Silence
Last night, at Being With, during sharing time, I kept bringing up instances around silence - the Silent Peace Walk this past Sunday at Gage Park, a Silent Retreat which I wanted to last forever. Why?
Silence.
What do I find so compelling about it?
Early every morning I am eager to begin 20-45 minutes of silent mediation on my meditation chair before anything else.
I love going to weekly meditation at Christ’s Church Cathedral.
I miss Silent Retreats very much, and hope to attend one again next month.
There are many things I adore about the Taize we do at the Cathedral, the next one of which will be Sunday, October 5 at 4 pm. One of those is the silences.
I have been leading Centering Prayer, a form of silent meditation followed by open discussions of contemplative readings, for over a decade now. Centering Prayer was ‘created’ by Father Thomas Keating a number of decades ago. He famously wrote:
“St. John of the Cross wrote, “The Father spoke one word from all eternity and he spoke it in silence, and it is in silence that we hear it.” This suggests that silence is God’s first language and that all other languages are poor translations.
—Thomas Keating,The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living by Thomas Keating,S. Stephanie Iachetta, editor
Perhaps this is the first and most important reason silence is so very compelling. It speaks to the spirit of its origin, to Awareness itself as a universal Reality, that the beginning of all was Silence.
From a scientific point of view, one might imagine the quiet before the Big Bang.
On a more personal level, before birth, a human' begins in a womb space.
In fact silence has never been total from the beginning. The developing fetus hears the mother’s heartbeat and a variety of other sounds from within her body, and, faintly, from the outside.
So it is when we sit in silence, or do a silent walk, there are always sounds. For me, I have constant ringing of the ears so there is always that in the background. Then perhaps a fan as the furnace or heat pump fan kicks in, the noise of the fridge running, the sounds of my husband stirring in the kitchen getting his breakfast, the whine of a motorcycle speeding by in the distance outside the window…
When I first began to meditate in the late 90s, I felt assaulted by what I thought of as ‘intrusive’ sounds that seemed to be ‘interfering’ with the pristine quiet of my perfect meditation. Suddenly a cleaner would begin a vacuum cleaner, and I would feel so upset! How dare they!
Gradually I came to understand nothing can actually interrupt the essence of silence. It remains, underneath the fabric of the Universe itself.
At one point during a meditation, I perceived myself falling endlessly through Space into the vastness of the Silence. And yet there was no fear because I understood the fall would never end catastrophically as it does here on Earth. The Silence was around and over and under and beside and held me as I continued to fall and fall serencely.
How do you feel about silence? Do you enjoy it or is it uncomfortable or scary? Do you like sitting in silence with a friend or loved one or does it make you worry?
I would love to hear your thoughts in comments or as a PM.