Spirituality: Experience; Silence; Listening; Stillness
SPIRITUALITY: EXPERIENCE; SILENCE; LISTENING; STILLNESS
About the Author—Winifred Rawlins (1907-1997) wrote 14 volumes of poetry & the correspondence printed in The Inner Islands. She began writing after emigrating from England in 1947. In the US, she worked with farm workers in California as well as with the War Resisters League & Pendle Hill. After serving as the head resident at Pendle Hill, she directed 2 Quaker retirement homes, the Harned in Media, PA, & the New England Friends Home in Hingham, Massachusetts. She was a member of Providence Friends Meeting in Media.
[My Dear Susan:/ I wonder] if you are enjoying the late 40s as much as I am? [How does] youth know some of the keenest despairs because [of having] no time to gather a philosophy of reality? We're like travelers about to venture out into uncharted seas. [Let's] explore at least some of the inland bays together, through an exchange of letters. We shall have that understanding of tides and shallows that comes from direct experience.
I discovered there is a great deal of truth in the "life begins at 40" point of view. About that time I began to have a more objective awareness of myself. [I became] familiar with my habitual thinking and acting, my subterfuges, pretenses, and rationalizations used to safeguard my reputation. I believe the Powers of life are working unceasingly to bring to their destined end all the plants, animals and human beings that exist.
When I was 25, I had an experience which made reality's spiritual nature a certainty for me. [I believed my spiritual aspirations had removed self-willed ambitions from my life. All I had done was exchange one set of ambitions for another; even years of work for peace had a lot of ambition. I saw that I [must not have spiritual ambition, but only] want to be what life wants me to be, something different each day. Write soon. Love, Wini.
[Well, my dear Susan, because of your request], I realize I must try to explain my experience as a 25 year-old again, if we aren't to leave an important island unexplored. Early childhood was very happy. During adolescence there was a good deal of strain because of my mother's tendency to neurotic illness, caused in part by father's early death. Father had religious faith; mother struggled to discover a satisfying philosophy of reality. She wanted to lead a good life, & devoted her life to service. She was never certain whether she had met God or not.
My mother developed a condition [from her emotional disturbances]. My purpose in life was to interpose my young mind between her infirmity and the world's [cruelty and suffering]. The devotion to my mother and to esthetic values filled my life. I neither accepted or rejected any religious tradition. When I was 25 my mother's illness grew rapidly worse. I tried to exorcise the unreality which seemed to envelop her mind, and which was her spirit's enemy. The search for the meaning of existence would [soon] draw to an unsatisfied close.
After the end of that epoch, I gradually became aware of a strong, protective essence flowing steadily round and through me. This essence was the underlying stuff of reality, universal and unchanging. Whether my mother experienced it too I am not sure. I was sure that her physical death was comparatively unimportant, and that her search was not cut short. My new knowledge certainly did not make me a saint or otherwise change my character. The conviction about this underlying trustworthy essence has stayed with me ever since. It isn't in any sense a private consolation./ Your fellow explorer, Wini
[My dear Sue:/ We are certainly] well out from shore now. Even with our similar concerns I know that our approaches are very different. No 2 people follow identical paths in trying to experience reality and know inner peace. Your use of certain rituals, traditional prayers, and certain times for meditation is the 1st Path. Embracing all experience as it comes to consciousness and making an intentional response to it is the 2nd Path. Your path needs to be in accord with your true nature, and it needs to be followed faithfully.
This 2nd Path consists of responding with [acute] awareness to the experience stream as it flows by us. [One can refer & relate everything to the Source of All]. One can observe things outside one's self, & one's thoughts. Experience is known as a varying flux moving against a unified & unchanging Ground, true Self, Seed, Inner Light, God. The "I" stands a little to one side, aware of the unchanging Ground of being & not identifying with what is experienced, [thereby] coming to a most direct knowledge of it. I have a strong sense that there is no interruption during sleep; something is added. I go to Meeting for Worship for a group seeking. [The main Meeting has to be at pre-arranged times, but smaller ones can happen any time, anywhere./ My Love to you, Wini
[My dear: / What a wonderful letter]. [You are right to say that] the 2 paths are not exclusive of one another. What you & I are concerned to avoid is engrossment with the ego. One source of the ego's nourishment is dwelling in thought on the past & future. I often catch myself [being more concerned] with what kind of impression I am making [than the interaction itself]. The withering away of the ego image will most likely take years.
I find that I am much influenced in all my thinking by the conviction that there is an educating element in the life process itself. Sin or egoism stands in the way of this process. When our life is centered in the Divine Ground, I believe that we are steadily and progressively taught to discriminate between eternal and ephemeral. The "embracing" of an experience means the quiet, simple regarding of the experience in the light of all the wisdom and maturity of which we are capable at the time; we are aware of experience being observed. Our task is to understand why we have these experiences. Given the desire for wholeness and the willingness to face the painful loss of ego, we need not fear that we shall be led in the wrong direction.
[Dearest Sue: Perhaps we are beginning] to unravel our destiny in childhood play. Or perhaps we set the pattern of our primary response at an early age. There were 2 games which I played endlessly with my sister & one brother. There was "Poor Man & Mailman," where we would enclose a room's corner so that there was just enough room for one child to sit on the floor behind it; there were no objects in that space. The lone child was Poor Man. A "Mailman" would bring a small toy or other article & give it to the Poor Man without being seen. The object would just be held & looked at, [contemplated]; this would go on indefinitely with several objects. I think there is an important similarity between the Poor Man's experience & my experience of the present moment.
The other game is called a "Supposing." Again, it is played for one person. The director guides that person down a "winding dark road" with "high walls you can't see over." The director provides little doors when things became unbearable; only then & not before. The player would say, "The Supposing is over everything, & won't let me get finally lost." This game was just the bigger game that we play all our lives (& perhaps beyond) in embryo. One goes through the "little door," being led from one moment to the next. Sometimes I get very, very excited when I think of the long vistas of the Supposing which lie ahead./ Write very soon, my dear, Wini P.S. [I have played a selfish game of "Fishing" with my trusting little sister, with the intent of claiming a coveted toy].
[Susan my dear, Perhaps we can] bring back from our trip into childhood some sense of being at home in our universe. We prepare our own future, in cooperation with the whole cosmos. It rests with us whether we hail it as friend [& teacher], or whether we struggle against it & reject it as alien & unfair. We can learn from joy or we can learn from sorrow. A beggar & a king can come to spiritual maturity. There is a sense in which we can't change our immediate destiny. But we are freer than we dare imagine to mold the shape of our future.
We lose great opportunities if we make a habit of distracting ourselves from painful or unfamiliar moods and emotions. Humans were made for joy and woe; both are congenial to one and complementary to one another. [In life] we can go through heaven or hell in this world without straying outside our native environment; we are essentially at home [in this life]. Life can't lose her children. But we can get distressingly separated from her. Don't look around for amusement or distraction from boredom or loneliness, but look it full in the face and turn in company with it to the Source of Being; it has a message for you. Shun even the most harmless distraction if you have not discovered the message the mood is bringing you. We shrink back from receiving any new insights, anything that might disturb our comfortable equilibrium. Usually, as soon as the meaning and full flavor of the loneliness has been absorbed it will leave you; bear with it until the end./ Your friend, Wini
[Dearest Sue,/ We all know pain] [is very hard to measure, because of the large subjective element]. I have not yet known an extremity of pain on the physical level. One thing to be said about it is that pain is robbed of much of its power when it is fully meaningful to us. I have been imprisoned because of pacifism, but it was not that hard to bare, because I had thoroughly accepted it in relation to myself [and my conscientious objection to war]. People who are most unable to cope with their suffering are also people without any coherent picture of reality and so their pain is meaningless to them.
If our existence finds expression in opposites then it must follow that pleasure and pain are 2 sides of the same coin. I am concerned to discover how we can make this unwelcome guest as much at home as possible while it has to stay with us, and so transform the visit into something we can use creatively. In accepting negative experience, we reduce the boundaries of pain into the simple act of experiencing it, moment by moment, like we would a beautiful sunset, and telling ourselves "This moment will not be prolonged indefinitely."
One of the most unpleasant experiences is fear. And the fear of fear is a torture. I am a naturally [or at least long-standingly] timid person. At present it seems I will have to learn to live with certain nervous fears. I have learned to reduce my fear to [only being afraid during the actual event, without the fear of anticipation]. I observe to myself, "This is me being afraid." The more fully we can welcome this unwelcome guest, the more it is willing to not dominate the whole scene, and be almost out of sight. [By relating to pain or fear as though it is] not intrinsically different from pleasure, and then turning my attention [without judgment] to the pain/fear, I become gradually less aware of it. Although we meet this pain head on, that part of us [in close relationship] to the Divine Ground is not to be identified with it. We see both pain and pleasure flowing past us; we greet it and allow it into us, there to be transformed./ Lovingly, Wini
[My dear:/ We are likely to make port] on the other side, even if it proves to be not the one in which we expected to dock. Are specific disciplines for daily living, deliberately decided on, necessary for spiritual growth? Spiritual maturity is possible in frameworks of the strictest monastic order, or the utmost freedom from any imposed pattern. I have always wanted to cast off all shackles and things that seem to tie me down to the particular, to not have around me objects which belong to the past. We all have to compromise [in our spiritual freedom] where relations with other people are concerned.
There are spiritual exercises accepted purely for discipline's sake, and there are life patterns which develop from some conviction or principle. I am a little frightened even of the latter if they bring about rigidity or absorb too much attention. [In order to avoid unhealthy food, I have found myself] making excuses to not eat with a friend, even though it was a significant visit we both needed. Sometimes, the need to express basic human unity [with another race] is greater than my need to be an absolutely consistent vegetarian. It is the difference between being clear about [one's life path] and values, and the rigid application of those values that may actually prevent the life process from teaching us some new truth.
Another discipline is the willingness to be obedient to what the present moment is saying to us, [and not ignore] impulses which we know we are meant to follow. Their voices are so tiny, so non-coercive, that there is nothing easier than to brush them aside. To trust in these young children of the Spirit is an act of great faith. 100 times a day we settle back into our old, non-demanding habits. And life awaits, more or less patiently. Perhaps the most significant discipline is the quality or intensity of our attention to what is before or within us; it demands a kind of heroism. It is known to every artist when the labor of one's creation is upon one, and occasionally even in everyday living. The reward is exactly in proportion to the degree of non-sparing of oneself.
[Sue, my dear,/ It seems that] as soon as we get a glimpse of [a new truth] about reality, something urges us to give it verbal expression, even though we are still mere babes in our ability to incorporate it into our lives. God uses us to help one another even when we are hardly able to help ourselves. You wrote of sadness about one period of life being over. Much of that sad poignancy is the result of our retaining a childish illusion that we are somehow immortal. We don't see [the process of] our individual lives as having an outward form as beautiful as a Greek vase, with all its symmetry in their rising and falling motion. [How can we practice dying in our lives, so as to understand our own death, and achieve it as a final and wholly satisfying act? How can we sup-port the dying in their most tremendous experience of all]? If the dead are aware of death as an experience, it is certainly not the same experience as the living who look on suppose it to be.
Along with a sense of complete "otherness" there comes a sense of familiarity, as though one had known about this always, & would know it again if only a key [fact] could be recalled. [In the agony & despair that seems near death], there enters an "X factor", indescribable yet completely reliable, which doesn't deliver them but reconciles them to it. By middle-life, we should have learned how to die daily to our old inadequate selves & to the transient element in all friendships, & that almost everything appears different when we are a part of it [& it becomes part of us], than when we are still at a distance from it. The best preparation we can make for death & beyond, is to cherish a growing confidence in the life-&-death process itself./ Your fellow pilgrim, Wini
[Dearest Susan:/ I shall always be grateful] to you. Your thought about death and love being essentially interwoven with one another, both needing the destruction of the old so that the new may be given birth, is something I will cherish. The most important island of all on our route is one we have never approached closely, fearful of the breakers and rocky coast that are the many misuses of love's name. Love is the powerful spring of vitality and creativity. Art is used by artists to re-channel the vital urge from the biological channel of early life. For others unable to [re-channel] this way, there is a real danger of the spring drying up.
The most rewarding & mature way of rechanneling passion is the development of tenderness in men & women. Surely [this rechanneled, controlled passion] is the same energy which runs like a stream of fire through all things. We are terrified of tenderness, that it would draw us out of our little deaths into life; we would become involved, responsible. We would have to show tenderness to ourselves, and many of us hate ourselves. You ask, "How do you reconcile what seems an almost indulgent attitude towards yourself with the need for heroism? I think we need a compassionate, relaxed attention which we give to all of life, including ourselves.
Although we long for freedom from all that shackles, the increased sensitivity which tenderness involves has always been associated with the concept of limitation, and totally accepting it. The achievement of creativity is the final triumph of the poet's and the artist's conception over these limitations. The highest peak of life may be gained by those who by all ordinary standards are frustrated at every turn. By a final acceptance of their helplessness, their vulnerability, can channel the gathered-up life within them into an intensity of tenderness & compassion. Under such circumstances, the human spirit occasionally puts forth alpine flowers of the greatest delicacy and strength. Joy is when the dammed-up stream of passion finally accepts the narrow bed [confined and] fashioned by suffering, and rushes with incredible swiftness towards the valley. Blessings always.
I'm told there is another group of islands called the Outer Ring, which may be worth investigating some day. They are considered the gateway to relationships with the world at large. Unless a ship approaches them by way of the inner islands there is a good deal of fog to be dealt with; this makes navigation difficult ... Wini
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192. Dialogue with the Other: Martin Buber and the Quaker Experience (by Janet E. Schroeder; 1973)
About the Author—Janet Schroeder believes that "religion is all of life." The immediacy & warmth of her pamphlet is an expression of this. She & her husband have been part of Bryn Gweled Homestead, an intentional, interracial community in Bucks County. She continues to study whenever courses speak to a "Way of Life"; she took Maurice Friedman's courses on Martin Buber. A class in Interreligious Dialog sparked the present pamphlet.
I—While the the new synagogue was being built in Bucks County, the Jewish congregation shared Southhampton Friends Meetinghouse with Friends. On a particular Sunday after the synagogue had been completed, the meeting room was well filled with both Jews and Christians. The rabbi quoted the Sermon on the Mount from memory, and said how these words lived for him in his everyday experiences. I said, " I am coming to know the Living God through the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. When a Friend said to him "I want to know how to live the life of spirit," Martin responded, "You Quakers believe that God speaks to you in the silence. I believe God speaks in everything we say and everything we do. What had been said recognized and accepted our differences and still found unity possible.
II—I only know God as God has spoken to me in the experiences of the everyday. I would like to share with you some of the various methods for corporate as well as individual worship experiences. What is the relationship to the dialogue between man and man, and between God and man? I believe the understanding of the dialog has been greatly influenced by Martin Buber & that he has made an great contribution to Friends. What is my own in religious experience, as over against what some have found to be that which is in common? In the kind of worship [mentioned earlier] there is a kind of conversation that takes place between God and humans, and between human and human when God is present.
Worship seems to contain a demand for the truth about one's self, well as one's relationship with others. Williard L. Sperry calls the service for worship, "deliberate and disciplined adventure in reality." There are many ways in which the basic experience of communion with and love of, God can be [explained and acted out]. Much formal worship has followed a conventional pattern of praise, penitence, forgiveness. All have an element of similarity as they express the contrast that is felt between God as God is experienced by people, and the people themselves; the attempt is made in worship to reconcile this contrast. Humankind is always aware of the gap between what is and what ought to be, and that human striving to close that gap is a symptom of love of God.
III—Friends described their worship to World Council of Churches delegates in 1948 as follows: "Worship ... is entirely without human direction, supervision, [or pre-arrangement] ... Each seeks ... divine leading & to know at 1st hand the Living Christ's presence. The meeting is held on the basis of "Holy Obedience," [rather than Silence] ... The only way in which a Worshipper can help such a meeting is by being prepared to be responsive ... to the still small voice & doing whatever may be commanded, [whether silence or speech]." The good Lord may ask: Who is speaking, you or me? A recognition of corporate guilt & shortcomings is sometimes revealed to us through what is said. A Jewish child answered Why are we not doing more to stop it? with "We are all afraid."
