Category Archives: Silence

October 30, 2018 · 10:00 am

Ways to See God

Rev. Thomas pioneer of the Contemplative Movement died this past week at the age of 95. I share below some quotes from him.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.

God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.

Nothing is more helpful to reduce pride than the actual experience of self-knowledge. If we are discouraged by it, we have misunderstood its meaning.

― Thomas Keating

There is no question in my mind that the best path to God is through silence. Prayer is not measured in the abundance of our words or the eloquence of our speech. Prayer is quietly listening to and waiting for the voice of God. The Contemplative Movement is about bringing this idea into the mainstream of Christian thought and spreading it beyond the limited boundaries of Christianity. Thomas Keating was a pioneer of that concept. Let me share a few ideas, with Keating’s help, about living the Contemplative life.

Silence is God’s Language

God is not American or Chinese. He is God. The Creator is not impressed with our methods of prayer or our vain attempts to be holy. He is a God who speaks beyond words and we, as His people, must learn to listen and communicate beyond words. Silence is the language of God. Noise is the language of man. (The Devil?) My major calling of the last several years has been to search for silence in my life. In that search, I have come to understand more of God but realize that I have discovered I know less of God.

Pay Attention

When I was a boy my “report cards” often had a checked box that said, “inattentive in class.” My teacher’s method was to let me and my parents know that I was not listening to the message that she was trying to deliver. God has sent people into my life, and your life, for the purpose of teaching us about him and his intention for our lives. We often go through life inattentive of these vital messengers. In silence, we can hear them.

Becoming God’s Creation

Most of us would agree that God created us. The problem is that we immediately begin to try to recreate ourselves in the way that we see ourselves. We forget God as soon as we are able to think for ourselves. Being fully human is to acknowledge that we are created by and dependent on God. In realizing our dependence we become fully human and open the divine gate of our life.

Seeing as God Sees

We all agree that pride is a major problem in ourselves and in the world. Keating draws a correlation between pride and self-knowledge. There are many who see their weaknesses and become forlorn and depressed by them. That’s because we fail to understand the nature of God. God is the ultimate source of love and understanding. He wants us to see ourselves so we can understand him better. He has offered us a “way out” of self-centeredness and self-destruction. That way is to accept his love and understanding, and we can never do that do unless we see ourselves as we truly exist. Self-knowledge is not a road to ruin but a road to the riches of God.

These few points give us a basis to living life and becoming closer to God in that journey. Give some thought to them as you travel the pilgrimage that God has given you this week.

Prayer

Lord ,I so want to see you. Help me to find a path to you. Help not to flounder in my ways. Show me a way to listen and hear so that I may come to understand you and myself as well. Guide me to a quiet place and speak loudly to me.

Amen

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May 9, 2018 · 9:57 am

Dark Silence

The Seven Storey Mountain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

—T.S. Eliot

For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.

—Thomas Merton

TS Eliot and Thomas Merton were both writers who spent a lot of their lives and writings searching for the ultimate meaning of life. They chose different paths. Merton was born in France and made his way to the US and became a citizen. Eliot, on the other hand, was born in St. Louis MO and immigrated to England where he became a subject of the Queen. Eliot married twice and dedicated his life to his wives and poetry. Merton joined the Abbey of Gethsemane and became the most famous writing Monk of our time. These great writers left us with a treasure trove of great literature. They were different but the same. The above quotes inform us that they had a commonality of thought about silence and meditation.

Their joint cry is that we hear and see the most when we cut ourselves off from the language and light that surround us. That cutting off is called by different names, silence, contemplation, meditation but it always has the same end desire, to communicate with something, someone outside of ourselves. We all have an inbuilt desire to discover our true selves that God created. We are bogged down, stitched up with the learning and cares of the world, and we all know there must be something more. That more only exists when we move beyond.

Eliot stresses the need to allow ourselves to be swallowed in the darkness so that the light might manifest itself. He aptly states that if we create our own hope it will be a prejudicial hope that is wrapped in our own desires. Only when we allow love that is not purely self-love enter, can we see light rise from darkness.

Merton reminds us that we are noise machines who seek to fill in every void with more noise. For our language (noise) to have any meaning there must be times of silence that allow us to digest what we have taken into our souls. That silence is the time when we experience divine translation of human noise. In the brightness of the light of God sometimes our utterly meaningless sound becomes the voice of God.

