Before the Feast of the Lord’s Birth, I was sharing thoughts about the 11th Step on John’s Ladder, Talkativeness and Silence. While we may think of talkativeness as a bad quality, very few usually connect it with sin. But as long as we consider the tongue to be autonomous – something that falls outside the scope of Christian ascesis, something independently of God – it will inevitably become a tool of sin. As St. James writes:

The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire by hell. No man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so.

Silence is the fruit of repentance, mourning and the remembrance of death. Even the chattiest of people are silenced when they are faced with somber and sobering thoughts. When we remember our sins, when we remember death and judgment, we can find no place for idle words. Thus St. John writes:

The man who recognizes his sins has taken control of his tongue, while the chatterer has yet to discover himself as he should. The man who is seriously concerned about death reduces the amount of what he has to say, and the man who has received the gift of spiritual mourning runs from talkativeness as from a fire.

By contrast, when we are spiritually lazy, we try to fill the vacuum with pointless chattering. The Ladder pinpoints three fundamental causes of such talkativeness. I wonder whether you can guess those in advance?

Next week, the three fundamental causes!