Martin Buber describes genuine dialog as: "What I have to say at any one time already has in me the character of something that wishes to be uttered, and I must not keep it back ... [all of] it belongs to the common life of the word ... [Sometimes] the word arises in a substantial way between men who have been seized in their depths and opened out by the dynamic of an elemental togetherness. With the child's response, we are pointed towards recognizing and facing the fears that are often at the base of our reluctance to take action. The Jewish child brought honesty and simplicity to a Friends worship service.
IV—The "great acts of conscience" Martin Buber describes can never be reduced to a method. He writes: "The action [of conscience] commences within the relation between the guilty one & one's God & remains there-in. It is consummated in confession of sin, repentance, & penance. [The one speaking to the guilty must] represent the transcendence believed in by the guilty one ... The action fulfills itself in self-illumination, perseverance, & reconciliation ... A wholly personal, [courageous] ... conscience is possessed by every simple person who gathers one's self into one's self in order to venture the breakthrough out of the entanglement in guilt."
There are everyday events that we would like to have responded to differently. I find that the guilt is often resolved by a general knowledge of the way, which points towards: accepting one's share of responsibility; doing all possible repairs of the situation; using the mistake for growth & avoiding another; dismissing further thought on what happened & moving on. What happens when we worship?: awareness of a Power beyond ourselves; ready to receive insights with open heart & mind; plan to act. True worship is a living, everyday Reality. There are occasions, while sitting in the quiet of the meeting, when an idea, or a personal experience of my own, or of someone I know, will keep presenting itself to me. I may decide to dismiss it from my mind. Then comes a feeling of being "pushed" to share what is on my mind. When I speak without this sense of urgency, what I have had to say seemed to me to be not for real and fall lifeless. With the "urge," there is something that needs to be said, and I am here to serve as a channel. It is like being spoken through.
V—I find that Martin Buber's thinking has helped me to see ever more clearly the evidence of God's presence in life's daily experiences. There are many stories in Quaker lore that point out that when the response is made in the light of a belief that there is "that of God in each of us," the resulting actions can be most unpredictable. Stolen furniture has been returned in exchange for other usable but unwanted furniture. Martin Buber & Friends both use stories to show that great things happen in the everyday [e.g.] Tales of the Hasidim (2 volumes, by M. B.) & Friendly Caravan & Candles in the Dark. Martin Buber has a story similar to the Quaker one about stolen furniture. Buber, as an elemental story teller has spoken to me in my own stories describing God's presence in everyday situations, instances in which God makes the demand & we are called upon to respond.
VI—Method of worship could be described as human response to God through awareness, humility, enlightenment and movement toward what one is called to be. We need them to ask themselves, in moving from method to content, what do we mean by the word "God"? Buber speaks of God as "the Thou that I meet in the every-day." Quakers say: "Those who have experienced the 'Inner Light' or achieved awareness of God within, have moved from symbol to reality." Maurice Friedman tells us that, after a friend's question and some reflection, Buber decided: "If to believe in God means to be able to talk about God in the 3rd person, I do not. "But if to believe in God means to say 'Thou' to God, then I do." One of the outstanding aspects about Buber's lectures was his refusal to answer any questions about God. He felt that such questions were turning God into an object. How does God address man? Buber's answer, I believe, would be, through the dialogue. God's voice of address is heard again and again, and Buber speaks of it as a voice to which one either does or does not listen and respond. He looks upon it as "a terrible thing when one does not hear or listen."
VII—We now find ourselves in a religious crisis. It may be that faith has taken a new direction—one more centered in everyday experience & less in religious institutions. There is a need to be part of a community that lends support to us when we are able to respond with our lives bravely to what God is demanding of us. A young homemaker who trusted a hungry young stranger with her keys & the contents of her 'fridge was rewarded with a note when she got home: "You have given me new reason to live by trusting me. Now I can really try. Thanks." A meeting Friend wrote about how she was strongly led to speak & how someone was deeply moved by the her message's authentic nature, even though he could not hear what she was saying; [he confirmed the Spirit in her].
Confirmation does not have to be a corporate experience. [I was able to confirm a little East Indian granddaughter's beauty and belonging; she was confirmed that she] belongs somewhere in order to know she belongs everywhere. The sacraments, for the Quakers happen in the "events of the everyday." "[I brought an 8 year-old concentration camp survivor into my home]; Susan need a great deal of loving, as did my own little girl. [I baked some bread. Susan sniffed at the sweet aroma]. I cut off 2 end slices, giving one to Susan, the other to Carol. [Susan ate] & we danced around the kitchen; she yelled, "I love you! ... " The loaf of bread had become a staff of Life. To a child who has known starvation, a loaf of bread can become the most precious gift of love.
VIII—Jesus points the way when one looks into the depths of one's being, with all its high as well as its low possibilities, and sees the Ideal, one's Image of Human. Buber looked upon the Bible as a mixture of "divine understanding and human misunderstanding." Our need is to open ourselves to the voice of Jesus—to hear and to respond. Elton Trueblood writes: "[In] early Quakerism ... the revolutionary change ... was George Fox's recognition of the live possibility of immediate contact with Christ, who is alive. He heard within: 'There is one Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition.' He said: 'I took men to Jesus Christ and left them there.' If contemporary Quakers can adopt this strategy, our future is full of hope."
George Fox also said: "that the Inner Light was synonymous with Christ, the light enlightens every man." To many Quakers the voice of Jesus has become lost in effort to be "open." There is need that the voice be heard again. Martin Buber is pointing the way. Quakers believe there is "that of God in every man," but in actual practice [there is resistance in fully acting that out]. We cannot say "Yes" to God, unless we can say "Yes" to our [co-humans]. We need to accept one, love one, as one is, and see also from that one's side. What characterizes the I-Thou, as Buber explains it, is a readiness to meet the other, and accept one just as that one is. The accepting, Buber believes, is not "identifying" with, [becoming] the other, but "imagining the real" in the other.
Friends seeking unity entails presenting honestly & openly opposing points of views, & then trying to find a "between" which sometimes proves to be a better way than that presented by either side. Each situation has possibility of allowing God to speak in it; it is a new creation. [Buber]: "This is the ultimate purpose: to let God in. But we can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where we live a true life. If we maintain holy intercourse with the little world entrusted to us, if we help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish it self in our section of Creation, then we are establishing, in this our place, a dwelling for the Divine Presence."
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267. Encounters with Transcendence: Confessions of a Religious Philosopher (by Scott Crom; 1986)
About the Author—Scott Crom is member of Beloit (WI) MM, Professor of Philosophy & Religion in Beloit, & a long-time friend of Pendle Hill; he has been student, staff member, & board member. This pamphlet grows out of personal and intellectual struggles. It is an attempt to reconcile the experience of transcendence and [religious experience] with the quest for rigor and clarity found in philosophy, logic and mathematics.
[Introduction]—John Woolman and Socrates have been continual inspirations and mentors in my personal and professional life. Woolman said the above quote about Quakerism. A colleague noted: “Woolman says that philosophy is vain without experience; Socrates says the experience is vain without philosophy.” I shall report 3 of my own encounters with transcendence. The felt tension between the heart and the head, between Woolman and Socrates, gives both shape and urgency to what follows.
There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names. It is however pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any, where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethren in the best sense of the expression. John Woolman.
[1st Transcendent Experience]—At a summer conference of the Young Friends of North America, I had a powerful meeting for worship; a strongly living silence made itself felt. Suddenly, my hands felt odd, & I saw they were wet. I then realized that tears were streaming down my face & dripping on my hands. They were not tears of grief, or joy; I [felt] utterly washed away. I did not feel anything that I could call a sense of divine presence, nor was there any sort of “leading” to action or refraining from action. I did feel a temporary loss of self.
“Religion is the response to an encounter with what is regarded as transcendent.” One can respond with fear or joyful dance; one can love others & all creation; one can put to the torch all who don’t respond in a similar way; one can seek a logical explanation. We can respond to someone else’s encounter, or to visible evidence of encounter in a friend, minister, or chance-met stranger. I could respond by seeking, by hunting the same source as my friend. We aren’t describing some ideal religion, but religion as we find it. I learned that “To be or not to be” is not the question. I both was & wasn’t at the same time; “I” disappeared. We tend to regard self as a sort of invisible, intangible, spiritual substance or soul. Where was I during that experience when I disappeared?
[Knowledge and Reality]—To reflect deeply on this question of self hood will raise some fundamental issues on knowledge and reality. We are, paradoxically, more free and powerful and yet also much more enslaved than we ordinarily realize; the worst kind of slavery is due to ignorance. If we do not know that there is a choice we sacrifice part of our freedom. Knowledge has both content and form, precepts and concepts. [Precepts do not constitute experience without form or organization if it is to count as experience].
Our experience is a joint product of what is “out there” and what is “in here.” John Smith says that we do not merely reflect what is encountered, but we also refract it in accordance with our interests and our conceptual structure. We assume that our human senses put us in touch with what is really “out there,” when they actually hide from us far more than they reveal. Perhaps a thing like an orange has only one quality, which is differently perceived by eyes, ears, nose and tongue. Experience is a joint product, and we are already active participants.
The conceptual or categorial elements of knowledge & reality are the most fundamental & pervasive structural aspects of knowledge & reality, such as space, time, cause, object, event, or self. The deep-seated categorial distinctions among object, activity, & quality are represented in language by nouns, verbs & adjectives. [English does contain flaws, such as “tornado,” where the word is a noun, but “tornado” is an event or activity & not a thing]. By looking at language families other than our own we can see the possibilities of different categorical structures. Some languages do not have the noun-verb-adjective structure of Indo-European languages.
The structure of interrelated categories can be compared to the syntax of a language, and to the rules of a game, which fit together to make possible an interesting and challenging game. But our old “parts of speech” categories break down on the frontiers of high-energy modern physics. And since categories are the structure or the internal skeleton of our reality, they determine the meaning of such terms as true, right, or real. Let us try to see where a structuring of reality which works fairly well as a tool for explanation fails to do justice to the task of healing and nurturing [that is religion’s function]. What alternative [to the scientific] way is there to approach our issues of selfhood, reality, and transcendence?
[Selfhood as Event]—[“Selfhood,” like “tornado,” is] an event rather than an entity. Taking selfhood to be an event rather than a “thing” enables us to do much more justice to what we actually experience in ourselves and observe in others, and does not let our speech run beyond our experience. What is the most distinctive feature of an energy whirlwind which makes it a self or a person rather than a tree or a stone? I prefer to speak of attention. How difficult it is to attend fully. Undivided attention means an undivided self; that’s where the self goes when it’s no longer “there.” The act of attending is a sub-process, or a small but effective eddy in that whirlwind of psychic energy. Alan Watts somewhere speaks of the individual self as a nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself. Seeing selves as process leaves room for convenient discrimination of different centers, but also facilitates relation, connection, and ultimate union. Selves seen as immaterial spiritual substances are divided, are ultimately different from each other, but self as process has no boundaries.
[2nd & 3rd Transcendent experience]—The 2nd transcendent experience was at Pendle Hill years later. A bushy-bearded friend & I were faithful attenders at the daily meeting for worship. One Saturday morning during a conference weekend I was again overwhelm or “zapped,” this time with what I can only describe as an over-whelming feeling of love, for all of Pendle Hill staff, for conference people I had never seen before, even for food particles in my friends beard, something one would ordinarily regard as an annoyance. As in the first experience, there was no “presence,” no “Thou,” no “person” standing in relation to me. I felt loving in the divine sense of the word. I felt love itself, & in some way, I felt loved; I encountered & temporarily embodied that love.
For years I struggled with the philosophical issue God. I was in the uncomfortable position [of not being able to] bridge the gap between scientific ways of thinking and the language of Scripture, early or even 18th century Friends. A book I read later said that, since God is Love, an experience of love may well be an experience of God. Yes, God is love, but not all love is God. [So I was back to regarding] my experience as religious, as an encounter with transcendence, but I could not feel easy about calling it an encounter with God.
3rd experience also took place at Pendle Hill, 5 or 6 years later. [I had a son studying overseas], coping with situations requiring a maturity beyond his years. During morning meeting for worship, I had a vivid visual image, [which is unusual because] my mental content tends to be strings of words, phrases or sentences. [While I “held my son in the Light,” I “saw” 2 cupped hands, in which the figure of my son stood. The light, at first a radiance became focused in a powerful beam. Under that beam, my son’s image began to melt. Soon nothing was left except a puddle of slag. In a moment that puddle began to stir, and gradually the figure rose again. It was smaller, more compact, yet clearly stronger, as if the dross had been burned away. [As compared to the first 2 experiences, this third case there seemed to be a highly specific content; there was again no sense of presence, no I-Thou reciprocity. The final moment of the experience contained a clear sense of reassurance. I was personally shown what it means to say that God does not give us what we want, but what we need.
[God-Colored Lens/Transcendence]—Terms often used for God, such as Creator, Redeemer, Judge, or Father, are pointers, or the least misleading terms which we have been able to produce. Of all the terms used to refer to the ultimate, I am most comfortable with “Light,” which can serve as three parts of speech, & does not confine us to any specific category of object, event, or quality. Those who live in a world with God are refracting their encounter through a God-colored lens. God is that framework which makes their experience intelligible.
But at this point arises the grave danger of moving insensibly from a healing function to an explanatory function. To use language therapeutically is very different from using it either discursively or to explain, but the similarity of the surface forms of expression makes the trap very subtle. I try to remain conscious of the purpose of my speech; if it is explanatory I use a structure which does not include God.
Do I find “transcendence” a useful category? Do I view the world through a transcendence-colored lens? Transcendence is “real,” is an ingredient of my world, is a functioning part of the framework of my experience; transcendence is the source of meaning, in both senses of that word: importance; intelligibility. In encounters with transcendence, we both see reality and are real, because we are in tune. The mystery is still there, but in embracing it, we become it, and the mystery is no longer a problem.
Transcendence is that which transcends, which goes beyond, or surpasses; it is an aspect of the intersection of “out there” and “in here” which is our experienced reality. It goes beyond the ordinary or routine, not in any spatial direction, but in quality. What meaning can we attach to “an experience of the transcendence,” which is not the same as “a transcendent experience” [i.e. one which exceeds previous attempts]? One can discuss religious transcendence only so far. In the end, it must remain an undefined term.
[Paradox of Transcendence]—“Psychic distance” is conscious awareness that one is a spectator, not an actual participant. The optimal psychic distance is actually minimal distance, short of its total disappearance. The optimal transcendence is the minimal transcendence. Awareness of alienation produces a desire for reconciliation, for going beyond the self. My encounters show an order of increasing specificity & awareness of self.
[In many ways the 1st experience was the “best.”] It was best because it was the most unalienated, & reconciled. That “purest” experience would approach what I could call a “lens-less” experience. It is such moment-less moments, such content-less experiences which give meaning to life. I don’t believe one can deliberately or intentionally produce such moments. Louis Nordstrom says: “True transcendence is radical immanence,” & “Transcendence is devoid of cognitive content, & … when this is perceived, transcendence has been transcended.”
If I am to function in the world, to respond to the needs of others, it is necessary for me to wear “world-colored” lenses. It is both possible and necessary sometimes simply to be. And those occasions when we most are are precisely those in which we are not. When we most clearly encounter that transcendence which is radically immanent, we are most at home, doing absolutely nothing special.
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430. The Door in (by Renee Crauder; 2014)
About the Author—Renee Crauder and her husband Bob lived and worked in Burma, Lebanon, Syria, Bangladesh, and other 3rd World countries for 14 years. Renne has a ministry of offering retreats and workshops on prayer, discernment, spirituality, and faithfulness. She also offers 1-on-1 spiritual direction.
Preface—I wrote this essay to share with you my life-changing experiences of God between the late 1970's and the mid 1990's. In my search for life and truth, I received much spiritual nourishment from retreats at Jesuit centers, based on the writings of Ignatius of Loyola. The spiritual directors there accepted me as a Quaker. I never thought of myself as other than a Friend. Jesuit spirituality, like Quaker spirituality, goes from head to heart. The Jesuit maxim of "contemplation into action" is close to the Quaker thought of "faith and practice." It was the convergence of my seeking, the desire and the time to engage in the search, and persons to guide me. My hope is that sharing my experience of moving into the Light, into the Spirit of God, may help others to listen carefully and go deeper into this mystery. There is only now to do so.
