By Jon Berry
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG, ASPIRING NEWSPAPER REPORTER, a gruff,
old journalist
taught me something I never forgot. It wasn’t about writing a
lede, developing sources,
or other tools of the trade. It was the importance of
cultivating silence.
Whenever he
hit a wall in a story or in life, the journalist went off to a corner of his
house where he wouldn’t be disturbed, lit a candle, and spent a half-hour
in
complete quiet. He always came back, he said, with a new perspective.
A business
executive once expressed the same idea in a different way to a friend of mine.
“Everyone,” he said, “needs some ceiling time.” He meant that everyone, even
busy executives, needs time to meditate. His own daily meditation was to gaze up
at the ceiling – the one space in his office that didn’t carry a reminder of
work.
Silence can
be uncomfortable. We’ve all had the experience of being asked to observe a
moment of silence in a ballgame, dinner, or meeting, when the leader leaps
onto the next sentence before the word “silence” has barely been said. We live
in a culture of taking action. Slowing down is disruptive. It’s disturbing.
And it
leads to good things. I see it in the people I’ve interviewed so far for Insight Trails. They practice it in
different ways – walks in the woods, meditation, prayer,
quieting down in
religious or spiritual setting. But all have silence as part of their life.
I
experience the power of cultivating silence in the spiritual communities that I’m
part of. In the Quaker meeting I go to on Sunday mornings, the hour of silence
yields insights, connections, and a sense of calm unlike anything in my
day-to-day life.
I’ve opened
meetings in non-spiritual settings – including workplaces – with a brief
silence. Sometimes it’s a minute. Mostly it’s just one or two full, deep
breaths. I don’t identify the request as spiritual as such – saying instead
something like, “first, let’s take a deep breath and think about what we want
from this meeting…” This moment of reflection can do wonders for focusing the
group’s attention.
Early
Quakers identified the experience of discomfort that we have in silence as the
first step in spiritual awakening. They believed that we all have within us an
“Inward Light” that impels us toward truth, including uncomfortable truths. The
experience brings us fresh points of view and deeper perspectives – in Friends’
terms, closer to God. Within it is the potential to transform, refresh, and heal.
How does
one begin? Recent readings have deepened my appreciation of the process of Quaker
silence. Taking these books and pamphlets together, certain themes come
through:
Center Down. This old Quaker
term literally means what it says. Quaker worship 
begins with turning inward,
to our center, and focusing down, to get out of our heads. The goal, says J.
Brant Bill in Holy Silence, a good,
book-length primer on Quaker worship, is to “create a space for God to work
within us.” It’s not easy. Cares of the week bubble up. Sounds crowd in –
someone coughing, cars going by, children whispering. Some Friends respond by
returning to centering down. Others turn the disruptions into prayer – reminders
to pray for people’s health, safe travels, and children – “pray the
distractions directly into the prayer,” as Douglas Steere puts it in his
pamphlet Friends and Worship.
Deeper Silence. At a certain
point, the busyness gives way to a deeper quiet. Bill puts it nicely. Having
“cast off from the shore” and made our way “around the edge of the spiritual
sea,” we are drawn to “launch out to the depths,” to a place that is “deeper
spiritually” and “higher emotionally” than “any place we normally live.” The
busyness of the first phase of centering drifts away. It’s as if we’ve stepped
outside time.
Opening up. In this deeper
silence, things happen. Life opens up. The controls that we clamp onto
day-to-day life – that often keep us from experiencing life – fade away. Some
people experience a welling up of gratitude that isn’t accessible to them in
everyday experience, from the divine mystery of life to simple beauties around
them – birds at the birdfeeder, children on the playground, bicyclists going
by.
Answers. Early Quakers found
another, important thing occurred in this deeper state: Answers came to them.
Many times they were elusive – an image, a feeling, or a snippet of a phrase.
But they resonated as true.
Rex Ambler,
who recreated the process of early Friends’ worship experience in his
brief
book Light to Live by, writes about the
words “be real” coming “out of the blue” to him while meditating on a troubled
relationship. He “understood immediately,” he writes, that he had “been acting
a part” in his life, with the result that he didn’t know himself or how to be
in a relationship. It would take courage and acceptance, but – if he could be
true to himself – he had a way through his problem.
