It is raining today (here at least) and so you can’t be in the garden. The cricket and tennis are rained off and there is no point watching replays. So instead, take some time to listen to Richard Rohr speaking about how silence equips us to find the ways of justice.
I went on an 8 day silent retreat at the beginning of the year. I am still working out its impact in my life, but silence remains a hard thing to find in this age of information overload.
On Friday (snowy conditions permitting!) I head off down to St Asaph, North Wales, to take an 8 day silent retreat at St Beunos Ignatian Spirituality Centre. I suddenly know loads of people who are planning a retreat there this year- well, 4 or 5 anyway. It seems that the new direction of many of us who have been on a journey from evangelical/charismatic Christianity, via emerging/missional metamorphosis, is towards older forms of monastic contemplation- and silence in particular.
It is not surprising really when you think about it. People like me who have been immersed in leading worship have always been longing for a deeper connection with God. In the past the methods to connect have included the intense cauldron of ecstatic worship music, through to creating open spaces with non directive ‘stations’, or spending time in wild places watching the changing skies. The journey has been away from the large auditorium towards older, simpler traditions.
I do not think there is any kind of technique that gives us some kind of hot line to God. I do however remember the Abbot of Worth Abbey making statements about “silence being the window to the soul, and the soul being the window to God- it just works that way.” It feels like the right time to test this theory- not just for me it seems.
Not without some apprehension however! 8 days in my own head. It might be an unpleasant place, a boring place, a dysfunctional place, a darn right depressing place. I expect to miss my home and family desperately. I expect to be tested and broken a little (or a lot.) Or worse than all of this, it could be an empty experience, a waste of time- a self absorbed narcissistic backwater.
Appropriately the Emergent Village minimergent yesterday was as follows;
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.
Pablo Neruda
Hmmmm.
A lovely poem appeared in my inbox today courtesy of Minimergent (a more or less daily e-mail from Emergent Village.)
It hit a nail on the head.
I have been thinking a lot of how I struggle to pray- how words tend to be hollow- presumptuous, pompous, self seeking. How it seems as though I am speaking more to myself than to God at times.
And how I tend to fill everything I do with words- because words are the medium of my understanding, my meditation, my artistic endeavour.
So this poem makes a suitable prayer. Wordy though it may be;
I who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray.
Amen.
Madelaine L’Engle ‘The Weather of the Heart’
The silence of God
Here I am God
Speaking again into your vast unknown
Straining for resonance in space you left wide open
Waiting
They say you speak through sunsets
That you voice the throat of sparrows
That I should look for you in the least of these
And that you also speak in silence
They say you are a jealous God
Who calls us from beyond the periphery of our understanding
But I am weary of mixing portents from selective mundanity
I hope for so much more than God-in-abstract
Who is unmoved by weeping
Perhaps the problem is all mine
Some deficiency of listening making holes in my audial spectrum
Perhaps I am too used to snowing my head with white noise
Or maybe my ears are all plugged up with sin-wax
But then again, can this really be a matter of technique?
An accident of genetics gifting some with God-ears?
Do you require some holy smoke-filled sanctuary?
Or a flagellated enlightenment?
Can a loving God be so capricious?
So I decided to stop sending all those wish lists
All the pleadings for success and significance
I will even intercede reluctantly
More out of habitual hope
And a desire to carry the shape of you to others
I mean in this no lack of respect Lord
What rights have I to command your attention?
Neither is this related to my lack of faith
Even when I forget where I planted my mustard seed
It is just honesty
In the face
Of silence
But still I am listening
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I have just watched this programme on the i player. I have been looking forward to it for some time, as our friend Maggie, who is a retreat director at St Beuno’s abbey in North Wales, had mentioned that some of the programme was filmed there.
It did not disappoint.
The format of the programme is simple- take a fairly random assortment of people and soak them in silence, led by Catholic monks who are able to guide them on the journey. It is reality TV that seems very real. Then end is not to make people Christian- rather to allow them to encounter themselves, and in doing so, to encounter God.
Here are a few things that hit me as I watched the programme-
Silence is a gateway to the soul, and the soul is the gateway to God.
Yet I find silence hard. For most of us, life is a process of constantly seeking distraction from- life.
It is a lifetimes work to find the silence that allows us to hear the voice of God.
Ah, well perhaps there is hope for me yet. How ever much life I have left…
Both the purpose and the means of the process is- purity of heart.
I know my heart a little- and it is not pure.
My spiritual encounters in the past have tended to revolve around repeatedly saying sorry for things that I know I will do again. As I became older, the pervasive guilt I felt as a young man trying to be Christian has ebbed away- which is good- but perhaps this might also mean that I am more comfortable with my impurity.
If you have not got a pure heart, you can not see God.
Is this true? How pure does it have to be? Or is it just something to do with desiring purity, and genuinely seeking to deal with all the things that get in the way?
The God of Surprises is going to give you some wonderful surprises.
I hope that this is true for these folk in the programme.
And I hope it is true for me, and you.
Because life without the surprise of God is half life, or no life.
this fragile tent 