Beginning—In 1978 4 Friends start a meeting for worship in our living room in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Perhaps God led me to Sr. Joann, an American nun & a girl-school principal. We met for an hour each Thursday afternoon for 3 years. She says, " We see God in people," [i.e.] in me. Someone/thing loves me unconditionally; that is amazing & life-changing. I am a new person who realizes that my worship & my life have to flow seamlessly into each other. Thomas Kelly writes: "The stabilizing of our lives, so that we can live in God & in time, in fruitful interplay, is the task of a maturing religious life." How do I begin to know myself? There are layers of self-justification, pride, and dishonesty to peel back to see myself as God must see me. I rediscover the Bible and its wisdom. Am I even on the right road? How does one know? As prayer deepens, we have to trust that we're being led the right way. Often I have a deeper awareness of God at odd moments of day, than during prayer.
1st Retreat—[Joann invited me on a day-long retreat]. I have butterflies: can I really fast for a day? I am deeply moved when I am prayed for during morning worship. I feel God's love & become still. I read Bible verse & Joann instructed me not to take the cultural parts of the Bible too seriously. The last few days I have felt converted. No blindingly clarifying experience of God, but, yes, a conversion. Until now, God gave me the courage to go on & my pride sustained me. Now, I need & desire for God to lead me on. I can't go back to who I was & I am not yet who I am to be. Pulled both ways, I sometimes feel lost. I don't yet recognize this new life's rules.
Months later, I'm on an unstressful, unpeaked, boring plateau. Prayer is ragged, flat. [I get some sense that I won't drown in dryness]. One morning I pray, "God, you can do with me what you like—I'll wait & hope & suffer & submit & obey," then God returns. I read with dawning understanding Evelyn Underhill's words: "True mysticism is active & practical, not passive & theoretical." Months later, I say yes to God. I go deep into myself, then pass through an opening like a Chinese moon gate in my innermost self. I am given back all of my self, free, unencumbered, joyous. In a way I don't understand, my prayer life & active life are fusing. This integration makes me less self-centered. The intensity of my love of God surprises me. I find I love Bob more tenderly.
From my trekking adventures in the Himalaya, it comes to me that Jesus is my guide, my sherpa. He stretches my possibilities, urges me past previous limits, the known landscape, past my reluctance. I realize once again that only as I own all of who I am will I be able to give myself to God. We left Dhaka after 6 years to return to the US. The Sisters left me with "We loved having you pray in our house." I see the way I must grow now—from peace, joy, and love, to patience, kindness, and goodness, to trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
1st 8-day Silent Retreat—In November 1983, I make my 1st 8-day retreat at a Jesuit Retreat Center. Each day Sr. Celeste listens to the content of my prayer and gives me Bible verses to be with. My prayer become deeper. I feel one with creation. I go outdoors. A feeling of God-with-me grows stronger, and then what happens I have no words for. I feel filled with Light, the Light expands in me. I cry, "I am not worthy, I don't deserve this," and Light and Fire touch me and cleanse me and heal me. "I am Yours to do with as You like." Ashes fall deep inside me, ashes of peace, of the dying of inordinate desires. "I want to die now, to be like this forever." Nothing specific was asked of me, "Obedience." During this retreat I have emptied myself enough so that God can enter. My desire is to lead other Friends into their own fullness with God.
At Radnor Meeting, I speak about my understanding of God's love in my life; this is the same for us as individuals & as a people. Douglas & Dorothy Steere [affirm my vocal ministry & my newly chosen ministry. Are others called to action & I to contemplate & help others to God? I participate in a spiritual directing course. Slowly, seekers come to tell me their stories, & I begin an ongoing ministry of one-on-one spiritual guidance. I continue to make annual 8-day retreats [with the Jesuits] at Wernersville & take workshops there & at Pendle Hill, balancing Quaker with Ignatian input. I work on Ignatian techniques that can be used by Friends to deepen their understanding of God. I still chafe because I think I ought to be more active in the world. Does the expectation to be more active in the world arise from deep inside or is it a form of self-imposed peer pressure from news of active Friends? This is a measuring of myself against others, not listening to God's voice in me.
There are expectations of how I am to be a "spiritual person." Do I have to meet others' expectations of a "spiritual person" to keep faith with you, God? The recognition of the rightness of Ignatian prayers, exercises, and approaches for me is disturbing. God says I am to continue to speak God's name and God's faithfulness and love to Friends now. [I agree with] Douglas Steere about how important ecumenism is. I return from a work- shop or retreat at a Catholic house a stronger Quaker. My life with God has a timelessness to it; time doesn't exist. "Living in eternity" might be the best term.
I suddenly realize I am no longer on the mountain journey. The sailboat journey has begun, in a small, sturdy sailboat, with steady breezes, & unexpected gusts. [I am in a similar boat in a dream]. I am doing very little, almost nothing. It is the water & God who are active; I'm passive. I want to live George Fox's message: "Be patterns, be examples in all countries ... wherever you come; that your carriage & life may preach among all sorts of people, & to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one."
We want to transform our meetings & the Society; what we need to do 1st is to listen to what God is asking us to do. If it weren't for you, God, I might think I was losing touch with reality, but I know that I feel more tenderly toward mundane reality & try to be your presence to all. Words are becoming less & less useful in my life in you. Worship & Ministry Committee accepted my proposal to find retreat places within 2 hours of everyone in Philadelphia YM (PYM). I spend 2 years making short retreats & writing a pamphlet. After each 8-day retreat, I yearn to offer other Friends these experiences that have enhanced my life. I am also drawn to Ignatius' "long," 30-day retreat. There is one at Loyola House in Guelph, Canada, that begins right after Bob leaves for Kenya.
The Long Retreat: January 1988, Loyola House Guelph—How do you pray? I struggle to answer Virginia, my spiritual director, realizing how inadequate words are in describing the soul's inner movements. In mid-16th Spain, Ignatius had deep religious openings. He developed spiritual practices to help others into the fullness of life in God, described in his book, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. This retreat experience lasts about 4 weeks, with 5 hour-long prayer periods each day using the biblical record of Jesus' life on earth.
Ignatius found a way to pray that he called "contemplation." The retreatant reads & rereads a Bible passage from Jesus' life. One fully develops the passage in one's imagination: place, people, conversation, food. After additional readings, & asking for the gift one desires, one inserts oneself into the story, as any character or one's self. After each prayer period is a "review of prayer," when one writes what the prayer has meant & what truths about one's self, God & the world it has opened. [To me,] Ignatius' way of being with Bible stories isn't so different from George Fox's "but what canst thou say?" [I lived in] the surroundings where Jesus walked in the 1950s. Some of the scripture passages are especially meaningful to me.
The 1st prayer of the day is to be just after midnight; sometimes we fall asleep. Yet often this is a powerful time to be with God. The other 4 prayer times are spread over the day. The silence becomes immense and deep. Except for the short daily meeting with the director and wishing each other the Peace at liturgy, there is no need and increasingly little desire to speak. Over the weeks I grow more understanding of Jesus' life and ministry and how that affects my own life. I realized it's one thing to look for that of God in everyone, another but related thing to understand that evil exists, in me and in everyone.
Just as I leave the Center, Bob calls from Nairobi. "I accepted for you to give a 3-day workshop of Quaker-ism to pastors of Eglon YM in Kenya, & an inspirational talk to the teenage girls of the Lugulu Friends School." I speak to 120 pastors about early Friends & faithfulness. I find God throughout the vastness of Africa. I stop in England to visit one spiritual friend in particular, the Anglican Sr. Heather, whose poetry moved me to write her. At PYM a respected older Friend said, "I've sat at your feet ... something must have already rubbed off." How do You, God, want me to think about someone sitting at my feet? It must have been at Your feet at which she sat.
The 1990 Summer Practicum at Guelph—The Practicum is 7 "staff associates"—4 Jesuits, 1 parish priest, 1 Catholic lay women, and 1 Quaker. We studied Ignatius' autobiography. I am struck by the similarities between Ignatius and George Fox. Luis Gonzales de Camara wrote that: "[Ignatius'] understanding began to open ... he saw and understood many things ... This took place with so great an illumination that these things appeared to be something altogether new. I dream I am on a major league baseball team. I feel accepted. I wake up feeling competent and that I belong. I like being part of a team; I like to empower people, not to lead them. We each direct several 8-day retreats, write papers, pray.
I say in answer to my son, "I love what I'm doing. I want to do that for and with Friends and live in Wayne with Dad." I lead a retreat and give the keynote address at Southeastern YM. Friends ask when the speech will be published. The Episcopal Diocese of Philadelphia has me listed as a spiritual director. I continue my service from PA, to AK, to IN, to FL. The 1st weekend retreat I direct shows that Friends can pray productively with the Ignatian way of prayer. I ask Radnor Friends for a clearness committee, as I need to not "outrun the Guide." I visit Bhutan and explore spirituality with a lama, who says that in his deepest meditations, he finds "Love."
` I am diagnosed with bladder cancer. [With family support, the laying of healing hands on, prayer, & surgery, I pass] through the crisis cleanly & painlessly. I give my 1st 8-day retreat for Friends, many of them spiritual directors themselves, in Wernersville. God is re-patterning me, & I am living into it joyfully & with abandon. Over the last 20 years, my prayer has changed. More and more, prayer for me has become looking for and answering that of God in everyone I meet. Prayer is knowledge that God is and deeply cares for me and all creation.
God is Mystery. I will never solve that Mystery, nor am I supposed to. When I deliberately place myself into God's presence, chronological time as I understand it disappears. I know that everything is in God's love and care. John Pitman mentions that in individuation, the ego is being superseded by the self; ego is fighting for its life and needs to lose so we may be whole. I reflect that while God may have stripped and pruned me, I don't miss whatever was pruned—I hardly remember what it was.
The Door In—In the mid-1990's, I experience myself sitting for many weeks before a wall with a door's outline cut into it; I am waiting. Later, the door has a knob & hinges; it opens a little, then wide open to darkness, which gradually becomes a thick snow cloud. I hear, "you'll enter when the time is right." Heather writes that when I go through, I will find more faith, joy, peace, & love in God. I go through & feel totally fulfilled. I feel unworthy, sinful, and small. A voice suggest that this sentiment may well be a way not to accept these gifts. God's concentrated love is so strong that it feels like pain and yet wonderful love at the same time.
My boundaries are blurring, and I am disappearing more and more into the clouds. Part of me is sitting cross-legged on the bed, writing these lines. Where is the part of me that was in the cloud? God says: "Sleep then, my love." Bernadette Robert's The Experience of No-Self tells of "The relative difference between life with the old self, and life with a new self that cannot be moved from its center in God. I am anchored in God. Through the open entrance door is black now. Suggestions and readings convince me it is not my self that is lost; much of my ego has disappeared. "You have to get rid of all images to be with me."
I go through the door again. The black center is now surrounded by blue and white clouds. I am a black line, almost invisible. It feels like utter rightness, a willingness to let of my own agenda, a passionate wanting of what God wants. I go through the door later and am there and not there but do not have the feeling of being as safe in God's heart as earlier. The next day the frame and the door are broken, and I am not to enter.
I have been reaching out to people in what amounts to tiny community cells. I feel inordinately, outrageously loved, yet I can't grasp where I am—not intellectually, affectively, nor any other way. When I 1st walked through the door, I thought I was losing my self. I now realize I was asked to give up human depictions of God. It is difficult to love a God I can't—am not permitted to—imagine. It is a lonely journey that I have to make alone but can't make alone. God is a force holding everything together in loving care; I have to align myself with that force. Through my work & beyond it, I feel intimately, indivisibly, connected with all that is created.
[Queries]—What implications does having only "now" have for the spiritual life and for life in general? If you have strived to know yourself in a "totally honest and "excruciatingly painful" way, what has been your experience? How has the Bible been helpful in your own spiritual life? Where is your support in spiritual growth? What did you do with spiritual "dryness?" How do you see Jesus? Have you had experiences where God is "much more real than the physical reality of anything else"? How has your spirituality affected your relationships with people? How do you pray? Would you choose to totally "dissolve yourself" in God or pass "through the narrow door"? Why or Why not?
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318. Silence: Our Eye on Eternity (by Daniel A. Seeger; 1994)
About the Author—Daniel A. Seeger is currently Director of Pendle Hill & has a long-standing interest in fostering communication among the Religious Society of Friends' branches & traditions. He has supported pastoral ministry in Jamaica (1984), & participated in the International Conference on Friends & Evangelism (1988). This pamphlet grows out of experiences in discussing & experimenting with silence in ecumenical contexts.
[Introduction/ Limitations of Language and Logical Reasoning]—A peaceful silence will characterize our expectant listening for [Divine Wisdom], most often to be found in worship. The present reflection considers the practice of inner silence in everyday life, which can provide a window to the Divine & be supportive of corporate worship. When Jesus said we could not live by bread alone, he was speaking of a great question carried within us and a hunger for the answer. [When] it arrives, there comes upon us a great experience of absolute Spirit and a leading to transform our lives, through new ways of being and acting.
We experience an event, internal state, or impulse, then we put it into words. All language deals with things "posthumously." Language is a great gift & a miracle. We can scarcely imagine being human without it; we must also recognize its limitations—its posthumous character, & its tendency to reduce all things & experience to a generalization. [As such, it does not deal well] with our incomparable, [unique] experiences of the Divine.
The landscape of humankind's spiritual world is one of intellectually unresolvable dichotomies, in particular human nature's simultaneous fallenness & exaltedness. The logical mind is offended by these dichotomies & seeks to come down on one side. People of great sanctity somehow transcend these dichotomies without abandoning the truth on either side. Humankind's [role in creation] is a precarious balancing act that can be carried out successfully only with wisdom & love, not with dogmatic assertions. Jesus [was neither] a philosopher or an analyst. Several times he simply said, "I am the Truth." [Pilate responded with a Socratic] "What is Truth?"
[External & Internal Silence]—Quaker meditative silence does not include "watching" private mental movies, while merely maintaining an external hush in the physical realm. Circling thoughts, inner conversations, & imaginings are laid aside. Caroline Stephens writes: "The silence we value is ... a deep quietness of heart & mind, a laying aside of preoccupation with passing things, even the workings of our own minds ..." Through inner silence we become poor in spirit, & becoming poor in spirit brings us closer to the "Kingdom" of Heaven.
Even theological thoughts should be laid aside while practicing silence, because there is a difference between thinking about theological concepts & actually experiencing Divine presence. Our thoughts about God are at best misleading, & at worst a form of idolatry, a worship of our own notions. Simone Weil writes: "I know that God exists because I feel the love in my heart that can have no other source; yet I also know that anything which my mind conceives of as God couldn't possibly exist." Inner silence is known by the quality of "presence," & by our mind being in the present moment & place, [& no other time or place]. One needs to avoid judging their own success or lack of it, & to give attention to the senses without analysis, for the senses operate only in the present.
[Simple Manual Tasks & Inner Silence]—Manual tasks are actually opportunities to strengthen our capacity for inner silence, by [intently] resting awareness on the interaction of cleaning tool with surface cleaned. This slowly weakens the hold upon us of hectic imaginings & inner conversations. [In the crafts realm], calligraphy, pottery, woodworking, weaving, & flower arranging are typical inner-silence inducing activities.
Gandhi began a weaving program during the Indian independence movement. Besides being an attempt at economic independence from the British textile industry, it was also meant to provide a devotional practice for members of a movement based on nonviolence. The present-centeredness, inner silence, which the practice of weaving strengthened was essential to non-violence, as was being attentive to the truth. Violence meant doing something ugly in the here and now in the illusory hope of producing a good result in the future.
In calligraphy, the letter's evenness & uniformity & [regulating] the ink's flow produced by nib & parchment requires full attention. In producing pottery, inner silence & obedience is required. The obedience is to the users' needs to the [properties] of the materials at hand. Out of inner silence even beginners can produce objects the lines of which are pleasing to the eye & the forms of which are admirably suited to comfortable & efficient service. Crafts provide an excellent way of experiencing the "letting go" which is characteristic of inner silence. Thich Nhat Hanh observes: "If while washing the dishes we think only of the tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way ... we aren't alive during the time we are washing the dishes ... & while drinking the tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. We are sucked away to the future & are incapable of living 1 minute of life." Blaise Pascal writes: "We wander about in times that don't belong to us, & don't think of the only one that does. We never actually live but only hope to live."
