“Just as the heat quickly escapes outside if the doors of the bathhouse are continuously open, so it is with the soul when it wants to do a lot of conversing. Even if the conversation is good sometimes, its own heat dissipates through the gate of speech. So silence at the appropriate time is a good thing, being nothing other than the mother of wisest thoughts.” — Abba Diodochos
One of my favorite movies is Spirited Away, a beautiful and deeply mystical film by the great anime director Hayao Miyazaki. It tells the story of Chihiro, a spunky girl who must travel to the spirit world to rescue her parents after they fall under a malevolent spell. Steeped in the indigenous folklore of Shinto, it’s a hero’s (er, heroine’s) journey as the girl must navigate a series of trials and challenges to succeed in setting her loved ones free.
Much of the action of Spirited Away takes place in a bathhouse, functioning as a kind of baptismal setting where the cleansing of the various spirits serves as a metaphor for the way of purgation or purification: which is a foundational initiation of the mystical life. We “clean up our act” (by the grace of the Spirit, of course) to prepare ourselves for the insight of illumination, the ecstasy of divine union, and the humble service that naturally flows from those boons.
Now here comes the Desert father Abba Diodochos, who uses the bathhouse as a metaphor for human consciousness. A chatty mind — whether the conversation is external or internal — is like a bathhouse with the doors open, so much so that the purifying heat of the spa is soon dispersed. Not that conversation is bad in itself, any more than it is naturaly for the bathhouse doors to open and close. The problem is one of proportion. Too much chatter is like a drafty house where no heat can be conserved. But when we conserve our interior silence, we create the auspicious conditions that function like “the mother of wisest thoughts” — a sacred womb out of which both serenity and contemplative knowledge can emerge.
Quotation source: John Wortley, ed. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Systematic Collection (Cistercian Studies Series 240) (p. 18). Kindle Edition.