THE SOUND OF SILENCE

2/3/08   Summit UU Fellowship

Rev. Kathleen A. Green

  An accomplished Indian Yogi once said:  “Before speaking, consider whether it is an improvement upon silence.”  It’s just too tempting! This same man once went 19 years without speaking! It’s hard for me to conceive of 19 years without speaking.  He obviously wasn’t a UU or a parent.

     As some of you may know, our DRE, Connie Henry, and I attended a district conference for ministers and religious education professionals last week.  We were at the retreat center for four days – learning, eating, laughing, conversing, eating, singing, sharing, reading, eating, meeting, and laughing some more during our mealtimes.  But one evening, someone suggested that we have our lunch the following day in silence.  In fact, he asked for a show of hands of who would be willing to be silent during the next day’s lunch.  Nearly everyone raised their hand (and a few eyebrows as well!).  Interestingly enough, as time for the silence lunch crept closer, I began hearing more and more hesitation and anxiety about being silent through the meal.  It would be difficult.  Get a group of UU ministers and religious education professionals together and you’ve got an extremely chatty group! 

     At the end of the morning workshop, just before lunch, it had been decided that a separate room would be available for those who chose not to be silent.  Everyone had to be silent as they entered the dining hall to get their lunch, but you could leave that hall and go next door where silence was not required or expected.  All in all, I would venture to say that perhaps just one third of those eating lunch chose the silent path. 

     It wasn’t easy.  It was a little uncomfortable.  I was actually hoping no one would sit by me, so I could just concentrate on my silence without the temptation to converse.  Connie and I later spoke about how we had both tried focusing on the act of eating – paying attention to each bite.  I would normally have a cup of coffee with my dessert and at this meal I had to force myself to do this – it meant staying in the room, staying silent.  Did I mention that it wasn’t easy?  I’m so glad that I chose to do it.  I carried the silence with me after lunch down into the courtyard where I sat for a while and then did some reading. 

     Silence invites reflection.  Reflection (consideration and contemplation) as opposed to reaction (response and retort).  I wonder what our wider community would look like if from time to time, maybe even on a regular basis, we chose silence – reflection – reflection instead of reaction.

     I believe that many of us find being silent awkward or unnerving.  I know that more and more of our children know silence only as a punishment or classroom demand.  Sitting in silence to relax, to reflect, to listen deeply is not only uncommon but uncomfortable.   The balance between “doing”, “going”, “playing” and stillness, rest, silence, is disproportionate at best.

     I began to learn something about silence when I did a unit of clinical pastoral education at a busy downtown Chicago hospital.  As students, we were taught to be a non-anxious presence with patients.  But as students we all wanted to know what to say, what to do.  Our supervisor advised us that what we said or did wasn’t nearly as important as how we listened; our silence & stillness.  We didn’t believe him at first.  But our experiences proved him right.  My silence was invaluable as I sat near the bed of a young man who had been shot in the face, and witnessed his mother and girlfriend holding his hands and mine as they spoke loving words of encouragement and hope to their loved one.

     It was silence that allowed me to see and feel the stories of a husband who said goodbye to his wife as she was taken off life support.  And the story of that woman’s daughter who sang her mother’s favorite lullabies, and the story of her brother who stood at the back of the room crying silently.

     We need silence in order to truly listen to the other’s story – not to formulate our responses while the other person is still speaking; not to interrupt because we know what they’re going to say next or we’re in a hurry to move on.

Come, Come Whoever You Are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.  Ours is no caravan of despair.  Come, yet again come.

     To know, to hear, the story of the wanderer, the worshiper, the lover of leaving, we must be willing to be silent.  As we sing the song as an invitation to join our caravan and say come, yet again come, we must be willing to be silent from time to time – to listen to others.

  I stood before you, in this pulpit, just about a year ago and offered another invitation.  A reading by the same name: The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. 

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.  I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.  I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love  for your dream  for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…  I want to know if you have touched the center of your sorrow

If you have been opened by life’s betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain – mine or your own

Without moving to hide it  or fade it   or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy – mine or your own

If you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning  be careful  be realistic  remember the limitations of being human.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day.

And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure – yours or mine,

And still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “yes”!

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.

I want to know it you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.  I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

     I wonder if our anxiety or discomfort with silence comes from not being in control somehow.  We don’t know what might surface in the silence – the unexpected, unplanned, unknown, the empty moments, the ‘emptiness’ of silence. 

     Emptiness is a central theme in Buddhism.  But while emptiness is similar to nothingness, what this world is about is quite the opposite:  somethingness.  We’re told to make something of ourselves; we want to be somebody.  But Buddhists see nothingness differently.  I read about a cartoon that had the Dalai Lama in it and it’s his birthday.  He’s opening a gift-wrapped box which is empty.  As he looks into the box, the Dalai Lama smiles and says:  Nothing.  Just what I’ve always wanted.

     In silence we can find the emptiness, the nothingness, that is a gift.  A gift which, as proffered by medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, allows us to stand so empty as to have merged with our source, and in that state no words are necessary.  We have returned to the great silence from which we came.

     Silence is needed in order to listen to and connect with our deepest selves -  and the still small voice deep within.

Voice Still and Small deep inside all, I hear you call, singing.

In storm and rain, sorrow and pain, still we’ll remain singing.

Calming my fears, quenching my tears, through all the years, singing.

  We all come from silence and return to silence.  There is a New Yorker cartoon that pictures a gravestone that reads:  Born 1932.  Yada yada yada.  Died 1995.

     What I’m encouraging you to do – what I’m asking all of us to do – is include some silence in the yada yada yada.  Make room for the empty moments.  Reflect more, react less.

     A New England minister shared his story when he wrote:  “These days, my own relationship with silence grows more intimate.  With Lou Gehrig’s disease I face the loss of my ability to speak.  Already my speech slows, my tongue grows unwieldy.  Before hefting another syllable across my palate, I consider more seriously whether it will improve upon silence.  Because I’m too dense to get the message any other way, and despite my years of meditation, the fates are instructing me quite literally in the art of sitting down and shutting up.  I’m being shown what is essential.  But my situation only dramatizes the choice we all face.  Whatever our personal circumstances, we can resist our fate and continue to suffer, or we can open ourselves to the fall into emptiness.”

     The sound of silence and the sounds within silence are calling each of us to embrace the initial discomfort and choose the silent lunch.

     Mother Teresa:  “See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.”  The souls of others, the souls of our selves.

May it be so.