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'The Look of Silence'
Easton, Maine
Saying: We need to move from seeing qualities of spirit as inert objects. Rather, they live as surely as you live who read these words. Solitude lives. Silence lives. You live. You cannot find these interior qualities, they are too close to you. You cannot locate them, for they are not somewhere. You can know them but not find them.
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Gerald G. May -
New Mexico in the summer of 1993. I am sitting on the deck of a small cabin and I am well into the silence, absorbed by the majesty of the mesas to the east and west, my awareness swallowed into limitless vistas of desert where the canyon opens in the south. As I so often do when it is totally unnecessary, I am trying to meditate. Why, when everything around me is perfect and I am immersed in the moment, do I still think I must do something to be contemplative? It is always only by a gift that I am allowed to just be. Left to my own devices, I will always be trying to do something - even if what I am trying to do is nothing.
*The Wisdom of Wilderness.
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One of the best known of the Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt, Saint Sarapion the Sindonite, traveled on pilgrimage to Rome. Here, Saint Sarapion was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life, for he was himself a great wanderer, Sarapion visited her and asked, “Why are you sitting here?” She replied, “I am not sitting, I am on a journey.”
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Our situation, say the Greek [Church] Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity.
*Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way.
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Silence and Solitude are not simply inactivity, not talking, or being apart from others. Even when outwardly one is still, motionless, and speechless, she is going somewhere and saying something. Without saying a prayer, she prays. She prays for she has become prayer, even as spiritual prayer lives in the heart before ever reaching the mind or lips.
Hence, going, speaking, and praying occurs within an inner landscape much different from the outer one. And, since there are no contours of time, one never has gone, spoken, or prayed, nor is one other than this that arises spontaneously.
It takes a long time for most of us to become settled in and familiar with this inner terrain. And little about us encourages this interior life, for it does not recognize the value of the inner life except as subject to psychology that offers it some measure of functionality to fit into the larger society and live with as much tolerance of oneself as possible.
Possibly, however, the most important movement in the inner life is the movement of Silence and Solitude. While we easily see external motions, there are deep, interior movements as real and are more essential to the ongoing pilgrimage. Our intelligence sees and decodes little depth, while the depths of spirit remain inaccessible to our waking consciousness.
The outer aspects of the pilgrimage can only rightly be lived, rejoiced in, and shared with other persons when joined with the pulsations of the inner Light. These movements take place deep within the heart of hearts in Silence and Solitude. Yet, again, this Silence and Solitude is not only in the absence of words and others, but one emerges to so become one with this interiority that she embodies it unknowingly, even as the Sun does not try to shine, yet shines.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, predominantly Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
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