[Inner Silence: Healing & Distractions]—Silence is important to healing. [If one is focused on ones sad inner] tale of disappointment, anger & betrayal, all the healing glories of nature will be eclipsed by things one carries around in ones mind & heart; no inner silence deprives one of healing. [Or young people might carry distraction in the form of cassette tapes in their back pockets, & even though surrounded by bird sanctuary, hiking trails, country lanes, & a magnificent view of a farm valley, spend their free time within 20 feet of a hi-fi], much as they might have done back in the Brooklyn church basement where they had worked all summer.
Most of us carry our own sounds around with us in our heads and hearts. These sounds may never be precisely articulated in our thoughts, but they nevertheless color our world, and structure the quality of our experience. We are bombarded with the idea that our nature is innately violent, that our chief preoccupation is with our sexuality, and that our main purpose in life is acquiring more nifty possessions. It's only through the practice of inner silence that we can begin to disentangle ourselves from our culture and its illusions.
People practicing inner silence become aware of literal & emotional sounds they carry about within themselves, & also become aware of the language of physical gestures. [A mindful person can as easily arrange objects on a table] in a way that expresses Creation's poise, balance, harmony, peace, [as one can] toss them down helter-skelter. Inner silence makes us aware that our bodies aren't sealed off from each other, & that what goes on in one affects the other.
[Inner Silence and Awareness of Body and Attitudes]—In practicing inner silence in daily life, I noticed how I treated my body. I would barrel down steps, fling myself through the turnstile, plop myself on a bench, tear open my book & devour some sublime philosophy. I eventually realized that to the extent I practiced a presence where my swiftness was poised & balanced, I avoided institutionalizing within a sense that life treated me like a dishrag. Taking a vacation from an office problem can enable us to return with a new approach. How do we take a vacation, get a rest from the sounds we carry around in our heads, & thus gain refreshment & new perspective? If the mind is troubled, sleep will usually not suffice, because an active & troubled sleeping mind will have us waking up feeling more tired than ever. Wakeful inner silence provides refreshment to the consciousness; William Penn knew this over 3½ centuries ago.
[When faced with the unfamiliar in a normally automatic process, we are] often forced to lay down preoccupations & enter into the present & inner silence attentively, [thus becoming aware of self-absorbed attitudes], & getting a little bit of enlarged vision, which is the only true source of life's true joy, i.e. spiritual joy. With inner silence, we begin to take our limited egos off center stage as the factor defining how we experience creation's glories. [Imagine] how much more advanced & valuable it is as a spiritual exercise if this practice of presence is a devotional effort [of opening one's self to inner silence], rather than an accidental result of circumstances.
[Inner Silence: Truth & Authentic Service]—2 groups were given a different background story to a film & asked to analyze the subject's behavior. Very little true observation took place, as each group superimposed their minds' agitation based on the different background stories. Inner silence is the key to accurate perception of reality. Without mindfulness, our ability to respond precisely & compassionately in everyday affairs is crippled.
Inner silence can be achieved in the midst of noise. It supports authentic service & enables us to transcend words' & formal logic's limitations without betraying intellect. The calming of our hearts' & minds' agitations of all that is stubborn & grasping, is essentially an expression of loving Truth. It helps establish an inner peace & harmony which will allow us authentically to contribute to outer peace & harmony. Even though we can't fully articulate the Truth, we can enact it in an exemplary life. We can perceive it in the one great, exemplary Life [& Death] presented to us in the New Testament. We, too must fashion a way to be a visible Truth in our lives.
[Inner Silence and Eternal Wisdom]—(Wisdom speaks:) In the beginning,/ he created me; for eternity I shall remain .../ Whoever acts as I dictate will never sin./ See, my conduit has grown into a river,/ & my river has grown into a sea .../ Now I shall make discipline shine out,/ I shall send its light far & wide./ I shall pour out teaching like prophecy,/ as a legacy to all future generations./ Observe that I haven't toiled for myself alone,/ But for all who are seeking wisdom. ECCLESIASTICUS 24: 14, 22, 32-43 (Jerusalem Bible)
There is a wisdom which is from the Lord, created from eternity in the beginning, and remaining until eternity at the end. We cannot contain what contains us nor comprehend what comprehends us. Those who have a grasp of this are wary of debates about spiritual matters; Truth is to be lived, not just talked about. I once stood at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. As one gazes up from the bottom, past all the rock strata from different ages and eons, up [thousands of feet] to the very rim, one realizes that the time humans have walked upon this earth is represented only by the top 2 or 3 inches of all these layers, and one is awestruck at the long creative process which has raised us up to where we are. A true simplicity and stillness of heart allows us to know in any given moment if we are acting so as to be at one with this great Creative Principle, or if we are not.
The Word that was at the beginning, the Mother of all things, a Word of grace and truth, abides within each of us, [all who have ever been, from all times and all places]. This primordial saving Word was uttered out of silence, and to silence we must return if we hope to hear it again. [Only] then God speaks to us, expressing herself fully. The Truth awaits [in silence] eyes unclouded by longing.
Our hearts are touched by something deeper than our reasonings, more comprehensive than all contradictions, something that supports all problems without need of human-devised solutions. When we drop our questions, paradoxically we find the answers, almost as if the answers had been waiting for us to discover them but had been drowned out by our questions; we find ourselves seized with meaning. We come alive to humankind's & our possibilities; we come alive & alert as well to needs & possibilities of others. We discover a way of life worthy of profound enthusiasm. So to live is to let our lives pour out teaching like prophecy & to prepare a place worthy of all people—so to live is to prepare a place where future generations can make their homes.
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303. WORDS, WORDLESSNESS AND THE WORD: Silence Reconsidered from a Literary Point (by Peter Bien; 1992)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Peter Bien is Professor of English & Comparative Literature & co-ordinator of Dartmouth College's Peace Studies. He teaches mainly modern British prose, & does research mainly in modern Greek literature. This essay combines literary & Quakerly involvements. It grows out of Dartmouth courses, sympathy for Quaker silence's mystical power, love of words, and his incorrigible weakness for all things Greek.
Blessed be the man/who in this confusion,/ this verbal muteness,/utters a truthful word or 2./Yet even more blessed be the man/ who, wrestling his meaning from the bosom of silence, acknowledges the perfection of Unutterableness. S. S. Harkianakis
“I love to feel where words come from” Chief Papunehang of the Delaware to John Woolman.
Nothing could be more unlike the natural will and wisdom of human beings than this silent waiting … People thus gathered together are inwardly taught to dwell with their minds on the Lord and to wait for his appearance in their hearts … Thus the forwardness of the spirit of man is prevented from mixing itself with the worship of God. The form of this worship is completely naked and devoid of all outward and worldly splendor.
“All of the minds’ own labors [and the imagination’s] things that are essentially good as well as things that are evil must be brought to a halt.” R. Barclay
[Silence: Then and Now]—Robert Barclay’s point in the quote at the beginning of this section is that silence subtracts from worship the intervention of the human will and all other forms of idolatry. This is an understanding that should be as valid for Quakers today as it was in the 17th century. While honoring the older understandings of silence, I nevertheless want to reconsider silence from a 20th century point of view. While early Friends wanted to remove language as a factor in human knowledge of the divine, I am suggesting that the divine may best be understood not by removing language but rather by investigating its nature. [In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is an enigmatic English woman named Mrs. Moore]. She goes to a group of caves, which have a peculiar echo. “Whatever is said,” the narrator tells us, “the same monotonous noise replies … ‘Boum [‘bou-oum, or ‘ou-boum] is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it...The echo began to undermine her hold on life … And suddenly at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words only amounted to “boum.” Then she was terrified.”
What has terrified Mrs. Moore is that she has discovered a realm beyond language, which, because it refuses to make distinctions, undermines her previous religiosity, her Christian value system. Forster’s “boum” is the Hindu mystic syllable Om, which as the Chandogya Upanishad says, holds together all speech. Poor Mrs. Moore can only feel undermined by Om, which seems to her to rob the world of value.
[Samuel Beckett & Bible]—In Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy, the title character’s major desire is to halt natural man’s roving imagination. Murphy does not want to do, he wants simply to be. He seeks to reach Barclay’s goals by tying himself to a rocking chair & rocking himself out of all the self-workings & motions of his mind. Beckett’s point is that whereas our noblest effort is to escape contingency, we are condemned to remain the playthings of contingency, the only escape being death. Murphy is in his own way waiting on the Lord.
We find the same distinction between speech & silence in the Hebrew & Christian Testaments' tradition. In Genesis 1:1-6; 8-10, God reached out from a distinctionless, timeless, shapeless, placeless state of Being in order to do something, making distinctions of time, shape, & place, & then naming [those times, shapes & places]. [Once made, man] imitated the divine process of naming by which distinctions are ratified. [An infant gradually makes distinctions & separations, gives itself a name, thus separating itself from its parents & siblings, splitting itself in 2, becoming “I” & “me”]. God does not have a name because God is distinction-less & bodiless.
[When asked for God’s name, God answered, “I AM WHO I AM (I will be what I will be). Even the Y-H-W-H is a verb (“to be”) rather than a noun. Hence the distinction between naming & namelessness, & more generally between speech & silence, may be found in the Hebrew Testament. John’s Gospel begins with “In the beginning was the [Logos] Word, & the Word was with God, & the Word was God. It announces the Trinitarian paradox of distinction-within-unity & Jesus’ divinity and humanity. What precisely did John mean by the term logos? Is the Word to be connected chiefly with the Doing aspect of God head or with the Being aspect?
“Whoever should hear this Word in the Father—where it is completely still—must be quite still and cut off from all images and forms.” Meister Eckhart
[Ancient Usage of Logos]—[One definition is]: Logos, the word or outward form by which the inward thought is expressed, and the inward thought itself; logos includes both the Latin ratio and oratio. The internalization may have begun as far back as 500 B.C. with Heraclitus, who “resorted to logos as the eternal principle of order.” The figure closest to John in the evolution of logos was Philo Judæs (40 A.D.), for whom logos was the divine prototype of which the created universe is but a copy. The parallels between John and Philo are striking. Logos and Sophia are commonly paired as synonyms.
The issues raised here were discussed in post-Biblical theology long before Fox and others picked them up in the 17th century. Tertullian said around 200 A.D., “For before all things God was alone—being in God’s self and for God’s self universe, and space, and all things … Even then God had God’s own Reason with God. God had not Word from the beginning, but God had Reason even before the beginning.” The distinction between words and the Word and between words and silence can be attested in discussions shortly after the New Testament was written. The implication is that Word should be identified with silence. If we link the Word with Being rather than Doing, it follows that the Word becomes paradoxically silent. Meister Eckhart wrote: “whoever should hear this Word in the Father—where it is completely still—must be quite still and cut off from all images and forms.” Silence is a mark of the Deus absconditus [the hidden God].
[George Fox & Word]—George Fox wrote: “They asked me whether the Scripture was God's word. I said, ‘God was the Word, Scriptures were writings; & the Word was before writings were; Word did fulfill them.” For Fox, even memorable words of poor little talkative Christianity from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished” are inauthentic compared with the unified, enduring unfragmented Reason or Light or Life or Word that John says “was God.” In abandoning inauthenticity of language, silent worshipers in a Friends’ meeting ritualistically participate in Godhead. Naming divides; silence unifies. In meeting’s silence, we flee Doing & enter Being. Words become a barrier between us & Godhead, which can best be expressed in human terms, Nietzsche claims, by dance & music as opposed to speech; neither dance nor music distinguishes or separates, as speech does.
Henri Bergson takes Nietzsehe’s metaphysical critique of language and applies it to human psychology. He said that the ever-changing inner life is “inexpressible, because language can't get hold of it without arresting its mobility.” “There is no common measure between mind & language.” [While the Quakers tried to eliminate language from worship, in the end] we sometimes feel relieved despite ourselves when the dynamic processes of the silence that are so deliciously melting into one another to form an organic whole are interrupted by spoken ministry. Even while waiting on the Lord we remain the fragmented playthings of contingency, and as such are condemned to use words, those emblems of fragmentation. [But in the end] “the Word became flesh [and dwelt among us].” [There was a danger that flesh would] “melt into spirit, imitation of Christ slides into identity with Christ,” as in the case of James Nayler. Let us hope that our own Quaker meetings may honor the paradox that the Word contains words within itself, just as the inactive God head contains with itself the possibility of action.
[Applying Beckett to Quaker Silence]—Beckett’s trilogy explores the synergy between silence and speech. The successive [trilogy] characters strive to do less and less and to be more and more, thereby escaping contingency [into] the unity and integrity of the silent Word. And, of course, they fail. They are us. They are every Quaker who sits in meeting week after week striving to escape the language of what Barclay calls the human being in his natural state. The religious quest to escape language is predicated on self-consciousness and self-consciousness is impossible without language. Silence is not speech’s elimination so much as its seed-bed. In silent meeting for worship we attempt to enter the code, [the system offered by the silent Word], to “give birth to something wordless in words.” This is what happens in Beckett’s novel.
The extraordinary force of a successful Quaker meeting is its reenactment of the nature of Godhead through silence and of the synergy between that Godhead and us through the spoken messages that emerge from silence and die back into it. The synergy between silence and speech releases extraordinary amounts of creative energy. So, like Quakers in meeting Beckett goes on, caught within this dilemma, yet also energized by it. In Beckett, as in meeting, the silence of the wordless Word paradoxically gives meaning to the messages, just as the messages paradoxically give meaning to the silence.
Most of us carry our own sounds around with us in our heads and hearts. These sounds may never be precisely articulated in our thoughts, but they nevertheless color our world, and structure the quality of our experience. We are bombarded with the idea that our nature is innately violent, that our chief preoccupation is with our sexuality, and that our main purpose in life is acquiring more nifty possessions. It's only through the practice of inner silence that we can begin to disentangle ourselves from our culture and its illusions.
People practicing inner silence become aware of literal & emotional sounds they carry about within themselves, & also become aware of the language of physical gestures. [A mindful person can as easily arrange objects on a table] in a way that expresses Creation's poise, balance, harmony, peace, [as one can] toss them down helter-skelter. Inner silence makes us aware that our bodies aren't sealed off from each other, & that what goes on in one affects the other.
[Inner Silence and Awareness of Body and Attitudes]—In practicing inner silence in daily life, I noticed how I treated my body. I would barrel down steps, fling myself through the turnstile, plop myself on a bench, tear open my book & devour some sublime philosophy. I eventually realized that to the extent I practiced a presence where my swiftness was poised & balanced, I avoided institutionalizing within a sense that life treated me like a dishrag. Taking a vacation from an office problem can enable us to return with a new approach. How do we take a vacation, get a rest from the sounds we carry around in our heads, & thus gain refreshment & new perspective? If the mind is troubled, sleep will usually not suffice, because an active & troubled sleeping mind will have us waking up feeling more tired than ever. Wakeful inner silence provides refreshment to the consciousness; William Penn knew this over 3½ centuries ago.
[When faced with the unfamiliar in a normally automatic process, we are] often forced to lay down preoccupations & enter into the present & inner silence attentively, [thus becoming aware of self-absorbed attitudes], & getting a little bit of enlarged vision, which is the only true source of life's true joy, i.e. spiritual joy. With inner silence, we begin to take our limited egos off center stage as the factor defining how we experience creation's glories. [Imagine] how much more advanced & valuable it is as a spiritual exercise if this practice of presence is a devotional effort [of opening one's self to inner silence], rather than an accidental result of circumstances.
[Inner Silence: Truth & Authentic Service]—2 groups were given a different background story to a film & asked to analyze the subject's behavior. Very little true observation took place, as each group superimposed their minds' agitation based on the different background stories. Inner silence is the key to accurate perception of reality. Without mindfulness, our ability to respond precisely & compassionately in everyday affairs is crippled.