Some years ago I spent a few days at days at St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana. I chose to stay in the guest rooms of the Monastery itself rather than the retreat house. By doing so I experienced the complete rhythm of Monastic life. Prayer, work, sharing meals and recreation time. I sat at the Abbot’s table in the refectory for meals and that is where I really got a message in the silence of meal time. There was a young monk reading some “Vatican News.” He was an otherwise engaging and intelligent young man, but his reading skills for this kind of stuff were horrible. Therefore I chose to tune him out but there was another sound that captivated my brain. It was the clanging of the dishes as the monks ate their food. That clanging became all that I heard. Mysteriously, God gave me a message in that absence of my noise. I have never again taken a single meal for granted. The noise of the dishes reminds me of the abundance that God has provided for me and the desire I must have to share it with the world. My silence allowed God to break into my life and speak to me. Merton reminds us, “For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.”

Seek the dark silence today so that you might experience the light.

Prayer

Lord, lead me to a time of silence and holy darkness that will allow me to get a glimpse of your light. It is the light that illuminates beyond my imagination. Allow me to silently bask in that light so that I may see you more clearly.

Amen.

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Tagged as Ateneo de Manila University, Atonement in Christianity, Christian Living, Meditattion, Sience, T S Eloit, Thomas Mewrton

December 12, 2017 · 5:44 pm

Alone and Quiet

The silence that is experienced in being quiet and alone is not the deepest and most satisfying silence to be had. The heart’s desire is for the Eternal, a level of silence that is penetrating in its power to draw forth the secret communication of the soul. Here, we discover that silence speaks and we learn how poor we are when we do not abide in this dimension. In this great silence, our being finds its roots in God, is nurtured inwardly, and gradually expands into a form of life that is itself eternal.

~ Romeo J. Bonsaint in “Spiritual Life” Summer, 2004

Prayer

Lord, have I been silent enough today? It is sometimes difficult to be silent and still enough to hear you. The world teaches me that everything is achieved by noise, but God longs to speak with no words. I am still God, speak to me.

Amen

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Tagged as Advent, Christianity, sacred silence

August 23, 2017 · 10:00 am

Finding Silence

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

—-Jean Arp

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 the two. Hence, positive silence implies a choice, and what Paul Tillich called the “courage to be.”

—–Thomas Merton

For over seven years we lived on a very busy city street. During that time I began to believe that silence was just a myth that is found in some far off place. I, like the German sculptor Jean Arp, began to believe that silence was passing into legend. Two and a half years ago I moved into a much quieter, though not silent, neighborhood. Once again, I enjoyed birdsong and could hear the sound of the wind flowing through the trees. It was as though I was rediscovering creation. Soon I realized that my new home has noise as well. Determined not to let my silence be taken away from me, I began to embrace the noise as a pathway to inner silence. That sense of silence acted as a catalyst for a new and stronger spirituality.

Merton refers to the damage caused by negative silence in “Love and Living.” My observation is the more we are surrounded by noise the more likely we are to fall into negative silence. I believe that it is caused by the constant awareness of that background noise that is always present. We become so frustrated by our inability to escape the uproar of humanity and position ourselves at the feet of the creator. We fight so hard to escape the uproar, we never find peace. The path remains elusive to us because we are concentrated on the negative. True silence is out there waiting for us to discover it.

True silence is positive silence, which is a time and a place of self-discovery. From that place we can be in the presence of God. The prophet Zephaniah says, “Be silent before the Lord God! For the day of the Lord is at hand; the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests. “I believe that only way to truly be before the Lord is in silence. How can we really hear God above the din of the world unless we clear our minds and focus on Him? The Bible, early Christians, medieval mystics, modern monastics and all other sorts of people in sincere search of God have a common cry -SILENCE!! This cry instructs us to find a quiet place and present ourselves to God. The quietness allows God to calm us, settle us and speak to us, and more importantly, for us to hear God.

No matter what your circumstance, try not to believe that the quiet place is a thing of the past. Take the time to hear your surroundings and listen to God wherever you may be. The throng of urban life doesn’t have to drive us into the negative silence of brooding and moping. Discover the glimpses of silence that God allows you. Try not to be frustrated with the sounds of His creation but to offer them up as part of your journey to your inner self.

PRAYER

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.

—-Thomas Merton

The Radical Heterodoxy of North Carolina BBQ (Matthew 11:16-19,25-30)

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Tagged as Apostle's Creed, Cardinal Vicar, Catholic Church, Christ, Christianity, Disciple (Christianity), Early Christianity, Epistle to the Philippians, Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Jesus

April 22, 2015 · 10:27 am

Silent Healing

Abba Poemen said of Abba Nisterus that he was like the serpent of brass which Moses made for the healing of the people: he possessed all virtue and without speaking, he healed everyone.

—sayings of the desert

There is great power in silent centering on God. We are pressed to be vocal and aggressive – even in prayer. I can well remember when the reason I didn’t want to pray in public was because I lacked the spontaneity of some others I knew. The monk tells us that we see great healing when we silently approach God with the needs of others. There are certain times when just being in the presence of prayer heals.