This notion
of letting in answers separates the
Quakers from other kinds of meditation that emphasize continual letting go. The concept has been
integrated into therapeutic practice. “Focusing,” a six-step technique developed by Eugene Gendlin,
a psychologist who attended Quaker meetings as a child, is premised on the idea
that truth resides in each of us (as opposed to an external authority); that
this truth can be experienced; and that it often lies deeper than words or
other symbolic expressions. Our inner truths often have corollaries in our
bodies – “felt senses” in the chest, gut, or elsewhere. Focusing doesn’t
solve the problem. But, in the words of one writer, it can lead to “the
beginnings of clarity about changes I need to make in my life.”
These
moments of clarity can also be accompanied by physical effects – sighs, tears, deep
feelings of relief. I’ve seen all of these, as well, in Friends’ Meetings for
Worship.
Transformation. Cultivating a
practice of sailing into the deep waters of silence, and listening to the
deeper truths available there, can be risky business. Early Friends describe
being “ripped apart” by the experience. But they also found that opening
themselves up in silence changed them in powerful ways. Exposing the old,
uncomfortable truths, says Ambler, can lead to “the birth of a new, truer
self.”
This
transformation can spur further changes. It sends us back into the world with a
new energy. It’s the underlying idea, I believe, in the often-quoted line from
William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania)
that “true goodliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to
live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.” It keeps us focused
on the big picture and big questions, forcing us, as Bill says, to ask “what
does God want?” rather than “our usual ‘what do I want?’” It helps us be with
others; a deep, shared silence can be more helpful than any words to a friend
in need of comfort. It gives us “strength and power to allay all storms and
tempests,” in the words of George Fox, the early leader of Quakerism. Done
communally, as in Friends Meetings, it can harmonize us with those around us and open us to wisdom that
others possess. Fox counseled his followers to always “carry around some quiet
inside thee.”
Early
Friends considered silence to be a direct path to God, the Christ Within. This
was a radical idea in its time. Giving up dependence on doctrines, rituals,
preachers, and the other accoutrements of the church, and turning inward to
find the Eternal, put the Quakers at odds with the establishment.
Silence
remains a radical idea today. In our culture of Blackberries, cell phones, the
Internet, high-definition televisions, and continual bombardment of advertising,
cultivating silence – as opposed to consuming products – is a radical idea. But
it can connect us to – and keep us on – the path we’re supposed to be on.
That’s I.T.
J. Brent Bill’s book Holy
Silence is a fine introduction to
Quaker practice, with guidelines for starting an individual practice or going
to a Quaker meeting. For more information, visit Brent’s website:
http://www.brentbill.com/
To purchase a copy of Holy
Silence, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1557254206/qid=1113445622/sr=8-6/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i6_xgl14/103-6882526-5818259?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Rex Ambler’s great little book Light to Live by chronicles Ambler’s study of early Friends’
approach and step-by-step distillation of it for individual and group
meditations. To purchase a copy, click
here:
http://www.quakerbooks.org/search
To read Douglas Steere’s Friends
and Worship, a classic introduction to Quaker meeting, please click on this
link:
http://www.fgcquaker.org/library/welcome/fa-worship.html
Nancy Saunders’ article “Focusing on the Light: A Modest
Proposal,” is a good introduction to Eugene Gendlin’s technique of Focusing and
its links to Quakerism: http://www.focusing.org/focusing_on_the_light.html
For more information on Focusing, click on this link:
http://www.focusing.org/
The website Quakerfinder can help you find a Friends meeting
near you:
http://www.quakerfinder.org/
Friends Journal is
an excellent resource for learning more about contemporary Quakerism (full
disclosure: I serve on the board of this publication, in addition to being a
big fan of it.):
http://www.friendsjournal.org/
The image of the Quaker meetinghouse is of Live Oaks Meeting in Houston, Tx. The meeting room features a "skyspace" ceiling window that opens to the sky. For more, see: http://www.friendshouston.org/
a
practice I sought out. But my work situation changed and I'm working in the city again. Rather than give up starting the day with 15
minutes of silence, I decided to see if meditation is transferrable. It is.
whether my 82-year-old Dad would be out on his 50-year-old tractor on his
centuries-old farm – and I smiled. Then I came back to breath, as always, after my thoughts have carried me momentarily away, and recentered into my meditation.
what Thich Nhat Hanh is getting
at in the idea that “a dandelion keeps our smile.” The most mundane parts of
life, he says, can bring us into “profound
communion with life.” Hanh, whom I've been reading on the ride in, writes about waiting in the airport and washing the dishes, but it could as easily be the commuter train or a staff meeting.