Inner silence can be achieved in the midst of noise. It supports authentic service & enables us to transcend words' & formal logic's limitations without betraying intellect. The calming of our hearts' & minds' agitations of all that is stubborn & grasping, is essentially an expression of loving Truth. It helps establish an inner peace & harmony which will allow us authentically to contribute to outer peace & harmony. Even though we can't fully articulate the Truth, we can enact it in an exemplary life. We can perceive it in the one great, exemplary Life [& Death] presented to us in the New Testament. We, too must fashion a way to be a visible Truth in our lives.
[Inner Silence and Eternal Wisdom]—(Wisdom speaks:) In the beginning,/ he created me; for eternity I shall remain .../ Whoever acts as I dictate will never sin./ See, my conduit has grown into a river,/ & my river has grown into a sea .../ Now I shall make discipline shine out,/ I shall send its light far & wide./ I shall pour out teaching like prophecy,/ as a legacy to all future generations./ Observe that I haven't toiled for myself alone,/ But for all who are seeking wisdom. ECCLESIASTICUS 24: 14, 22, 32-43 (Jerusalem Bible)
There is a wisdom which is from the Lord, created from eternity in the beginning, and remaining until eternity at the end. We cannot contain what contains us nor comprehend what comprehends us. Those who have a grasp of this are wary of debates about spiritual matters; Truth is to be lived, not just talked about. I once stood at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. As one gazes up from the bottom, past all the rock strata from different ages and eons, up [thousands of feet] to the very rim, one realizes that the time humans have walked upon this earth is represented only by the top 2 or 3 inches of all these layers, and one is awestruck at the long creative process which has raised us up to where we are. A true simplicity and stillness of heart allows us to know in any given moment if we are acting so as to be at one with this great Creative Principle, or if we are not.
The Word that was at the beginning, the Mother of all things, a Word of grace and truth, abides within each of us, [all who have ever been, from all times and all places]. This primordial saving Word was uttered out of silence, and to silence we must return if we hope to hear it again. [Only] then God speaks to us, expressing herself fully. The Truth awaits [in silence] eyes unclouded by longing.
Our hearts are touched by something deeper than our reasonings, more comprehensive than all contradictions, something that supports all problems without need of human-devised solutions. When we drop our questions, paradoxically we find the answers, almost as if the answers had been waiting for us to discover them but had been drowned out by our questions; we find ourselves seized with meaning. We come alive to humankind's & our possibilities; we come alive & alert as well to needs & possibilities of others. We discover a way of life worthy of profound enthusiasm. So to live is to let our lives pour out teaching like prophecy & to prepare a place worthy of all people—so to live is to prepare a place where future generations can make their homes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Peter Bien is Professor of English & Comparative Literature & co-ordinator of Dartmouth College's Peace Studies. He teaches mainly modern British prose, & does research mainly in modern Greek literature. This essay combines literary & Quakerly involvements. It grows out of Dartmouth courses, sympathy for Quaker silence's mystical power, love of words, and his incorrigible weakness for all things Greek.
Blessed be the man/who in this confusion,/ this verbal muteness,/utters a truthful word or 2./Yet even more blessed be the man/ who, wrestling his meaning from the bosom of silence, acknowledges the perfection of Unutterableness. S. S. Harkianakis
“I love to feel where words come from” Chief Papunehang of the Delaware to John Woolman.
Nothing could be more unlike the natural will and wisdom of human beings than this silent waiting … People thus gathered together are inwardly taught to dwell with their minds on the Lord and to wait for his appearance in their hearts … Thus the forwardness of the spirit of man is prevented from mixing itself with the worship of God. The form of this worship is completely naked and devoid of all outward and worldly splendor.
“All of the minds’ own labors [and the imagination’s] things that are essentially good as well as things that are evil must be brought to a halt.” R. Barclay
[Silence: Then and Now]—Robert Barclay’s point in the quote at the beginning of this section is that silence subtracts from worship the intervention of the human will and all other forms of idolatry. This is an understanding that should be as valid for Quakers today as it was in the 17th century. While honoring the older understandings of silence, I nevertheless want to reconsider silence from a 20th century point of view. While early Friends wanted to remove language as a factor in human knowledge of the divine, I am suggesting that the divine may best be understood not by removing language but rather by investigating its nature. [In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is an enigmatic English woman named Mrs. Moore]. She goes to a group of caves, which have a peculiar echo. “Whatever is said,” the narrator tells us, “the same monotonous noise replies … ‘Boum [‘bou-oum, or ‘ou-boum] is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it...The echo began to undermine her hold on life … And suddenly at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words only amounted to “boum.” Then she was terrified.”
What has terrified Mrs. Moore is that she has discovered a realm beyond language, which, because it refuses to make distinctions, undermines her previous religiosity, her Christian value system. Forster’s “boum” is the Hindu mystic syllable Om, which as the Chandogya Upanishad says, holds together all speech. Poor Mrs. Moore can only feel undermined by Om, which seems to her to rob the world of value.
[Samuel Beckett & Bible]—In Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy, the title character’s major desire is to halt natural man’s roving imagination. Murphy does not want to do, he wants simply to be. He seeks to reach Barclay’s goals by tying himself to a rocking chair & rocking himself out of all the self-workings & motions of his mind. Beckett’s point is that whereas our noblest effort is to escape contingency, we are condemned to remain the playthings of contingency, the only escape being death. Murphy is in his own way waiting on the Lord.
We find the same distinction between speech & silence in the Hebrew & Christian Testaments' tradition. In Genesis 1:1-6; 8-10, God reached out from a distinctionless, timeless, shapeless, placeless state of Being in order to do something, making distinctions of time, shape, & place, & then naming [those times, shapes & places]. [Once made, man] imitated the divine process of naming by which distinctions are ratified. [An infant gradually makes distinctions & separations, gives itself a name, thus separating itself from its parents & siblings, splitting itself in 2, becoming “I” & “me”]. God does not have a name because God is distinction-less & bodiless.
[When asked for God’s name, God answered, “I AM WHO I AM (I will be what I will be). Even the Y-H-W-H is a verb (“to be”) rather than a noun. Hence the distinction between naming & namelessness, & more generally between speech & silence, may be found in the Hebrew Testament. John’s Gospel begins with “In the beginning was the [Logos] Word, & the Word was with God, & the Word was God. It announces the Trinitarian paradox of distinction-within-unity & Jesus’ divinity and humanity. What precisely did John mean by the term logos? Is the Word to be connected chiefly with the Doing aspect of God head or with the Being aspect?
“Whoever should hear this Word in the Father—where it is completely still—must be quite still and cut off from all images and forms.” Meister Eckhart
[Ancient Usage of Logos]—[One definition is]: Logos, the word or outward form by which the inward thought is expressed, and the inward thought itself; logos includes both the Latin ratio and oratio. The internalization may have begun as far back as 500 B.C. with Heraclitus, who “resorted to logos as the eternal principle of order.” The figure closest to John in the evolution of logos was Philo Judæs (40 A.D.), for whom logos was the divine prototype of which the created universe is but a copy. The parallels between John and Philo are striking. Logos and Sophia are commonly paired as synonyms.
The issues raised here were discussed in post-Biblical theology long before Fox and others picked them up in the 17th century. Tertullian said around 200 A.D., “For before all things God was alone—being in God’s self and for God’s self universe, and space, and all things … Even then God had God’s own Reason with God. God had not Word from the beginning, but God had Reason even before the beginning.” The distinction between words and the Word and between words and silence can be attested in discussions shortly after the New Testament was written. The implication is that Word should be identified with silence. If we link the Word with Being rather than Doing, it follows that the Word becomes paradoxically silent. Meister Eckhart wrote: “whoever should hear this Word in the Father—where it is completely still—must be quite still and cut off from all images and forms.” Silence is a mark of the Deus absconditus [the hidden God].
[George Fox & Word]—George Fox wrote: “They asked me whether the Scripture was God's word. I said, ‘God was the Word, Scriptures were writings; & the Word was before writings were; Word did fulfill them.” For Fox, even memorable words of poor little talkative Christianity from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished” are inauthentic compared with the unified, enduring unfragmented Reason or Light or Life or Word that John says “was God.” In abandoning inauthenticity of language, silent worshipers in a Friends’ meeting ritualistically participate in Godhead. Naming divides; silence unifies. In meeting’s silence, we flee Doing & enter Being. Words become a barrier between us & Godhead, which can best be expressed in human terms, Nietzsche claims, by dance & music as opposed to speech; neither dance nor music distinguishes or separates, as speech does.
Henri Bergson takes Nietzsehe’s metaphysical critique of language and applies it to human psychology. He said that the ever-changing inner life is “inexpressible, because language can't get hold of it without arresting its mobility.” “There is no common measure between mind & language.” [While the Quakers tried to eliminate language from worship, in the end] we sometimes feel relieved despite ourselves when the dynamic processes of the silence that are so deliciously melting into one another to form an organic whole are interrupted by spoken ministry. Even while waiting on the Lord we remain the fragmented playthings of contingency, and as such are condemned to use words, those emblems of fragmentation. [But in the end] “the Word became flesh [and dwelt among us].” [There was a danger that flesh would] “melt into spirit, imitation of Christ slides into identity with Christ,” as in the case of James Nayler. Let us hope that our own Quaker meetings may honor the paradox that the Word contains words within itself, just as the inactive God head contains with itself the possibility of action.
[Applying Beckett to Quaker Silence]—Beckett’s trilogy explores the synergy between silence and speech. The successive [trilogy] characters strive to do less and less and to be more and more, thereby escaping contingency [into] the unity and integrity of the silent Word. And, of course, they fail. They are us. They are every Quaker who sits in meeting week after week striving to escape the language of what Barclay calls the human being in his natural state. The religious quest to escape language is predicated on self-consciousness and self-consciousness is impossible without language. Silence is not speech’s elimination so much as its seed-bed. In silent meeting for worship we attempt to enter the code, [the system offered by the silent Word], to “give birth to something wordless in words.” This is what happens in Beckett’s novel.
The extraordinary force of a successful Quaker meeting is its reenactment of the nature of Godhead through silence and of the synergy between that Godhead and us through the spoken messages that emerge from silence and die back into it. The synergy between silence and speech releases extraordinary amounts of creative energy. So, like Quakers in meeting Beckett goes on, caught within this dilemma, yet also energized by it. In Beckett, as in meeting, the silence of the wordless Word paradoxically gives meaning to the messages, just as the messages paradoxically give meaning to the silence.
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83. The Use of Silence (by Geoffrey Hoyland; 1955)
[About the Author and Pamphlet]—Geoffrey Hoyland (1889-1965) believes that the gateway to the Sanctuary of Silence lies open to every man and woman. He also wrote hymns that were found in various Protestant Hymnals.
Religious knowledge and religious experience . . . must enter in the first place through . . . seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching. [Even] silent prayer is never truly silent; it is full of noises remembered. [From taking] the Eucharist to reading the Scriptures. . . a man’s faith is built up from the evidences supplied by his senses. Self-awareness is the only form of knowledge which is not dependent of sensory experience. . .
The really significant rejections of [sensory input] of the adult are those he makes because he distrusts his senses. Jesus told his adult hearers that . . . they must grow beyond the phases of doubt and re-enter the phase of acceptance. It is inevitable that the Christian should distrust religion, [which] is a product of sensory experience. Can the Christian become aware of God in the same [sense-free] way that the Christian is aware of selfhood? Once the senses have unlocked the door and Someone has come in, the senses are forgotten.
[In] Professor William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, he is not interested in the various keys of creed, dogma, or ritual which unlocked the door. . . [but] with the inner experience. In its essence it is neither words nor emotion nor action; it is pure silence. Nothing in James’ conclusions conflicts with Jesus’ teachings.
How many Christians can say that this inward spiritual communion is the core of their religious experience? Is the vision of God reserved for a favored few? The words of Jesus and Paul do not suggest a rare and fleeting experience to be granted only to a chosen few. We cannot receive God while we are talking to God... We have to achieve a silence of mind and of spirit which is something quite different from the mere absence of noise. [We must have faith] that God is waiting for us [as we turn inwards]. . . There must be [humility], no thought of either sin or holiness in ourselves when we approach the Living Silence.
The man and woman who dares to go into the silence to meet with God must possess something of a quality of [enthusiastic] abandon along with faith and humility. . . Communion with God in the deeps of the soul does not remove all conflict from life; in many ways it increases the strain. The outer life of sense and action must be changed to conform with the new relationship within. Communion with God in the Living Silence is not a substitute for “active” prayer and meditation, rather it is their crown.
This living communion of the individual Christian with God . . . has always presented the Church with a well-nigh insoluble problem. It is impossible to deny to most of these heretics some measure of inspiration, [which contradicted orthodox teaching]. This perplexing dilemma has made the Church suspicious of her mystics. You cannot enter into communion with God on the basis of [restrictions as to how God may approach you].
[Freedom and humility is necessary in our approach to God.] This humility must spring from a knowledge of the ways of God as of ourselves. [For] God speaks to us by silences and it is often difficult to translate that experience into the words and thoughts of our conscious life. [And] we may surely believe that the prism of a stern, relentless prophet [may have] distorted the “word” that arose in his mind as a result of his communion. In the Living Silence God will give them, not words, but grace. The grace will transform their very natures, recreating them and impressing upon them Christ’s image. One must recognize that one’s own imperfect nature may well have distorted and misinterpreted the perfect will of God. One must not be disobedient to the Heavenly Vision.
The ideal is that worshippers gather in silence, each offering one’s self to God in uttermost self-abandonment . . . sins and all. They become one soul . . . because God has made them one. [Afterwards] problems . . . have solved themselves even though they have not been consciously thought of during the hour of worship. Does the silent worship of the Friends actually work out in this way, producing these results? They gather in silence . . . but it is [often] not the Living Silence. [To the extent that it is the Living Silence, a meeting is said to be “gathered.”]
First . . . silent prayer or meditation is not the same thing as the “Living Silence.” . . . Second . . . silent communal worship can only spring from a deep and overwhelming conviction that God is there in the profound depths below consciousness. . . Third . . . worship in the Living Silence cannot be combined profitably with “sensory” worship. Is it not possible that in the Living Silence lies the one perfect road to reunion? [Here] priest and layman, ritualist and Quaker, male and female are indistinguishable when they are all alike held with the embrace of God. The gateway to the Sanctuary of Silence lies open to every man and woman who will pay the price of entry. Is there any reason in Heaven or Earth why we should not all enter it together?
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201. Psychology and Silence (by Stanislaw A. Zielinski; 1975)
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83. The Use of Silence (by Geoffrey Hoyland; 1955)
[About the Author and Pamphlet]—Geoffrey Hoyland (1889-1965) believes that the gateway to the Sanctuary of Silence lies open to every man and woman. He also wrote hymns that were found in various Protestant Hymnals.
Religious knowledge and religious experience . . . must enter in the first place through . . . seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching. [Even] silent prayer is never truly silent; it is full of noises remembered. [From taking] the Eucharist to reading the Scriptures. . . a man’s faith is built up from the evidences supplied by his senses. Self-awareness is the only form of knowledge which is not dependent of sensory experience. . .
The really significant rejections of [sensory input] of the adult are those he makes because he distrusts his senses. Jesus told his adult hearers that . . . they must grow beyond the phases of doubt and re-enter the phase of acceptance. It is inevitable that the Christian should distrust religion, [which] is a product of sensory experience. Can the Christian become aware of God in the same [sense-free] way that the Christian is aware of selfhood? Once the senses have unlocked the door and Someone has come in, the senses are forgotten.
[In] Professor William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, he is not interested in the various keys of creed, dogma, or ritual which unlocked the door. . . [but] with the inner experience. In its essence it is neither words nor emotion nor action; it is pure silence. Nothing in James’ conclusions conflicts with Jesus’ teachings.
How many Christians can say that this inward spiritual communion is the core of their religious experience? Is the vision of God reserved for a favored few? The words of Jesus and Paul do not suggest a rare and fleeting experience to be granted only to a chosen few. We cannot receive God while we are talking to God... We have to achieve a silence of mind and of spirit which is something quite different from the mere absence of noise. [We must have faith] that God is waiting for us [as we turn inwards]. . . There must be [humility], no thought of either sin or holiness in ourselves when we approach the Living Silence.