Thanks to Brother Augustine (supertradmum-etheldredasplace.blogspot.com)

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Tagged as Aaron, Adam, Apophthegmata Patrum, Book of Exodus, Desert Fathers, God, Healing, Israelites, Moses, Silent Prayer

March 7, 2015 · 4:52 am

Come Away

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

—Jesus

As we continue our Lenten journey there is no better time to heed the call of Jesus to “come away to a deserted place” than the Lenten season. All of us need these times of solitude to take stock of ourselves. The world in which we live is so hectic and busy that it generates precious little time for soul care. Jesus understood that He and the disciples were going about doing many great things and yet, going to a deserted place was a matter of necessity. Lent is the season of deserted places.

As we steer our lives in the other worldly path of self- denial, we automatically find that it is a less traveled road. Perhaps we can take advantage of that reality and spend some quality time with God. After all, practices of self-denial are designed to make us keenly aware of our need for God. Instead of counting the minutes or seconds of silent prayer relish the time. Conceivably your time of fasting can be used to take a quiet walk and experience God’s creation in a special way. When you give offerings to the needy, pause a moment to take yourself to a quiet place and see the person you are helping through the eyes of their Creator. These can be simple ways of coming away to a quiet place without ever traveling.

The whole concept of Lent is one of coming away to the quiet place of your soul. I hope you are having a Holy Lent and traveling towards a joyous Easter.

Lenten Ideas to Help Us Focus on and Become More Like Jesus (conjecturesguilty.wordpress.com)

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Tagged as Ash Wednesday, Christian, Easter, God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Lent, Palm Sunday

March 5, 2015 · 4:39 am

The Value of Silence

Silence and prayer

If we take as our guide the oldest prayer book, the biblical Psalms, we note two main forms of prayer. One is a lament and cry for help. The other is thanksgiving and praise to God. On a more hidden level, there is a third kind of prayer, without demands or explicit expression of praise. In Psalm 131 for instance, there is nothing but quietness and confidence: “I have calmed and quieted my soul … hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

At times prayer becomes silent. Peaceful communion with God can do without words. “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” Like the satisfied child who has stopped crying and is in its mother’s arms, so can “my soul be with me” in the presence of God. Prayer then needs no words, maybe not even thoughts.

How is it possible to reach inner silence? Sometimes we are apparently silent, and yet we have great discussions within, struggling with imaginary partners or with ourselves. Calming our souls requires a kind of simplicity: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” Silence means recognizing that my worries can’t do much. Silence means leaving to God what is beyond my reach and capacity. A moment of silence, even very short, is like a holy stop, a sabbatical rest, a truce of worries.

The turmoil of our thoughts can be compared to the storm that struck the disciples’ boat on the Sea of Galilee while Jesus was sleeping. Like them, we may be helpless, full of anxiety, and incapable of calming ourselves. But Christ is able to come to our help as well. As he rebuked the wind and the sea and “there was a great calm”, he can also quiet our heart when it is agitated by fears and worries (Mark 4).

Remaining silent, we trust and hope in God. One psalm suggests that silence is even a form of praise. We are used to reading at the beginning of Psalm 65: “Praise is due to you, O God”. This translation follows the Greek text, but actually the Hebrew text printed in most Bibles reads: “Silence is praise to you, O God”. When words and thoughts come to an end, God is praised in silent wonder and admiration.

The Word of God: thunder and silence

At Sinai, God spoke to Moses and the Israelites. Thunder and lightning and an ever-louder sound of a trumpet preceded and accompanied the Word of God (Exodus 19). Centuries later, the prophet Elijah returned to the same mountain of God. There he experienced storm and earthquake and fire as his ancestors did, and he was ready to listen to God speaking in the thunder. But the Lord was not in any of the familiar mighty phenomena. When all the noise was over, Elijah heard “a sound of sheer silence”, and God spoke to him (1 Kings 19).

Does God speak with a loud voice or in a breath of silence? Should we take as example the people gathered at Sinai or the prophet Elijah? This might be a wrong alternative. The terrifying phenomena related to the gift of the Ten Commandments emphasize how serious these are. Keeping or rejecting them is a question of life or death. Seeing a child running straight under a car, one is right to shout as loud as possible. In analogous situations prophets speak the word of God so that it makes our ears ring.

Loud words certainly make themselves heard; they are impressive. But we also know that they hardly touch the hearts. They are resisted rather than welcomed. Elijah’s experience shows that God does not want to impress, but to be understood and accepted. God chose “a sound of sheer silence” in order to speak. This is a paradox:

God is silent and yet speaking

When God’s word becomes “a sound of sheer silence”, it is more efficient than ever to change our hearts. The heavy storm on Mount Sinai was splitting rocks, but God’s silent word is able to break open human hearts of stone. For Elijah himself the sudden silence was probably more fearsome than the storm and thunder. The loud and mighty manifestations of God were somehow familiar to him. God’s silence is disconcerting, so very different from all Elijah knew before.

