'Silence Is God's First Language'

[Guest guest]

'Silence Is God's First Language'

Most religions consider a practice of 'intentional silence'--such as

centering prayer--essential to spiritual awakening.

By Cynthia Bourgeault

 

Excerpted from " Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening " by Cynthia

Bourgeault. Reprinted with permission from Cowley Publications.

 

Deeper Silence, Deeper Self

 

" Silence is God's first language, " wrote the 16th-century mystic John

of the Cross. And silence is the normal context in which

contemplative prayer takes place. But there is silence and then there

is silence. There is an outer silence, an outer stopping of the words

and busy-ness, but there is also a much more challenging interior

silence, where the inner talking stops as well.

 

Most of us are familiar with this first kind of silence, although we

don't get enough of it in our spiritual nurture. It's the kind of

silence we normally practice in retreat times and quiet days;

sometimes you'll hear it described as " free silence. " With a break

from the usual hurly-burly of your life, you have time to draw inward

and allow your mind to meander. You may pore over a scriptural verse

and let your imagination and feelings carry you more deeply into it.

Or you may simply put the books away and go for a walk in the woods,

allowing the tranquility of the setting and the relative quieting of

external pressures bring you more deeply in touch with yourself. You

listen carefully to how you're feeling, what you're wishing. In this

kind of work, the free association of your mind provides the key to

the renewal, and silence furnishes the backdrop where this work can

go on.

 

But there is another kind of silence as well, far less familiar to

most Christians. In this other kind of silence, the drill is exactly

the opposite. In free silence, you encourage your mind to float where

it will; in this other, sometimes called " intentional silence " -or to

use the generic description, meditation-a deliberate effort is made

to restrain the wandering of the mind, either by slowing down the

thought process itself or by developing a means of detaching oneself

from it.

 

Intentional silence almost always feels like work. It doesn't come

naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable

resistance raised from the mind itself: " You mean I just sit there

and make my mind a blank? " Then the inner talking begins in earnest,

and you ask yourself, " How can this be prayer? How can God give me my

imagination, reason, and feelings and then expect me not to use

them? " " Where do 'I' go to if I stop thinking? " " Is it safe? "

 

Since centering prayer is a discipline of intentional silence,

dealing with this internal resistance is an inevitable part of

developing a practice. In fact, I've often said to participants at

centering prayer introductory workshops that 90 percent of the trick

in successfully establishing a practice lies in wanting to do it in

the first place. So let's consider that question first.

 

The Art of Awakening

 

Perhaps the most powerful argument is the one from authority.

Virtually every spiritual tradition that holds a vision of human

transformation at its heart also claims that a practice of

intentional silence is a non-negotiable. Period. You just have to do

it. Whether it be the meditation of the yogic and Buddhist

traditions, the zikr of the Sufis, the devkut of mystical Judaism, or

the contemplative prayer of the Christians, there is a universal

affirmation that this form of spiritual practice is essential to

spiritual awakening.

 

When I talk about " transformation " and " awakening, " incidentally, I

should make clear that I am not using New Age terminology. I am

speaking of: " You must be born from above " (John 3:7 NRSV),

or " Unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and dies, it remains

just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit " (John

12:24), or perhaps most pointedly: " For whoever wants to save his

life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for me will find it "

(Matthew 16:24-25). Among the worldwide religions, Christianity is

surely one of those most urgently and irrevocably set upon the total

transformation of the human person. And while it's true that we don't

have pictures of Jesus teaching meditation practice exactly-this can

be read between the lines fairly easily on any number of occasions

and more important, derived theologically.

 

Like most the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught

from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case

of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be-that

busy, anxious little " I " so preoccupied with its goals, fears,

desires, and issues-is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and

to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on

the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who

tries to keep his " life " (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the

one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing. Beneath the

surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its

presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller " I " with its

insatiable needs and demands.

 

This confusion between small self and larger Self (variously known in

the traditions as " True Self, " " Essential Self, " or " Real I " ) is the

core illusion of the human condition, and penetrating this illusion

is what awakening is all about.

 

Beyond Ordinary Awareness

 

But why is intentional silence so important to this process of

awakening? One of the most effective ways of getting at this question

comes through a simple bull's-eye diagram created by Father Thomas

Keating. It's called " Levels of Awareness. "

 

The outer circle is called our " Ordinary Awareness. " This is the mind

as it usually thinks, and our sense of self tied to that way of

thinking.

 

As human beings we are gifted with what is known as " self-reflexive

consciousness " : the capacity to stand outside ourselves and look upon

ourselves in the third person. Because of this unique capacity of the

mind (as far as we know, we're the only species so gifted), we are

able to experience ourselves as unique persons, made up of unique

qualities, capacities, and needs. The subject/ object polarity built

into the way the mind works sets up the impression of " having " a

distinct identity, informed by certain attributes and imbued with

certain gifts that need to become fully expressed if my personhood is

to be whole. That sets up a good deal of expectation-and also a good

deal of anxiety.

 

If one really follows closely what thinking and selfhood feel like at

this ordinary level, it is not a pretty picture. Into our head, out

of nowhere, pop random thoughts, memories, associations, and

sensations. Sometimes they are stimulated by the environment; more

often by the environment triggering a memory or triggering a reaction

or chain reaction.