The man and woman who dares to go into the silence to meet with God must possess something of a quality of [enthusiastic] abandon along with faith and humility. . . Communion with God in the deeps of the soul does not remove all conflict from life; in many ways it increases the strain. The outer life of sense and action must be changed to conform with the new relationship within. Communion with God in the Living Silence is not a substitute for “active” prayer and meditation, rather it is their crown.
This living communion of the individual Christian with God . . . has always presented the Church with a well-nigh insoluble problem. It is impossible to deny to most of these heretics some measure of inspiration, [which contradicted orthodox teaching]. This perplexing dilemma has made the Church suspicious of her mystics. You cannot enter into communion with God on the basis of [restrictions as to how God may approach you].
[Freedom and humility is necessary in our approach to God.] This humility must spring from a knowledge of the ways of God as of ourselves. [For] God speaks to us by silences and it is often difficult to translate that experience into the words and thoughts of our conscious life. [And] we may surely believe that the prism of a stern, relentless prophet [may have] distorted the “word” that arose in his mind as a result of his communion. In the Living Silence God will give them, not words, but grace. The grace will transform their very natures, recreating them and impressing upon them Christ’s image. One must recognize that one’s own imperfect nature may well have distorted and misinterpreted the perfect will of God. One must not be disobedient to the Heavenly Vision.
The ideal is that worshippers gather in silence, each offering one’s self to God in uttermost self-abandonment . . . sins and all. They become one soul . . . because God has made them one. [Afterwards] problems . . . have solved themselves even though they have not been consciously thought of during the hour of worship. Does the silent worship of the Friends actually work out in this way, producing these results? They gather in silence . . . but it is [often] not the Living Silence. [To the extent that it is the Living Silence, a meeting is said to be “gathered.”]
First . . . silent prayer or meditation is not the same thing as the “Living Silence.” . . . Second . . . silent communal worship can only spring from a deep and overwhelming conviction that God is there in the profound depths below consciousness. . . Third . . . worship in the Living Silence cannot be combined profitably with “sensory” worship. Is it not possible that in the Living Silence lies the one perfect road to reunion? [Here] priest and layman, ritualist and Quaker, male and female are indistinguishable when they are all alike held with the embrace of God. The gateway to the Sanctuary of Silence lies open to every man and woman who will pay the price of entry. Is there any reason in Heaven or Earth why we should not all enter it together?
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201. Psychology and Silence (by Stanislaw A. Zielinski; 1975)
[About the Author]—The 2 essays in this pamphlet were written by Stanislaw Zielinski (1909-74) while a student at Pendle Hill (PH) in 1950’s; he held the crafts instructor post there for 12 years until his death. He conducted summer craft courses at his farm in Fulford, Quebec. He was best known at PH as a master weaver & weaving instructor; he held a master’s degree in physics & electronics. The major part of his life was writing. [He produced 2 encyclopedias, one of radio & one of hand-weaving], & published a bi-monthly weaving magazine for 23 years.
[Stan was a Renaissance man, with interests in & familiarity with]: astronomy, mathematics, comparative religion, linguistics, physics, and metaphysics.
Stan had several great loves. The 1st was the sky & astronomy. While a high school student he was in charge of the Warsaw Municipal Observatory; he met his wife there. He built several telescopes, & co-discovered a new comet. He married in Paris in 1931 & they lived there a few years. Stan’s 2nd love was mountains, [in particular] the Tatras, a small but breathtakingly picturesque rocky range between Poland, Hungary & Czechoslovakia.
The longest & most enduring of Stan’s loves was for nature, for wilderness, for a free life away from civilization. They couldn’t get land of their own in Poland, so they moved to Canada. By the end of 1937, they found themselves in Montreal. They wanted land on the Eastern slopes of the Rockies, but settled on a small farm in Fulford, not far from the Vermont border. They tried farming & then started a weaving school instead in 1948.
In the course of their search for a religion without cumber, they were directed to Montreal MM. For the remainder of his life weaving & pottery supplied Stan with a modest livelihood. He chose a simple life & had few personal belongings. Stan’s last great love was Pendle Hill; it was love at 1st sight. Since his 1st term as a student in the winter of 1951-52, he never missed a year without a longer or shorter stay in the place that became his spiritual home, fulfilling a multitude of interests and tasks, especially teaching.
THE ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGY IN RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM:[Applying Psychology to Spirituality]—Most psychologists assume that religion doesn’t correspond to any objective reality & analyze religious experience as an emotional disturbance. The peculiar attitude of St. Paul towards sex is indirectly responsible for the compensating position of Freud & his followers. Psychology is a very powerful tool. There is no reason why we shouldn’t take advantage of modern psychology methods if they can help us in our spiritual growth.
What astonishes an unbiased observer is the fact that all schools of psychology, with their specialized & changing vocabulary, & their arbitrary assumptions, have about the same fairly good therapeutic results; none of them can be completely wrong or entirely correct. The outstanding value of psychological technique is that it can show the patient an objective picture of a large part of one’s psyche. The limitation of psychoanalysis is due to fact that the analysis doesn’t penetrate very deeply, & thus is limited to the early stages of religious development.
[Hypothetical Journey]—Suppose we have a person who doesn’t know, or doesn’t wish to recognize religion’s existence. There is a need for religion, which one will call looking for knowledge or truth. Religion may find a roundabout way to penetrate one’s defenses. When one is faced with unscientific & contrary methods to explain ones dreams, psychology can help by showing that science & religion aren’t incompatible, why one depends on ones intellect only, why the name of God makes one uneasy, and assuring one that ones emotional life can be liberated and made a source of energy for ones spiritual development.
Particularly illuminating in studying the relationship between the scientific & the spiritual is the representation of the human psyche by Dr. Carl Jung. The conscious is merely a point, which contains little more than an idea or a fleeting impression. Immediately below it we have memory, sometimes called the subconscious, where we accumulate knowledge. Deeper down lies the unconscious. Its highest layer contains things forgotten because of their small importance, things never consciously noticed, and perhaps some important, unpleasant things.
The next layer down is a different one, mainly composed of things so painful or so remote that no amount of conscious effort can bring them up. [When it speaks], this part of the unconscious speaks in parables and uses symbols; this is our personal unconscious. By penetrating still deeper we find a stratum which does not belong to to any particular individual, but which is held by a group; the deeper we go, the broader the group. This is the collective unconscious. [We will reach the limits of our imagination before] we reach limits of the psyche. Jung’s image of the psyche shows its construction and helps explain most psychic phenomena. Thus, it is valuable to one who desires to express ones idea of reality in one neat concept. This image of the psyche is nothing more than a parable. By understanding it one is not much nearer to ultimate reality than one was before.
Our hypothetical person is at the beginning of a long road. The seeker must live a virtuous life by observing certain positive & negative rules of behavior. Many seekers give up, thinking that the problems are more than they had bargained for. Psychology can help the individual adjust to an existing environment. You needn’t consciously believe in anything except that it is worthwhile to go on with the work.
Probably the 1st question tackled will be: Why did I decide to search for truth? In psychoanalysis there will be many answers coming from different levels. The seeker may find an accurate answer, [where the motivation in one’s search of knowledge is a negative quality]. From understanding to overcoming a particular attitude is a strenuous step, but not impossible. Now ones understanding can no longer be a purely intellectual one.
Emotional factors must be used in ones mental processes to distinguish between personal deceptions and conventional ones. [One should not put searching for self-deception over discovering personal truths]. This preoccupation can be the deadliest vice, a disguised expression of one’s hatred toward oneself and others. Pride originates from insecurity and gives the person a false sense of importance. It can combine with a holier-than-thou attitude. Hostility may come from a feeling of insecurity, and may lead to occupations ranging from reporter or critic, to the military, or even a judge, teacher, or preacher.
[Psychoanalysis, Conventional Deceptions and Mystical Integration]—Psychoanalysis first shows conventional deceptions for what they are. Recognizing conventional deceptions without psychoanalysis is hard because these falsehoods are usually associated with a set of uncompromising interdictions rather than with the spirit of a religion. [One may have “principles,” and be scrupulous to a fault in observing them]. This “flight into principles” is probably most destructive where sexuality is concerned.
Psychoanalysis can save us from misconceptions about the effectiveness of will power & the concept of sin. Most sins are misunderstandings within ourselves. There is only one sin which can't be reduced to simpler factors, & that is the lack of will to acquire understanding. Hindu mysticism knew long ago the sin of ignorance or lack of discrimination. Psychoanalysis doesn't alleviate suffering during the process; it makes the path straighter but not less thorny. The purpose of mystical exercises expressed in psychological terms is integration. Each unconscious layer must become accessible to the conscious. Each strata must be mastered & quieted. In the more advanced stages, the process of mystical integration is entirely different from the process of psychoanalysis. Neither the method nor the knowledge of mystical integration can be described very well in psychological terms.
Since the unconscious' content is often terrifying & its invasion may disorganize the conscious, reluctance [to even briefly part with reason] is quite justified under ordinary circumstances. With psychoanalysis, there is more knowledge & less fear & resistance to relinquishing reason. If psychology made a great mistake in trying to explain away religion, then religion is making an equally great error in rejecting psychology as an aid in spiritual development. Neither headaches nor selfishness are spiritual, but both prove to be obstacles in spiritual development, & should be eliminated in the most efficient manner, [i.e. with modern medicine & psychoanalysis].
SILENT MEETING: [Introduction]—The importance of silence in spiritual life has been recognized since time immemorial. Silence has been considered both a method to achieve knowledge and the result of knowledge. Between individual and group silence, the individual is much easier to interpret psychologically. [Union with God or reality] must penetrate not only the layers of personal unconscious, but the whole of the collective unconscious. The 1st stages of analysis and mysticism appear nearly identical.
Preparatory to yoga is “submission to the law,” a decision to change oneself which implies resignation to higher authority. Silence is then used in all steps initiation: the silence of the body, senses, intellect, & of the emotions. In psychoanalysis, the silence of the body is scarcely recognized; there is the general advice to relax, but not much more. In “sense withdrawal,” the ego controls lines of communication between psyche & body. In the silence of the intellect, the ego prevents all mental activity from becoming conscious; the ego & the personal conscience merge. In the silence of the emotions, there is little distinction between conscious & unconscious.
The 13th century Albertus Magnus writes: “When thou prayest, shut the door of thy senses. Keep them barred & bolted against phantasms & images … One who penetrates into oneself transcends oneself, ascends truly to God … Don’t think about the world … consider thyself outside of the world & alone with God … separated from the body, [with no interest in] the state of world.” [One begins to see into the depths of oneself as worldly winds die down. As mud & silt settle, one sees deeper & deeper, until the bottom comes into sight].
[Group Silence]—Where each member behaves as if one were alone, [it doesn’t differ from individual silence]. When the group works as a whole, the primary object is the development of group unity; the mystical experience will grow out of this unity. Little has been done to explain the process of group unity, little or no direction is given. Nowadays we need such direction, even though simple people of the past did not. There is hardly any parallel between a therapeutic group and a silent meeting.
There's no evidence of anything faintly resembling silent meeting before the 14th century. In the 6th century, Dionysius writes: “We must contemplate things Divine by union not in ourselves, but by going out of our selves & becoming wholly of God.” [There were heresies starting in Armenia, traveling through Bulgaria, into southern France that had things in common: opposing war, death penalty, oaths, all liturgy, professional clergy, & church buildings. The Brethren of the Free Spirit (13th century) introduced the principle which Quakers called “the Inner Light.” The Brethren’s meetings for worship weren't silent, speaking was supposed to be spontaneous.
13th century Beghard’s small communities were secular institutions; inmates had complete freedom both in joining & renouncing the community life. There are indications that worship had a group character without any liturgy. In later movements in 14th & 16th centuries, silence becomes more prominent, but still there is no evidence that group silence was used much. The “Family of Love” in the mid-16th century had compulsory silence in worship. The English Seekers were around before Quakers in the early 17th century, & had something similar to meeting for worship. They influenced Quakers in the mid-17th century & were the earliest converts.
[Silent Meeting for Worship]—Seekers brought the silent meeting for worship into the Quaker movement. In it silence must prevail, but it can't be compulsory. Robert Barclay writes: “As there can be nothing more opposite to the natural will & wisdom of man than this silent waiting upon God, so neither can it be obtained nor rightly comprehended by man, but as he layeth down his own wisdom & will, so as to be content to be thoroughly subject to God [in] an outward silence of the body & an inward silence of the mind.” Isaac Penington writes: “If any man speaks there, he must speak as the vessel out of which God speaks; as the trumpet out of which God gives sound.” These foundations of the meeting for worship were reinforced by the influence of Continental Quietism, which came from The Spiritual Guide Which Disentangles the Soul by Miguel de Molinos.
Charles Lamb wrote: “More frequently the meeting is broken up with out a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been bathed with stillness.” On the other hand, a complete silence lasting years resulted in apathy, if not stupor. Caroline Stephens wrote: “Of all the disturbing influences from without which hinder the consciousness of communion with God, I think that unwarranted words not freshly called forth by the united exercise of the moment are the most disturbing.”
[Silence, Communion, and the Message]—St. Gregory Nazianzus (4th century) writes: “To speak of God is an exercise of great value, but there is one that is worth more, namely to purify one’s soul before God in silence.” We are not used to silence. Not only that, we are afraid of it, especially silence of the mind. The discovery that acceptance or submission—as opposed to resistance—is the only way to deal with the unconscious made modern psychotherapy practicable.
Besides complete silence in meeting for worship, there is also communion & the message [that results]. One is tempted to interpret meeting “communion” as the whole assembly attaining collective unconscious. But what we know about the unconscious doesn’t seem to apply here. A spiritual bond between the members of a meeting is undeniable. In a successful meeting short, [widely spaced] messages coming from different speakers form a sequence. Since the phenomenon is hard to explain, it is still harder to advise anyone how to achieve it.
Provided that silence & communion are present, there's no need to control or evaluate a message’s content. However, it is too much to expect that all meetings to be so lucky. If only the 1st 2 requirements are realized the meeting for worship is still good; even silence alone is valuable. When message precedes the other 2 elements we have a discussion on an intellectual level or worse, a free-for-all competition in making speeches. [In judging whether our message is valid, perhaps one criterion could be that if there is any doubt in the mind of the speaker as to the value of one’s message, the one should remain silent. A 19th century Friend, John Wilbur, felt that the more a message was polished, & the more intellectual work had been put into it, “the more it tasted of the pipes.”
In dealing with abusing the right to speak, perhaps the best advice is be patient & charitable. One who sincerely tries to work out problems is worth more than the one who slumbers quietly in the corner or doesn’t come. Lao-Tzu writes “He who knows doesn’t speak,/ He who speaks doesn’t know. We can’t expect everyone to reach the stage where one doesn’t speak any more. We are the ones who don’t know. We are seekers, not saints.
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335 Come Aside and Rest Awhile (by Frances I. Taber; 1997)
About the Author—Frances Taber grew in the Conservative Quakerism of Iowa & Ohio YMs in the 1930s & 40s. [Fran's involvement with Pendle Hill grew from student in the 1977-78, to kitchen staff, to study, research, & experiencing solitude in the 1984-85 school year. This essay's original version was a report given after 1985's Spring term. She is a core teacher for the School of the Spirit's program On Being a Spiritual Nurturer.
[Introduction]—I have long loved quiet & separate spaces: long walks in the country; staring into a wood fire; how the world feels at dawn. I grow more aware of how central "retirement" is for a faith-practice. In dialogs I had, objections arose. I set out to address them, exploring Quaker practice & other religious groups' experiences. I experienced "retirement's" value in my own life, & observed it during the evolution of Pendle Hill's personal retreat program. There is a deep, ecumenical hunger for deeper experience of silence & solitude.
In the 1977-78 Pendle Hill school year, I began to explore having a space apart from daily routine. I started an initiative offering personal retreats at Pendle Hill, beginning with students trying to satisfy their need for apartness from the perennial stimulation of community life. [I sought to make] quiet space more readily available. Before we began to respond, others found themselves drawn to spend silent time in solitude at Christian Church renewal centers. Some were drawn to retreats with an Eastern orientation.
