Monastic Sign Language, and the Sacredness of Silence

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We got an email from David Lauren in Chicago who attended Catholic

Seminary in the 1960s, and he told us that at mealtime they sat 16 to a table and breakfast

Was completely silent. As part of their discipline, nobody was allowed to speak,

But you still have to ask for things to be passed to you, and so what they developed was a one-handed sign language.

So if you wanted somebody to pass the milk, you extended an index finger.

If you wanted the salt and pepper, you extended your first two fingers.

Pass the sugar was first three fingers, and pass the cereal was just holding up your thumb.

And David’s email sent us down a very interesting path,

Because in fact several religious orders take a vow of silence during mealtimes,

And also for many other times of the day, including what’s called the Great Silence, which is eight to nine hours after sunset.

But of course, living in a community like that, you still need to be able to communicate about the food you’re preparing or how the garden is coming along or equipment you’re fixing or clothing.

And for centuries, these communities developed their own highly sophisticated system of hand signals.

And this was hundreds of years before the development of things like American Sign Language.

And in fact, as early as the 10th century, we have records of an order of monks in France

That developed a system of nearly 300 signs to use during periods of silence.

And more recently, there was some fascinating work done by anthropologist Robert A. Barakat,

Specifically among Cistercian monks in Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s.

He compiled a comprehensive dictionary of these signs, and you can find them online.

And one thing you notice right away is that many of the nouns involve combining simpler terms,

Like, for example, to make the sign for horse.

You make the generic sign for animal, and then you pull a shock of hair just above your forehead,

And you bend your head forward slightly.

And then for tractor, what you do is you combine the sign for horse with the sign for the color red,

Which is touching your lip, the red part of your face.

And so you can see sort of the etymology, I guess, of these terms.

How cool is that?

I love it, yeah.

And so you can see the growth of a language that way.

And, you know, the other thing, Grant, is the more that you read about all this,

The more you start to understand that there’s something really beautiful

About being a part of a community that chooses to live in silence.

And that led me to a gorgeous book called A Time to Keep Silence.

It’s by Patrick Lee Fermor. It was published in 2007.

He writes about staying in some of the oldest monasteries in Europe,

And he talks about arriving at one of them when he’d been sleepless and sluggish and depressed.

But amid the enforced silence there, he finds that there were no automatic drains,

Such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains,

Or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.

Soon, he writes,

Dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock

Than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a lake shore.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Yeah, it is perfect.

We know we have plenty of listeners who have gone to silent yoga retreats, for example,

Or maybe you’re part of a religious order,

And you have something to say about that.

We’d love to hear about it.

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