it be withdrawal, renunciation, disagreement, divergence, dissent, reform, resistance, rebellion, or revolution, in all of these forms there is a No! to the world as it exists now. The reformer Teresa of Avila; the Beguines of Flanders, who created their own new forms of life; Thomas Muntzer, the revolutionary leader of peasants; and Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit destroyer of weapons of mass destruction-all of them lived their mysticism in the repudiation of the values that ruled in their worlds. For those who want the world to remain as it is have already acceded to its self-destruction and, consequently, betrayed the love of God and its restlessness before the status quo.

During the years in which this book came into being, I tested and experimented with it in seminars in New York, Hamburg, and Basel, and with people elsewhere. After some initial hesitation, I decided upon the concept of "resistance" as my focal orientation. Later perhaps, in a different time, it might be possible to write a book on "mysticism and revolution." But for us who live in the transition to the third millennium of the common era, however, "resistance" seems to be the formulation that is more accurate and closer to reality.

For me, as a citizen of a rich, industrialized country, "resistance" has become in recent years more and more important as an expression of political culture. It is as if in this word I could express best what common life really means, even though I know very well that most often, for people who are just learning to walk, it is like a shoe that is too big. The word contains the memory of the European resistance against Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and the human rights violations in the sphere where power was exercised by Socialist regimes. It also contains the memory of the dead, such as Sophie Scholl and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who in their protests and battles gave up their lives.

"Resistez" is a battle cry that persecuted Huguenots scratched on the wall in the tower of Aigues-Mortes. I do not want to be separated from them and the many others all over the world, who in seemingly hopeless situations practiced the madness of the No! from a different love of life. What I can do in the context of the rich world is minute and without risk in comparison with the great traditions of Resistance. The issue is not to venerate heroes but together to offer resistance, actively and deliberately and in very diverse situations, against becoming habituated to death, something that is one of the spiritual foundations of the culture of the First World. It is us, indeed, who find ourselves "asleep in a prison / of all places," even though God's world is "big" and the recognition of the other bigness invites even us into other ways of living.

With the word "mysticism," I try in a two-fold sense to name a process in which I find myself: the discovery of traditions of mysticism and their appropriation. To make something one's own also means to re-collect it in the sense of internalizing it. When I read how mystics thought, dreamed, spoke, and lived, my own life looks more and more mystical and amazing to me. It is as if I were growing other ears, a third eye, wings of the morning. I understand myself better because I learn from these "brothers and sisters of the free spirit" a language that brings my own experiences closer to me and lets them shine. Of course, my own deprivation also becomes more clear, for the prison can be named only by someone who calls me to come out of it.

The Greek word for "reading" means to have renewed cognition, to re-cognize. To read texts of mysticism is to have renewed cognition of one's self, of a being that is buried under rubble. Thus, the discovery of the mystical tradition also sets free one's own forgotten experience. For that reason, there is little I can do with the modesty of some scholars of mysticism. They steadfastly understand .themselves as nonmystics, as persons who have not experienced anything and are only delivering secondhand goods-as if mysticism could occupy one just like any other business. I look for something among mystics that I, a prisoner in the huge machine, do not receive. It's not my wish to admire the mystics, but to let them re-collect me so that daily I see the inner light as clearly as possible, for it is hidden also within me.

But if I need both, the inner light of being at one with every living thing and the resistance against the machine of death, how do I get them together? What does the "and" in the subtitle of this book mean, mysticism and resistance? Does resistance truly grow from mystical experience? Or do mystical experience and certainty grow from the solidarity of resistance? Are there not enough mystics who have turned their backs on the world, who politically are totally resigned and swallowed up by their own narcissism? Is their mysticism then not deep enough, their poverty not poor enough, and their connectedness not secure enough? Perhaps "grow from" is not the correct way to put it. It might imply that mystical, unmediated nearness of God has to find a sort of ethical application focused on humans. That would still be a fatal conceptual separation of ethics and religion.

To overcome that separation more and more is the aim of this book. If it is true that God is love, then the separation of religion and ethics-or, in the technical terminology of the academy, the separation of systematic theology and social ethics-is dangerous as well as detrimental to both sides. It is self-destructive for religion and ethics because it empties religion, reducing its basis for experiencing the world. It turns ethics into arbitrary arrangements of individual tribes and hordes.

The "and" between mysticism and resistance must be understood more radically, and that is precisely where the difficulties arise. For one cannot think what one does not do. You cannot perceive or observe God's love by looking at others. "The observer sees nothing." I can see God's love only when I become part of it myself. Thus, some of the fundamental weaknesses of this book, apart from the writer's personal ones, are weaknesses of our political-intellectual culture. Our religiously grounded resistance is still so weak, so experientially impoverished, so little practiced that we can hardly think it.

The title of this book is an address to God that is taken from an anonymous letter from the late Middle Ages, presumably from a pastor to a penitent in difficulties and distress (see chapter S). "My child, be patient and leave off because God will not be torn from the ground of your heart. O deep treasure, how wilt thou be unearthed?" This is followed by a series of addresses to God that, as often happens in the language of German mysticism, do not use the traditional personal metaphors like Father, King, Most High, but new, nonpersonal ones like treasure, fountain, radiance, or "security that is hidden" in order to name the deity. In that sequence of metaphors is found the paradoxical expression "the silent cry" that has fixed itself in my mind for years now. It is a mystical name for God, whose divine power is not grounded in domination and commandment. It is a name that everyone can use, everyone who misses the "silent cry" that has often become inaudible among us. May the one who also cries in us help us all to learn to hear the cry in the foundations of the world.