[Queries and Responses]—How is "taking retreat" beyond the weekly meeting for worship necessary and part of Quaker practice, in a sect best known for social action? How does the urge toward retreat [fit in] with a call to social witness? How would withdrawl from community for personal retreats affect the community's power to heal? Trust in "retirement" is rooted deeply in Friends's faith and practice. Howard Brinton writes: "Retirement is considered [to be] ... a Christian duty. Members ... are expected to wait in silence ... at worship, and occasionally in their families, in their private chambers, or in daily occupations, that in stillness of heart ... they may acquire direction and strength for performing life's duties."
William Penn writes: "I don't only acknowledge but admire solitude ... retreats for the afflicted, tempted, solitary & the devout, where they might wait undisturbed upon God ... & being strengthened may with power over their own spirits, enter into the world's business again." It was centuries before Penn's political vision for a union of states was seriously considered. Deliberately setting aside certain days is a new practice among Friends. Being productive is valued. No common valuation is given to pursuits which involve what looks like doing nothing.
[Unwilling Retreats]—In an unwilling retreat of the sort that we all have from time to time, I learned about the awkwardness of taking retreat & the difficulty of breaking with expectations. In salvaging a retreat out of a time of illness, I was readier than usual to adopt a frame of mind where my illness was a retreat. Some insights were the following: "What comes now is that I need more reverie-retreat time, with less effort. It is in reverie, at least as much as in reading & [scheduled reflection], that this precious time's work is done. Perhaps this is why I got sick. God wants me to contemplate, rather than always organize & doggedly pursue projects. I moved to the sofa at 5:00 with tea, & just drank in quietness, peace & beauty." This experience showed me something of a re-treat's illuminating quality. How do we bring forward God's sustaining & healing presence into outward action? A full experience of retreat compels & propels us into desiring to love, to give, & to act from compassion.
[Dark Night of the Soul]—Constance Fitzgerald applies the dark night of the soul experience, equating it with the world impasse, a situation in which one cannot help oneself and cannot escape. If one quits trying to escape or to help oneself and goes into the impasse with naked faith, out of the darkness of contemplation will come a "solution" that was previously unimaginable. There are many "dark nights or impasse experiences," both in our personal lives and in our lives in community and society, that "cry out for meaning."
A dark societal time must be understood and entered into if it is to lead to a "new vision and harmony" [for all of creation]. Belden Lane writes: "The impasse provides a challenge and a concrete focus for contemplation ... It forces the right side of the brain into gear, seeking intuitive, symbolic, unconventional answers. The hunger for retreat carries with it a recognition that there is no other way out of many [impasses that arise] in the complexity of our lives, than to take them into the darkness of silence before God.
At Pendle Hill, at some level consciousness, persons [burnt out from doing service], when they seek retreat, are taking with them into the dark silence with God the various impasses of their lives. Constance Fitzgerald writes: "It is in the very experience of darkness & joylessness, in suffering & withdrawal of accustomed pleasure, that ... transformation is taking place." In going into the silence of retreat, we don't withdraw from life, but take life with us into the mystery of God, having faith that in God's good time we will come forth with new life & vision. In the choice to make ourselves willing to go into the darkness of contemplation, we are giving away our powerlessness and poverty of spirit. This is a practice of receiving Divine Presence, and of experiencing a transformation of a feeling of unworthiness into a sense of self-worth, without deserving or earning.
[George Fox's Retreat]—He responded to a dark night or impasse by going on an extended retreat from which he emerged into a life of ministry. George writes that the Lord said to him, "Thou must forsake all, both young & old, & keep out of all, & be as a stranger unto all ... Frequently in the night [I] walked mournfully by myself, for I was a man of sorrows in the times of the 1st workings of the Lord in me ... Hope underneath held me [& my immortal soul], as a anchor in the bottom of the sea, to my Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea, the world where all the raging waves, foul weather, tempests & temptations are ... I had been brought through the very ocean of darkness & death, through & over Satan's power, by the eternal, glorious power of Christ ... into God's Paradise. All things were new; all the creation gave another smell than before, beyond what words can utter." Starved by repetition of truths which didn't come with the fresh scent of Truth clinging to them, he persisted in a retreat of wandering until he knew the Truth "experimentally" or experientially. With more attention to the dark places between [Fox's more popular] openings, we will grow in understanding of the contemporary urge toward retreat. Dark places have to be traveled before it is possible to come into the fullness of light.
[Inward Knowing]—Pendle Hill retreatants have recognized that the silence and emptiness of the retreat experience make way for an inward knowing not achieved before. Retreatant Quotes: "When we reach the limit of our own resources, the spirit can help us at last." "During my 2- or 3-day retreats my clearest insights came about what God was calling me to do in my life; I sank deeper into my center; I heard messages I had not heard before; [I could then] be taught by my Inward Teacher." "[How] Can I by willing, running, ever sink—/ Desiring God within my heart to know/ By application of the gift to think—/ Down to the soil in which the Seed will grow?" The inward experience of God can come through the activity of a restless mind.
A common image for retreat is that of the desert experience, or Jesus entering the wilderness. McNamara's advice for hermitage-style retreat is to urge people not to try to get anything out of it, but to enjoy God's company. His "favorite definition of contemplation is taking a long, loving look at the Real with no designs on the Real ... a retreat is meant to touch one's core so that one will never be the same again ... When one becomes contemplative & mystical, one can't help but be ministerial, apostolic, an immense help to one's immediate neighbor and to one's society at large. Solitude develops the social dimension, especially the capacity for compassion.
[Visitation Monastery in Philadelphia]—I glimpsed the relationship between solitude and community in a 2-day stay at the Visitation Monastery in Philadelphia, a silent, Catholic contemplative community. [It took several of my 1st hours there for the quiet to come into me. The next morning: "I didn't rebel at getting up at 5:30 ... I didn't leap out of bed either ... At 6 I was ready for chapel ... I was aware of a difference [between their silent prayer] ... and Pendle Hill's [meeting for worship ... I was unsettled during it] There was no 'gatheredness,' or 'presence, [Divine or corporate.' It was being] 'together in solitude' ..."
"Later in Mass, a sense of Presence came, with reality & warmth ... The simplicity of bread & coffee at breakfast seemed a part & a symbol of the whole of life ... The structure of the day itself becomes prayer; I have added [2 walks] around the grounds [to that structure] ... There is much wisdom [and restfulness] in a rule of silence, for the cultivation of the inner rather than the outer spaces. I sense that different spaces of silence have different shapes and are good for different uses ... " Living with this one for a longer time, one could learn more about the freedoms [and joy] lying within and beneath discipline ... The joy within this discipline is partly a joy connected to freedom from struggle, innocence and teach-ability ... and a direct route to joy of thanksgiving and celebration. Praise God for being in this silence." The structure present at a personal retreat in the Spring house at Pendle Hill is mediated through night & day, physical necessity, & the shape of one's being. How would I go into unstructured silent retreat? I imagined a direct experience of God, [in whatever form that needed to be].
[Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse (Nerinx, KY)/ Pendle Hill Hermitages]—Some wonder whether the solitude of my Catholic retreat represents a denial of communal life around it. Jean Manion says that Elaine Prevallet, a former Pendle Hill teacher & now director at Loretto's retreat center, credits the center with creating "the sustaining matrix of quiet hospitality & [openminded]-freedom ... There is the presence of people with a free open, [& nurturing] spirit ... Not just the sisters, but other persons work here, & seem to engender that spirit."
We also have such a community at Pendle Hill. Seeking solitude from, but remaining still within the circle of community, Pendle Hill students have recognized the importance of the community to the work of solitude. How is a supportive community important in doing solitary work? A student writes: "It was important to me to feel physically and spiritually surrounded by the community of which I had been a member only 2 weeks, but with which I was sharing an important and tender part of my spiritual journey. Education consists on continual cycles of engagement and reflection together. Only engagement leaves much of what could be learn unlearned. Only reflection means one will run out of material on which to reflect. At Pendle Hill, individuals have to work very hard to find or make enough time for reflection. Withdrawal from community allows room for intuitive knowing to emerge and complete the educative process, which continues to be supported by the community.
A student writes: "I came not to the Spring House all alone—/ Although alone I shiver here tonight—/ For I am with God, in God, & at one/ With that of God in every living Light./ Peace of God doth move across my heart: Unshakable, but ever sought anew,/ & though in sep'rateness I stand apart,/ My consciousness is joined to all things, too." The listening cultivated in silence & aloneness informs one's interaction with others on one's return to community. William McNamara writes: Communication could be a kind of communion if indeed we were a more silent & solitary people ... Where we live with God alone in silence. When we come out of that holy, sacred space, we are deepened & not only ready but longing to share with others life's deeper dimensions."
We learn to sense a rhythm between engagement & reflection that God is calling us to live. [Jesus calls all disciples] to "Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place where you can rest quietly." Don't assume that you will stay in that rest, but that you will go forth again into mystery. Basil Penington writes: "[The you Jesus is inviting to be refreshed] is you & me, & the whole of you & me; the Lord wants to refresh us in our entirety. The Lord wants to respond in Love to all our needs." Feeling Jesus' invitation to rest is a conspicuous theme in retreat log book entries. It is more than recovery from fatigue; it leads to peace, to healing, to an awareness of being loved. One retreatant who expected to be searched, to make hard decisions," received the message, "You have come here to be loved." Molly Vass writes: "There is nothing to do in rest, there's nowhere to go, there's nothing that's more important or less important in rest. Rest is our birthright, & rest is part of our healing process."
My Winter Retreat: Day One Journal entry]—I took a week of unstructured silent retreat. On retreat, I read Julian of Norwich: "The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God knowing that that goodness can reach down to our lowest depths of need." DAY ONE JOURNAL ENTRY: Much of a retreat consists of just getting the task-, mind-, body-clutter out of the way. The activity of walking, along with looking as one goes, keeps the brain just occupied enough not to be tempted to [any routine distractions from meditation]. I walked around the lake and followed the stream that was the outlet from the lake.
I wound my way through brushy growth, down the bank, & found myself face-to-face with a delicate, small waterfall. At the foot of the left-hand bank down which I came, a mossy rock invited me to sit. I sat staring at the waterfall as one can stare into a fire, transfixed by the never-ending splash of sun-sparkled stream. It wrapped my mind & held it; I didn't want to leave. The falling of water entered into me & I merged into the landscape of the woods, at one with them, with the sparkle & the water's music in my soul. That was what my soul had longed for. I returned to my teen years, of being held by wonder at the beauty of nature. That young poet found here the layered years of [the full life] experience, & the gathering search for God, for unity, & merged with them.
My walk became my prayer, my contemplation, & a part of my healing & re-uniting life. Basil Penington wrote that the monk's life [was all one], & that "There was one simple movement of response to a God who had spoken, a God who speaks in books of the divinely inspired Scriptures, in the whole creation, & in the depths of one's own being." The fractured consciousness of modern man & woman [interferes with] richly-differentiated layers of consciousness waiting to be melded into a new prism of prayer. [Embracing] adolescent wonder of nature cuts through that interference. St. Bernard writes: "Believe me who have tried [listening to nature]. Thou wilt find something more in woods than books. Trees & rocks will teach what thou canst not hear from a master"
[Winter Retreat: Other Entries]—DAYS 2 &3: 2 kinds of thoughts run through my mind in reflecting on, What is Prayer?: when to pray [or not pray]; on retreat, what constitutes prayer expands. With less analytical mind involved in separating one thing from another, the distinction between what is praying & what isn't praying, begins to blur. In eating as prayer, I need to be mindful of what my body does & doesn't want. [Beginning-the-day routine as prayer becomes an unstrained morning movement of awakening the whole self. I open my self with the pace of a growing thing, not to an activities program, but to God's action around & in me in the spring-likeness of this day. Washing is [prayer], cleansing, baptism, awakening. Dressing is ceremonial preparation; breakfast is Eucharist. [Listening to the body-prayer is listening] to God speaking through the body. Sleep becomes a part of prayer. Much of a retreat is physical. It is remarkable to "do nothing" as one's top priority.
DAY 4: [I was exhausted from the rough walk] up the creek yesterday, and paid for it all the next day. I am disgusted at being so fragile. [My exploring the creek became yet one more] set back to connecting to God. I must hang on to my conviction that God is giving me what I need while I am here. I keep trying to find things I ought to do, [when the most important ought is to not do]. I had to learn through my own process what the obstacles were and the flow was between my self and God.
DAY 7: God, clear the ground, make ready open space for the seed. It has taken this whole week to clear away, to make open space, to nourish & draw together naked soil; I got the healing I needed. [My discovery & drawing close to my little outer waterfall], was a drawing closer to my inner, ever-flowing waterfall, by which I can always sit. My walking has been in search of fresh, running water, the living, laughing, life-giving water of the little streams. Woods & water re-joined me with parts of my self I had scarcely touched for a long time.
We cannot catch it, but must let it flow, over the waterfall, over the rocks, down the stream, in the sure knowing that the stream will never cease from flowing. Clearing away the oughts makes room for the nudges, which are like new green shoots piercing the surface of the cleared ground. I met God in the way I needed to; I did not have a direct experience of God [God's goodness did indeed] "reach down to my lowest depths of need."
[Clearing Away]—I am beginning to learn that the clearing away which is part of a retreat helps to reveal the nature of one's own instrument, & to clarify one's part in the community's harmony. A retreat provides discernment on how to give; one's, fractured parts are re-gathered into a whole. Silence in solitude is meant to prepare a way for the Lord; clear a straight path for God. One puts aside for a time the major obligations and all work; one sets aside all expectations to produce. It creates a clearing where nothing obscures the view. This type of silence takes its shape from the inner rhythms of the retreatant, & her or his perception of the nudges of God.
A retreatant writes: "This morning I have been so acutely aware of my natural rhythms & of the spirit asserting themselves in the absence of outside constraints ... Schedules fall away; events simply take place in intrinsic order ... In such atmosphere, it is easy & natural to be in prayer while peeling an egg or brushing one's hair ... My most necessary activities are harmonized, integrated, & unified at the deepest levels of my being ..."
This kind of retreat is shaped from the inside out. It is a very interior silence. It distrusts structures and patterns laid upon me by another's experience. It is a silence of enormous possibilities. One risk is that we may be more open to the subconscious than to God. If we are bewildered by our experience, we can seek a spiritual friend with whom to reflect on it. Such an open silence is one of tremendous potential for growth or for sheer laziness; one may "do nothing" creatively, or one may really do nothing. A greater danger is the danger of filling the time, with words; words from other people; words from books.
Filling up time is in truth the real danger we face as a religious people; it is an endemic problem. Duty overtakes us and swallows us whole. We have to fight for space, space through which to see the light. I came back from my term of study and exploration to oversee the personal retreat experiment at Pendle Hill until it became a recognized part of the resident program. I close with the 1994 logbook entry of a Spring House retreatant: "In this quiet space, away from the props and distractions of life, one can feel closer to God, obtain a truer perspective on life, feel closer to people when you hold them prayerfully, and then leave with a new enthusiasm for life which has meaning beyond ourselves."
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388. Expectant Listening: Finding God’s Thread of Guidance (by Michael Wajda; 2007)
About the Author—Michael Wajda travels widely among Friends, leading retreats, giving talks & seeking to help strengthen our meetings’ spiritual life. Michael has been a Friend since the late 1960’s. He currently serves as Associate Secretary for Development & Interpretation for the Friends General Conference. He is a graduate of the School of the Spirit’s course “On being a Spiritual Nurturer”; he and his family are members of Goshen MM.
[Introduction]—Have you ever been moved by an inbreaking of the Light—awakened by the inflowing love of God? God is continually calling us to faithfulness and into the gifts and ministries that we are given; it creates a hunger for more. One way to feed that hunger is through expectant listening. [The more] we experience this indwelling nature, the more expectant we become; we grow in expectant listening.
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335 Come Aside and Rest Awhile (by Frances I. Taber; 1997)
About the Author—Frances Taber grew in the Conservative Quakerism of Iowa & Ohio YMs in the 1930s & 40s. [Fran's involvement with Pendle Hill grew from student in the 1977-78, to kitchen staff, to study, research, & experiencing solitude in the 1984-85 school year. This essay's original version was a report given after 1985's Spring term. She is a core teacher for the School of the Spirit's program On Being a Spiritual Nurturer.
