August 19, 2007
Psalm 46
I’ve been preaching this summer on Spiritual Practices, this week the spiritual practice of silence, stillness.
Nothing is so like God as silence.
— Meister Eckhart quoted in Why Not Be a Mystic? by Frank Tuoti
Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation. In order to hear that language, we must learn to be still and to rest in God.
— Thomas Keating quoted in The Sun & Moon Over Assisi by Gerard Thomas Straub
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub.
— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross quoted in Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das
It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
— Thomas Merton
Silence will illuminate you in God. . .
and deliver you from phantoms of ignorance.
Silence will unite you to God. . . .
In the beginning we have to force ourselves
to be silent. But then from our very silence
is born something that draws us into deeper silence.
— Isaac of Nineveh, seventh century Syrian monk, quoted in The Great Escape Manual by Edward Hays
Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.
— Thomas Merton quoted in Thomas Merton: Essential Writings edited by Christine M. Bochen
I could talk a lot about silence, but that’s way too protestant to preach a sermon on silence. I want us to have the chance to experience silence together. And I know it’s hard for many of us individually to be still and have silence.
So I invite us to practice silence, together. Using our breath to help us. Silence is about gentleness, focusing on your breathing…quieting the mind, letting the thoughts that come in gently float on. I’ve listed some possible mantras in the bulletin.
Show breathing in and out of first three mantras.
Lord Jesus, have mercy
Be compassionate, as God is compassionate
Haaam-Sa, the sound of breathing.
The 4th is simply a position on your face and an intention.
Smile with face, smile with mind. Finally the 4th is using your own mantra based on a word of phrase.
To move us into the silence, I’m going to read a short story by Sue Monk Kidd, from her book, When the Heart Waits. My finishing of the story, invites us into silence together, which is different than silence by ourselves. Here’s the story.
One afternoon, as the children watched television and I folded laundry, we heard a terrible thud against the patio door. I turned in time to see white wings falling to the ground. A bird had flown into the glass. None of us said a word. We looked at one another and crept to the door. The children followed me outside. I half expected the bird to be dead, but she wasn’t. She was stunned and her right wing was a little lopsided, but it didn’t look broken, bruised maybe.
The bird sat perfectly still, her eyes tiny and afraid. She looked so fragile and alone. But I sat down beside her. I reached out my little finger and brushed her wing. A voice came from behind me, “Why doesn’t it fly off momma.” “She’s hurt”, I said. “She just needs to be still.” We watched her. We watched her stillness.
Finally, the children wandered back to the television, satisfied that nothing was going to happen for awhile. But I couldn’t leave her. I sat beside her, unable to resist the feeling that we shared something, the two of us: the wounds and brokenness of life, crumpled wings, a collision with something harsh and real. I felt like crying for her, for myself, for every broken thing in the world.
That moment taught me that while the postures of stillness within the cocoon are frequently an individual experience, we also need to share our stillness. The bird taught me anew that we’re all in this together; that we need to sit on one another’s stillness and take up corporate postures of prayer. How wonderful it is when we can be honest and free enough with one another to say, “I need you to wait with me” or “Would you like me to wait with you?”
I studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know instinctively that in the stillness is healing. I had been learning that too. Learning that stillness can be the prayer that transforms us. How much more concentrated our stillness becomes though, when it’s shared.
The door opened again. “Is she finished being still yet”. “No, not yet”, I said, knowing that I was talking as much about myself as the bird. We went on waiting together, twenty minutes, thirty, fifty.
Finally, she was finished being still. She cocked her head to one side, lifted her wings and flew. The sight of her flying made me catch my breath. From the corner of my eye, I saw her shadow move along the ground and cross over me. Grace is everywhere I thought. Then I picked myself up and went back to folding laundry.
SILENCE - 10-15 minutes
Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Eat, Pray, Love, has a great description of the beginning of a 10 day silent retreat.
It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I’d stopped talking, I found that I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech—brain, throat, chest, back of the neck—vibrated with the residual effects of taking long after I’d stopped making sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners have left for the day. It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall way, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.
Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. It was difficult and it was terrifying, but this much I knew—I never didn’t want to be there, and I never wished that anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.
I invite you individually…and us corporately…to continue to discover the practice of silence.
