I spent a year in a monastery; I was 18 years old. Among other things, I learned about ‘silence’ and I also learned about ‘meditation.’ I learned that silence takes guts to face and embrace. Experiencing ‘silence’ requires us to ‘find it, embrace it, and then, sustain it.’ All of this is quite daunting, challenging and stretching, for me at least. At its best, Word and Voice are rooted in deep silence. To paraphrase Robert K. Greenleaf, when I speak how will that improve on the silence?
I have a bias. I believe that we each need to teach ourselves to sit quietly and listen, just listen long enough to leave our butts a bit sore. Our lives are, more and more, whelming us over with both internal and external noise and because of this when it comes time to tap into and then convey to ourselves and perhaps to others our deepest intuitions, our deepest yearnings, our deepest hungers and when our lives demand, cry out for, inner guidance we will find ourselves speechless.
Many of us don’t even recognize silence. Silence lacks stuff – background noise, internal noise, chatterings of all types. This type of silence requires discipline over time. Silence is not easy to find, nor experience. I used to invite participants into ‘silence;’ two years ago I shifted and now I invite them into ‘quiet.’ For many, if not most, of us ‘relative quiet’ is the only kind of quiet known; silence is not known.
This challenge of finding and experiencing silence is exacerbated by the fact that, as Thomas Merton noted so insightfully, our culture loves noise; we are a noisy culture. We do not like silence; people cannot sit in silence for but a few moments at a time [I am reminded of the searcher who went to Nepal to learn about silence and meditation; he was gone but a short time. A close friend saw him out walking and stopped him and asked what had happened that he had left and returned in such a short period of time. The man replied that indeed he had gone off to Nepal in search of silence but left within a day or two. Why? Because every where he went, Yak, Yak, Yak!].
We fear silence. Silence reveals. It reveals our deepest longings and our emptiness, if not our inner wasteland. In silence we hear the sound of our own suffering. This is the type of suffering that results in tears flowing. There have been times in my life when I was afraid that if I tapped into this suffering in myself that my tears would never cease flowing.
Sitting quietly is also counter-cultural. We love activity. We value doing not being. Sitting in silence requires us to embrace ‘doing nothing;’ it requires of us just to ‘be.’ Perhaps silence is, for us, a glimpse of what death is all about. Death is our enemy, we seem to believe. Perhaps if we are noisy enough death will not open the door to the coach and invite us in; some perhaps!
Silence is an antidote to language; words cannot capture nor describe the mystery, the transcendent, the wonder, the awe, the magical. Silence provides us the space for these to enter into us, to surround us, to nurture us. Silence, indeed, is golden.
Searcher-Seeker 