Silence makes us ready for a new meeting with God. In silence, God’s word can reach the hidden corners of our hearts. In silence, it proves to be “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit” (Hebrews 4:12). In silence, we stop hiding before God, and the light of Christ can reach and heal and transform even what we are ashamed of.

Silence and love

Christ says: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). We need silence in order to welcome these words and put them into practice. When we are agitated and restless, we have so many arguments and reasons not to forgive and not to love too easily. But when we “have calmed and quieted our soul”, these reasons turn out to be quite insignificant. Maybe we sometimes avoid silence, preferring whatever noise, words or distraction, because inner peace is a risky thing: it makes us empty and poor, disintegrates bitterness and leads us to the gift of ourselves. Silent and poor, our hearts are overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit, filled with an unconditional love. Silence is a humble yet secure path to loving.

Note:This post was copied from the Taize community website with some editing.

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January 22, 2015 · 12:08 pm

Prayer for Silence

Jesus our peace, if our lips keep silence, our heart listens to you and also speaks to you. And you say to each one of us: surrender yourself in all simplicity to the life of the Holy Spirit; and with that surrender we may know you in a superlative way. Lord help me to observe a sacred silence. AMEN

Thomas Keating: A Rising Tide of Silence, Official Trailer (prodigal.typepad.com)
9.5 Invitations into the Contemplative Renewal of Christianity – Invitation #2:Grow Deeper (contemplativechristians.com)

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January 8, 2015 · 5:45 am

On Silence

Catherine of Siena describes religious life as a ship “ready to receive souls who want to race on to perfection and to bring them to the port of salvation. The captain of this ship is the Holy Spirit, who lacks nothing. His religious subjects who violate his orders can hurt only themselves, never this ship.” This goes not only for the ship of religious life, but also for the Church. The ship can never be sunk, though it can be steered into hurricanes. The key is silence.

First, without silence you can’t hear the captain’s orders. Silence is not only a lack of external noise, but internal listening. Without it crucial directions can be missed. The Holy Spirit is not usually a yeller.

Secondly, you need to hear your shipmates. They have specific duties that cannot be explained in the midst of a storm. They may need your help with one of their tasks or they may need to get by you to reach their station. At times, it is through your shipmates that you hear the orders of the captain.

Thirdly, you need to hear your ship. The external structures of the ship require attention and the creaks of the ship communicate to the sailor. Catherine describes the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as ropes that hold up the sails of the ship. Terrible consequences come of a frayed rope in the midst of a hurricane…

In this extended metaphor, silence is correctly seen as a positive aspect of the religious life and of the Christian life in general. It not only provides the space to listen to God, but it is a weapon of the Christian life. As a pious woman wrote: “Silence is a sword in the spiritual struggle. The sword of silence will cut off everything that would like to cling to the soul.” Storms are not the only danger to a ship, but sea serpents roam the waters too.

We must be prepared to listen past the winds of the world, struggle against the noise of our hearts, and fight the demons of the depths. Silence is the weapon with which we fight the world, concupiscence and demons. It is in the silence of the cross that the ship sails into safe harbor.

Food for Thought-The Prophet Speaks (richardsfoodforthought.com)

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February 24, 2014 · 10:43 am

Silence and Solitude

Thomas Merton is a sage of the modern contemplative and mystic world. He offers us some sound guidance for our spiritual pathways. He addresses silence and solitude and their impact on our development as whole human beings.

The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting. For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person. He no longer lives as a man. He becomes a kind of automaton, living without joy because he has lost his spontaneity. He is no longer moved from within, but only from outside himself.

——Thomas Merton

The joy of silence and the peace of solitude are missing links in American society. Twenty first century America is searching for its soul and looking in all the wrong places. Merton calls for us to be in silence and solitude so that we might hear the inner voice. There are few among us that would not admit that all of God’s creatures are looking for spiritual peace. Such a peace is very illusive in our society. We find the ever increasing number of people who identify as spiritual but not religious. That very label is a deep interior cry for union with our inner selves. Somehow they have failed to hear the inner voice and therefore, suffer from the agony of separation from the springs of spiritual life that wait them.

Merton acknowledges the impossibility of living as a hermit as the answer for the bulk of society. He does, however, strongly urge us to discover our inner selves. He calls our inner self our “home,” and implies that we are locking ourselves out of our own homes. In this act of exile, we cease to be a true person and become some kind of automated robot that merely functions from day to day.

Let us begin today to heed the advice of this modern day sage, and seek silence and solitude whenever and wherever it presents itself.

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Tagged as inner voice, Silence. Meditation, Solitude, spiritual peace, Thomas Merton