Silence?

PHOTO: Mary van Balen “I am SO glad this is August 2 and the mess in Washington, for better or worse, is finally over.”

Noreen, my spiritual director and friend was gathering our small spirituality group for prayer after dinner and expressed her relief that at last, for a moment anyway, there was quiet in Washington. I think many agree with her. The constant talk, attacks, and general cacophony made one want to turn off the tube and retreat to a monastery hoping to find some common sense and quiet.

Silence enough to be in touch with our true selves and the Holy Presence within is hard to come by these days. Resting in it requires a conscious choice and effort. “Noise” takes many forms. The obvious is aural – sounds that fill our days. Speech, music, traffic, appliances, TV, radio. Where I work two televisions hung outside fitting rooms compete for attention with Muzak, not to mention the buzz of customers who sometimes check out while talking on their phones.

“Noise” can be visual as well. Pop up adds on computer screens have become more distracting now that many are videos. I particularly dislike ones that explode across the screen retreating to their place in the sidebars only after confounding my efforts to find the “X” to close or and stop the car from racing or whatever “eye-catching” visuals an advertiser has dreamed up.

“Some silence,” one of my friends said as she settled into the recliner, “is what we need, but don’t always know we need…”

“This Saturday, I gave myself few hours to read the NCR’s special section on Spirituality” Noreen continued. As a prelude to our prayer, she shared some of the articles including one on a book on Centering Prayer by Thomas Keating and an enthusiastic review of Joan Chittister’s new book The Monastery of the Heart.

“I just received an email from my friend, Wilfred, a Benedictine monk,” I said. “I had asked what he was reading lately. ‘Lots of Cynthia Bourgeault,’ he wrote. So, I Googled her. She has a new book out, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. Has anyone read her work?”

Someone had. Someone who has been practicing and teaching centering prayer for years.

Noreen opened our prayer with a time of quiet. A time to simply be present to ourselves and to God Within.

“You don’t have to DO anything. You just have to be present. In the quiet prayer, God does the work, the healing, the blessing. We just show up with the intention of spending quiet time focused on the Holy One. It is about INTENTION.”

The room became still. An unanswered phone’s ring came and went. The seven of us, connected by silence, sat together in prayer.

Driving home after our meeting, I wondered if the mess in Washington might have taken a different turn had the members of the House and Senate spent some time together each day, not arguing, not haranguing one another about “pure” ideals or politically expedient polices, but sitting in silence, allowing the Holy One to heal, instruct, and move each one. How might our politics, our world be changed if we all let go of personal agendas for twenty or thirty minutes a day, and made ourselves available to the One who lives within each of us, around the globe, and the Grace that flows from such encounters.

Silence anyone?