 

I remember testing this for myself once. I had read somewhere that

without spiritual training the human mind is unable to concentrate on

anything for more than two minutes. Surely this must be wrong, I

thought; with a Ph.D. and a couple of books under my belt, I figured

my powers of concentration must be considerably better than that. So

to test this theory, I set myself the task of noticing everything red

in the next five-mile stretch of highway I was driving.

 

What a humiliation! I did all right for the first 30 seconds or so,

until the next red thing that popped into my path happened to be a

Dairy Queen. When I " woke up " again, several miles later, I realized

I had been completely lost in a long reverie touched off by childhood

memories of ice cream at the beach. So much for my superior powers of

concentration!

 

The Buddhists smilingly call this " monkey mind. " The little beast

jumps from one tree limb to the other, taking the whole of us with

it. And we would probably not be able to abide the inner chaos were

it not for that stable sense of " self " created through the subject/

object polarity. At the center of all that orbiting chaos, an

apparent solidity is given by that self-reflexive " I, " with its

constant set of self-referential questions with which it probes and

measures the universe: " How well am I doing? " " Is it safe

here? " " What did she mean by that? " " Am I okay? "

 

Another name for " ordinary awareness " is " egoic thinking. " It is the

normal functioning zone of the human mind. It doesn't matter whether

you're a Ph.D., a bishop, a nuclear physicist; how brilliantly

intellectual or intensely devout you may be. Without special

spiritual training, your sense of the world and your sense of

yourself will be formed at this level of awareness. Even the so-

called self-awareness tools of our times, from psychotherapy to Myers-

Briggs personality typing to the enneagram, spend most of their

effort merely resorting and clarifying the characteristics: " I am an

INFP, " " a gut-centered type, " " a five, " etc. This may yield insights

into the workings of the personality, but it's still ordinary

awareness.

 

.. . .

 

Deeper than this, in every single one of us though unbeknownst to

most of us, is the level that Thomas Keating describes as

our " spiritual awareness. " " Awareness " might be too mental a word to

describe it, however; the sensation is much more visceral, more like

that tug I experienced as a child in Quaker meeting, drawing me down

into my depths. You might picture it as a kind of interior compass

whose magnetic north is always fixed on God. It's there; it's as much

a part of what holds you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat.

And its purpose, just like a compass, is for orientation.

The problem is that most of us are not in touch with our spiritual

awareness (or at least, not deeply and consistently enough in touch

with it), let alone having any idea of what it's there for or how to

use it. It comes upon us only rarely, sometimes in a moment of

overpowering emotion, such as suddenly being moved to tears by

watching a sunset or receiving the Eucharist. That " nostalgia for the

divine " sweeps over us and we are left trembling before the presence

of a Mystery almost more vivid and beautiful than we can bear. But

ordinary life does not encourage such moments, and the impression

fades, to be revisited only in our dreams, the usual repository of

our spiritual awareness.

 

But spiritual awareness is actually a way of perceiving, just as

ordinary awareness is a way of perceiving. And as with ordinary

awareness, there is a sense of identity or selfhood generated through

this mode of perception. The big difference between them is that

whereas ordinary awareness perceives through self-reflexive

consciousness, which splits the world into subject and object;

spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole

and an innate sense of belonging. It's something like sounding the

note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that

surround it and make it a chord. And since spiritual awareness is

perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it

is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates

life at the ordinary level of awareness.

 

The Divine Indwelling

 

If we have within us a compass pointing to the magnetic north of God,

does this mean that God dwells within us, as the center of our being?

Is that what the bull's-eye of Thomas Keating's diagram is all about-

what he calls our " divine awareness " ?

 

Cautiously, the answer to this question is " yes. " I say " cautiously "

because Christian theology makes very clear that the human being is

not God and that the innermost core of our being is not itself

divine. And yet theology has always upheld the reality of the " divine

indwelling. " As we move toward center, our own being and the divine

being become more and more mysteriously interwoven. " There is in the

soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a

something in which the soul dwells in God, " writes the medieval

mystic Meister Eckhart, the subtlety of his words reflecting the

delicacy of the motion. In our own times, Thomas Merton describes

this " something " in a passage of astonishing clarity and beauty:

 

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is

untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or

spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal,

from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the

fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This

little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory

of God written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our son-

ship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of

heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see

these billions of points of light coming together in the face and

blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life

vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only

given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

 

Notice how deftly Merton navigates the tricky theological waters

here. His words are bold, in that he claims-to my knowledge more

clearly than any other Christian mystical writer-that at the center

of our being is an innermost point of truth which shares not only the

likeness, but perhaps even the substance of God's own being. And yet,

following the bent of Christian tradition, he makes it absolutely

clear that access to this center is not at our command; it is entered

only through the gateway of our complete poverty and nothingness.

The divine indwelling is the cornerstone of contemplative prayer.

Thomas Keating refers to it as " our personal big bang, " for it

reveals the Source of our own being-the explosion of divine love into

form which first gave rise to our personal life. It also reveals the

direction in which our hearts must travel for a constantly renewed

intimacy with this Source. As we enter contemplative prayer, we draw

near the wellspring from which our being flows.

 

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