Practice: Cultivating Silence

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/

 

Comments

[MysticSaint]

beautifully useful post and sharing!

will be linking in my post on silence.!

peace!