Tags
Buddhist, meditation, Meg Wheatley, noise, perseverance, silence, sound, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
I just read something that I first thought quite amusing but then I began to think about it as something more than a whimsical quote from Meg Wheatley (see Perseverance, p. 102) and it became a challenge to my way of thinking that puts me at the center of things. Here’s what I mean.
I love the times like yesterday afternoon when everyone who lives in our house is home doing whatever we do in an atmosphere of silence. It’s a very peaceful feeling of a communal spirit. (Ironically, some geese just flew by outside cackling wildly to disturb the morning silence.) I’m not saying I long for the days of enforced silence for most of our waking moments, but hearing the hammering of carpenters on our land or 18-wheel trucks zooming down the road can be disturbing. Then there’s the vacuum cleaner that makes me think I should be doing some household chore instead of reading in my room…but that’s another matter…and I digress. Here’s what I read:
A Buddhist teacher caught himself complaining about the loud party nearby that was disturbing his meditation. And then he had this insight. “Oh, the sound is just the sound. It is me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. It’s just doing what it has to do. That’s what sound does. It makes sound. That is its job. So if I don’t go out to bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me. Aha!”
Today I am privileged to spend the morning in reflection with seven people considering the topic of hope. Self-selected and always seeking to deepen their spiritual lives, these people are all known to me although not to one another. I never know exactly what will transpire at these brief encounters (just 3 hours of prayer, silence and sharing) but I am never disappointed. That is not to say that I do not have a carefully crafted agenda, but once I have prepared, I let go and see where the Spirit will take us. I smile when I think of that truth because it has not always been that way. Needing success eventually gives way to simply being present and trusting the willingness of the participants to hear something of merit and to offer their wisdom to the group.
It is said that “old habits die hard.” I was aware of that in a small way during the days of retreat from which I returned yesterday. Each morning when I awoke to the sounds of silence one of my first thoughts was of my daily writing task. Since I had announced the 5-day hiatus, I was able with just a grateful breath to simply turn toward the silence and enter the day where the only speaking was in sessions of prayer & reflection on the mystical practices of Sufism. What became the most obvious truth for me swirled around and into every hour of the day in the words of the chant: Wherever I turn, there is the face of God.
Just a few words this morning as I prepare to travel to New Hampshire for five days of retreat with a brilliant spiritual teacher half my age. If you haven’t met Rev. Matthew Wright, I urge you to look him up on the internet at 
Everything is so still this morning. It reminds me of the line in Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he says that “all creation is on tiptoe, waiting for the children of God to come into their own.” That image is my favorite translation because it is so visual but also because it implies for me an intense use of both ears and eyes. We won’t see it if we have our eyes closed and we won’t hear it if we’re not really listening. Even if all of our five outer senses are engaged, there needs to be an interior readiness for the in-breaking of God’s presence. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an incremental thing, sparked either by our own silence or by a communal encounter of recognition. Deeper than silence, the stillness becomes palpable and we know something that we didn’t know before – indescribable but deeply true. Again it is John Philip Newell whose prayer suffices for this morning.
I believe that I understand at this moment what Thomas Merton wrote at dawn on a day a half-century ago about waking up. It is totally silent inside my house; everyone is sleeping still or again. (The coffee is made so someone was up before sunrise.) Outside is a different story. The mourning doves punctuate the conversation that is constant and loud – some would say cacophonous – among all the other birds large and small. And through it all the rooster reigns, splitting the silence with a voice that carries to the river and back again calling us all to wakefulness. “It is like the first morning of the world,” Merton writes, “when Adam, at the sweet voice of Wisdom, awoke from nonentity and knew her…” Only in silence, I think, is it possible to have such an experience. And so I will dress and go into the day, carrying with me the pure sounds of praise in the natural world, hoping to know the wakefulness that is available to me this day.
We have arrived. “It is the first day”, the saying goes, “of the rest of our lives.” It is the first day of April, the month when we expect great flowerings – in our weather, our gardens and, hopefully, our life. We have survived the winter, some with great stress and destruction, and though it seems to be hanging on, we need to remember that the resistance of Mother Earth can be as strong as our own when it comes to change.
Today, sorrow and lament fill the praying world as ritual attempts in word and song and sometimes even gesture to reach the depth of pain that is recalled to us from across the ages as “the scandal of the cross,” the suffering and death of Jesus. If awake enough, we see this suffering repeated again and again in our own time and know it as a vivid manifestation of the pain body of Christ. In that way it becomes our pain as well since we are not separate but merely different cells in that very real and present body.
Waking up very early (5:20am) has its benefits as I am experiencing today. I need to be in my car by 7:30, in order to be able to breathe when I arrive at the retreat venue where I will share the day with probably about 50 people. During the event we will share reflections on three questions from the gospel of Mark: