Silence
has its own way of showing me things that have nothing to do with language,
vision, or anything I could directly name. I don’t know how to articulate it.
Perhaps it’s one of those things that words simply fall short of being able to
describe.
So, with
that said, I’ve been thinking about silence a lot today. I went out on my deck
and leaned into the space my mother used to call the portal, the space just
before the forest begins. Last night after the rain finally ended, the clouds
surrounded Sharptop and showed me gradations and spectrums of color I haven’t
seen before. The light there is always different. A blessing even in times of
grief and fear. But silence and solitude can be so kind here. They can also
seem like a desert of sorts, I confess. There’s an emptiness I feel here that
is both frightening and beautiful. I don’t think emptiness is the best word for
it, but it will have to do. It’s related to silence, I suppose. In the silence
here, there are of course forest noises, and occasionally the sound of a car
going by on Cove Road up above my property, but
there are not the claiming and clamorous voices of students or friends or
family. I love those voices most of the time. But here I feel like I’m standing
on the edge of something more than just my deck. I think I am still afraid of
it. It doesn’t just show up here. It likes to save itself mostly for the woods
and swamps. It isn’t trying to disconnect me from community or anyone else in a
tangible, literal way. But it does sure enough want something from me. Perhaps
by “it” I mean God. I suppose that’s true, since I believe (even when I don’t
feel it) that God is in everything, all of us, all the time. I think of Maurice
Manning’s beautiful poem from the Bucolics collection, the one where he’s talking
to God and says “what I want from you is nothing Boss compared to what you want
from me”. That feels very true for me too. It doesn’t feel like a scold,
though, even when I haven’t been meditating, praying, reading, or working in
the ways I feel like I “should” be. It is much more of a promise. It’s
exciting, actually.
For
me silence is as much about seeing as anything else. For me to see in a way
that recognizes the ordinary holiness and beauty in absolutely everything, I
need silence. I don’t recognize that beauty all of the time, but when I do it
seems to permeate everything and everybody. It can be very intense, even
tiring. It doesn’t “play favorites” but it isn’t aloof or remote. It holds
everyone’s soul to its Heart, this silence. It sees everyone as its favorite. I
want to trust it more. I don’t need locutions or dramatic conversations with God,
though I hope I would be open to them if God wanted me to be. I want to feel
the Heart of silence, which I tend to feel as the Heart of Christ and of Jesus.
I am kinder and more patient when I try to put myself in this “space.” Sometimes
it comes to me of its own accord, thank God. I am thinking of so many times at
the land off of Griffith Road or over by Hidden Pond. Times
when I feel a poignancy to the edge of everything, from the sudden appearance
of a rabbit at the edge of the path to the sound of a whippoorwhill before it’s
gotten dark. There can be a melancholy present, I guess, but I don’t know that
I would really name it as such. It’s some sort of alloy. It’s something like what
Rilke wrote about in the Tenth Duino Elegy when he wished he could have
received and surrendered to his nights of suffering more closely. It’s Lawrence ’s three strange angels. It
might even be a cousin of Pascal’s FIRE…God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of
Jacob. It’s what held me in place for unnoticed hours that summer afternoon
in Kentucky, overcome with joy and love beside the statue of Jesus and his
crimson heart. I think it must be with me all the time. If I can
begin---continue?---to be able to recognize it in any given moment, to let it
open and share its silent heart with me, I will be---what? Happy? Not that,
necessarily….maybe grateful? Actually, “present” is the best word I can find,
which is paradoxical because what I’m talking about is really, I think, more
about absence than presence---it has often felt that way, anyway. I can
sometimes conceive of the absence as a benediction, a presence, even when it
feels like emptiness, and that is a huge grace. I can’t think of anything more—or
less--I would want to pray for.
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