[Introduction]—I have long loved quiet & separate spaces: long walks in the country; staring into a wood fire; how the world feels at dawn. I grow more aware of how central "retirement" is for a faith-practice. In dialogs I had, objections arose. I set out to address them, exploring Quaker practice & other religious groups' experiences. I experienced "retirement's" value in my own life, & observed it during the evolution of Pendle Hill's personal retreat program. There is a deep, ecumenical hunger for deeper experience of silence & solitude.
In the 1977-78 Pendle Hill school year, I began to explore having a space apart from daily routine. I started an initiative offering personal retreats at Pendle Hill, beginning with students trying to satisfy their need for apartness from the perennial stimulation of community life. [I sought to make] quiet space more readily available. Before we began to respond, others found themselves drawn to spend silent time in solitude at Christian Church renewal centers. Some were drawn to retreats with an Eastern orientation.
[Queries and Responses]—How is "taking retreat" beyond the weekly meeting for worship necessary and part of Quaker practice, in a sect best known for social action? How does the urge toward retreat [fit in] with a call to social witness? How would withdrawl from community for personal retreats affect the community's power to heal? Trust in "retirement" is rooted deeply in Friends's faith and practice. Howard Brinton writes: "Retirement is considered [to be] ... a Christian duty. Members ... are expected to wait in silence ... at worship, and occasionally in their families, in their private chambers, or in daily occupations, that in stillness of heart ... they may acquire direction and strength for performing life's duties."
William Penn writes: "I don't only acknowledge but admire solitude ... retreats for the afflicted, tempted, solitary & the devout, where they might wait undisturbed upon God ... & being strengthened may with power over their own spirits, enter into the world's business again." It was centuries before Penn's political vision for a union of states was seriously considered. Deliberately setting aside certain days is a new practice among Friends. Being productive is valued. No common valuation is given to pursuits which involve what looks like doing nothing.
[Unwilling Retreats]—In an unwilling retreat of the sort that we all have from time to time, I learned about the awkwardness of taking retreat & the difficulty of breaking with expectations. In salvaging a retreat out of a time of illness, I was readier than usual to adopt a frame of mind where my illness was a retreat. Some insights were the following: "What comes now is that I need more reverie-retreat time, with less effort. It is in reverie, at least as much as in reading & [scheduled reflection], that this precious time's work is done. Perhaps this is why I got sick. God wants me to contemplate, rather than always organize & doggedly pursue projects. I moved to the sofa at 5:00 with tea, & just drank in quietness, peace & beauty." This experience showed me something of a re-treat's illuminating quality. How do we bring forward God's sustaining & healing presence into outward action? A full experience of retreat compels & propels us into desiring to love, to give, & to act from compassion.
[Dark Night of the Soul]—Constance Fitzgerald applies the dark night of the soul experience, equating it with the world impasse, a situation in which one cannot help oneself and cannot escape. If one quits trying to escape or to help oneself and goes into the impasse with naked faith, out of the darkness of contemplation will come a "solution" that was previously unimaginable. There are many "dark nights or impasse experiences," both in our personal lives and in our lives in community and society, that "cry out for meaning."
A dark societal time must be understood and entered into if it is to lead to a "new vision and harmony" [for all of creation]. Belden Lane writes: "The impasse provides a challenge and a concrete focus for contemplation ... It forces the right side of the brain into gear, seeking intuitive, symbolic, unconventional answers. The hunger for retreat carries with it a recognition that there is no other way out of many [impasses that arise] in the complexity of our lives, than to take them into the darkness of silence before God.
At Pendle Hill, at some level consciousness, persons [burnt out from doing service], when they seek retreat, are taking with them into the dark silence with God the various impasses of their lives. Constance Fitzgerald writes: "It is in the very experience of darkness & joylessness, in suffering & withdrawal of accustomed pleasure, that ... transformation is taking place." In going into the silence of retreat, we don't withdraw from life, but take life with us into the mystery of God, having faith that in God's good time we will come forth with new life & vision. In the choice to make ourselves willing to go into the darkness of contemplation, we are giving away our powerlessness and poverty of spirit. This is a practice of receiving Divine Presence, and of experiencing a transformation of a feeling of unworthiness into a sense of self-worth, without deserving or earning.
[George Fox's Retreat]—He responded to a dark night or impasse by going on an extended retreat from which he emerged into a life of ministry. George writes that the Lord said to him, "Thou must forsake all, both young & old, & keep out of all, & be as a stranger unto all ... Frequently in the night [I] walked mournfully by myself, for I was a man of sorrows in the times of the 1st workings of the Lord in me ... Hope underneath held me [& my immortal soul], as a anchor in the bottom of the sea, to my Bishop, causing it to swim above the sea, the world where all the raging waves, foul weather, tempests & temptations are ... I had been brought through the very ocean of darkness & death, through & over Satan's power, by the eternal, glorious power of Christ ... into God's Paradise. All things were new; all the creation gave another smell than before, beyond what words can utter." Starved by repetition of truths which didn't come with the fresh scent of Truth clinging to them, he persisted in a retreat of wandering until he knew the Truth "experimentally" or experientially. With more attention to the dark places between [Fox's more popular] openings, we will grow in understanding of the contemporary urge toward retreat. Dark places have to be traveled before it is possible to come into the fullness of light.
[Inward Knowing]—Pendle Hill retreatants have recognized that the silence and emptiness of the retreat experience make way for an inward knowing not achieved before. Retreatant Quotes: "When we reach the limit of our own resources, the spirit can help us at last." "During my 2- or 3-day retreats my clearest insights came about what God was calling me to do in my life; I sank deeper into my center; I heard messages I had not heard before; [I could then] be taught by my Inward Teacher." "[How] Can I by willing, running, ever sink—/ Desiring God within my heart to know/ By application of the gift to think—/ Down to the soil in which the Seed will grow?" The inward experience of God can come through the activity of a restless mind.
A common image for retreat is that of the desert experience, or Jesus entering the wilderness. McNamara's advice for hermitage-style retreat is to urge people not to try to get anything out of it, but to enjoy God's company. His "favorite definition of contemplation is taking a long, loving look at the Real with no designs on the Real ... a retreat is meant to touch one's core so that one will never be the same again ... When one becomes contemplative & mystical, one can't help but be ministerial, apostolic, an immense help to one's immediate neighbor and to one's society at large. Solitude develops the social dimension, especially the capacity for compassion.
[Visitation Monastery in Philadelphia]—I glimpsed the relationship between solitude and community in a 2-day stay at the Visitation Monastery in Philadelphia, a silent, Catholic contemplative community. [It took several of my 1st hours there for the quiet to come into me. The next morning: "I didn't rebel at getting up at 5:30 ... I didn't leap out of bed either ... At 6 I was ready for chapel ... I was aware of a difference [between their silent prayer] ... and Pendle Hill's [meeting for worship ... I was unsettled during it] There was no 'gatheredness,' or 'presence, [Divine or corporate.' It was being] 'together in solitude' ..."
"Later in Mass, a sense of Presence came, with reality & warmth ... The simplicity of bread & coffee at breakfast seemed a part & a symbol of the whole of life ... The structure of the day itself becomes prayer; I have added [2 walks] around the grounds [to that structure] ... There is much wisdom [and restfulness] in a rule of silence, for the cultivation of the inner rather than the outer spaces. I sense that different spaces of silence have different shapes and are good for different uses ... " Living with this one for a longer time, one could learn more about the freedoms [and joy] lying within and beneath discipline ... The joy within this discipline is partly a joy connected to freedom from struggle, innocence and teach-ability ... and a direct route to joy of thanksgiving and celebration. Praise God for being in this silence." The structure present at a personal retreat in the Spring house at Pendle Hill is mediated through night & day, physical necessity, & the shape of one's being. How would I go into unstructured silent retreat? I imagined a direct experience of God, [in whatever form that needed to be].
[Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse (Nerinx, KY)/ Pendle Hill Hermitages]—Some wonder whether the solitude of my Catholic retreat represents a denial of communal life around it. Jean Manion says that Elaine Prevallet, a former Pendle Hill teacher & now director at Loretto's retreat center, credits the center with creating "the sustaining matrix of quiet hospitality & [openminded]-freedom ... There is the presence of people with a free open, [& nurturing] spirit ... Not just the sisters, but other persons work here, & seem to engender that spirit."
We also have such a community at Pendle Hill. Seeking solitude from, but remaining still within the circle of community, Pendle Hill students have recognized the importance of the community to the work of solitude. How is a supportive community important in doing solitary work? A student writes: "It was important to me to feel physically and spiritually surrounded by the community of which I had been a member only 2 weeks, but with which I was sharing an important and tender part of my spiritual journey. Education consists on continual cycles of engagement and reflection together. Only engagement leaves much of what could be learn unlearned. Only reflection means one will run out of material on which to reflect. At Pendle Hill, individuals have to work very hard to find or make enough time for reflection. Withdrawal from community allows room for intuitive knowing to emerge and complete the educative process, which continues to be supported by the community.
A student writes: "I came not to the Spring House all alone—/ Although alone I shiver here tonight—/ For I am with God, in God, & at one/ With that of God in every living Light./ Peace of God doth move across my heart: Unshakable, but ever sought anew,/ & though in sep'rateness I stand apart,/ My consciousness is joined to all things, too." The listening cultivated in silence & aloneness informs one's interaction with others on one's return to community. William McNamara writes: Communication could be a kind of communion if indeed we were a more silent & solitary people ... Where we live with God alone in silence. When we come out of that holy, sacred space, we are deepened & not only ready but longing to share with others life's deeper dimensions."
We learn to sense a rhythm between engagement & reflection that God is calling us to live. [Jesus calls all disciples] to "Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place where you can rest quietly." Don't assume that you will stay in that rest, but that you will go forth again into mystery. Basil Penington writes: "[The you Jesus is inviting to be refreshed] is you & me, & the whole of you & me; the Lord wants to refresh us in our entirety. The Lord wants to respond in Love to all our needs." Feeling Jesus' invitation to rest is a conspicuous theme in retreat log book entries. It is more than recovery from fatigue; it leads to peace, to healing, to an awareness of being loved. One retreatant who expected to be searched, to make hard decisions," received the message, "You have come here to be loved." Molly Vass writes: "There is nothing to do in rest, there's nowhere to go, there's nothing that's more important or less important in rest. Rest is our birthright, & rest is part of our healing process."
My Winter Retreat: Day One Journal entry]—I took a week of unstructured silent retreat. On retreat, I read Julian of Norwich: "The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God knowing that that goodness can reach down to our lowest depths of need." DAY ONE JOURNAL ENTRY: Much of a retreat consists of just getting the task-, mind-, body-clutter out of the way. The activity of walking, along with looking as one goes, keeps the brain just occupied enough not to be tempted to [any routine distractions from meditation]. I walked around the lake and followed the stream that was the outlet from the lake.
I wound my way through brushy growth, down the bank, & found myself face-to-face with a delicate, small waterfall. At the foot of the left-hand bank down which I came, a mossy rock invited me to sit. I sat staring at the waterfall as one can stare into a fire, transfixed by the never-ending splash of sun-sparkled stream. It wrapped my mind & held it; I didn't want to leave. The falling of water entered into me & I merged into the landscape of the woods, at one with them, with the sparkle & the water's music in my soul. That was what my soul had longed for. I returned to my teen years, of being held by wonder at the beauty of nature. That young poet found here the layered years of [the full life] experience, & the gathering search for God, for unity, & merged with them.
My walk became my prayer, my contemplation, & a part of my healing & re-uniting life. Basil Penington wrote that the monk's life [was all one], & that "There was one simple movement of response to a God who had spoken, a God who speaks in books of the divinely inspired Scriptures, in the whole creation, & in the depths of one's own being." The fractured consciousness of modern man & woman [interferes with] richly-differentiated layers of consciousness waiting to be melded into a new prism of prayer. [Embracing] adolescent wonder of nature cuts through that interference. St. Bernard writes: "Believe me who have tried [listening to nature]. Thou wilt find something more in woods than books. Trees & rocks will teach what thou canst not hear from a master"
[Winter Retreat: Other Entries]—DAYS 2 &3: 2 kinds of thoughts run through my mind in reflecting on, What is Prayer?: when to pray [or not pray]; on retreat, what constitutes prayer expands. With less analytical mind involved in separating one thing from another, the distinction between what is praying & what isn't praying, begins to blur. In eating as prayer, I need to be mindful of what my body does & doesn't want. [Beginning-the-day routine as prayer becomes an unstrained morning movement of awakening the whole self. I open my self with the pace of a growing thing, not to an activities program, but to God's action around & in me in the spring-likeness of this day. Washing is [prayer], cleansing, baptism, awakening. Dressing is ceremonial preparation; breakfast is Eucharist. [Listening to the body-prayer is listening] to God speaking through the body. Sleep becomes a part of prayer. Much of a retreat is physical. It is remarkable to "do nothing" as one's top priority.
DAY 4: [I was exhausted from the rough walk] up the creek yesterday, and paid for it all the next day. I am disgusted at being so fragile. [My exploring the creek became yet one more] set back to connecting to God. I must hang on to my conviction that God is giving me what I need while I am here. I keep trying to find things I ought to do, [when the most important ought is to not do]. I had to learn through my own process what the obstacles were and the flow was between my self and God.
DAY 7: God, clear the ground, make ready open space for the seed. It has taken this whole week to clear away, to make open space, to nourish & draw together naked soil; I got the healing I needed. [My discovery & drawing close to my little outer waterfall], was a drawing closer to my inner, ever-flowing waterfall, by which I can always sit. My walking has been in search of fresh, running water, the living, laughing, life-giving water of the little streams. Woods & water re-joined me with parts of my self I had scarcely touched for a long time.
We cannot catch it, but must let it flow, over the waterfall, over the rocks, down the stream, in the sure knowing that the stream will never cease from flowing. Clearing away the oughts makes room for the nudges, which are like new green shoots piercing the surface of the cleared ground. I met God in the way I needed to; I did not have a direct experience of God [God's goodness did indeed] "reach down to my lowest depths of need."
[Clearing Away]—I am beginning to learn that the clearing away which is part of a retreat helps to reveal the nature of one's own instrument, & to clarify one's part in the community's harmony. A retreat provides discernment on how to give; one's, fractured parts are re-gathered into a whole. Silence in solitude is meant to prepare a way for the Lord; clear a straight path for God. One puts aside for a time the major obligations and all work; one sets aside all expectations to produce. It creates a clearing where nothing obscures the view. This type of silence takes its shape from the inner rhythms of the retreatant, & her or his perception of the nudges of God.
A retreatant writes: "This morning I have been so acutely aware of my natural rhythms & of the spirit asserting themselves in the absence of outside constraints ... Schedules fall away; events simply take place in intrinsic order ... In such atmosphere, it is easy & natural to be in prayer while peeling an egg or brushing one's hair ... My most necessary activities are harmonized, integrated, & unified at the deepest levels of my being ..."
This kind of retreat is shaped from the inside out. It is a very interior silence. It distrusts structures and patterns laid upon me by another's experience. It is a silence of enormous possibilities. One risk is that we may be more open to the subconscious than to God. If we are bewildered by our experience, we can seek a spiritual friend with whom to reflect on it. Such an open silence is one of tremendous potential for growth or for sheer laziness; one may "do nothing" creatively, or one may really do nothing. A greater danger is the danger of filling the time, with words; words from other people; words from books.
Filling up time is in truth the real danger we face as a religious people; it is an endemic problem. Duty overtakes us and swallows us whole. We have to fight for space, space through which to see the light. I came back from my term of study and exploration to oversee the personal retreat experiment at Pendle Hill until it became a recognized part of the resident program. I close with the 1994 logbook entry of a Spring House retreatant: "In this quiet space, away from the props and distractions of life, one can feel closer to God, obtain a truer perspective on life, feel closer to people when you hold them prayerfully, and then leave with a new enthusiasm for life which has meaning beyond ourselves."
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388. Expectant Listening: Finding God’s Thread of Guidance (by Michael Wajda; 2007)
About the Author—Michael Wajda travels widely among Friends, leading retreats, giving talks & seeking to help strengthen our meetings’ spiritual life. Michael has been a Friend since the late 1960’s. He currently serves as Associate Secretary for Development & Interpretation for the Friends General Conference. He is a graduate of the School of the Spirit’s course “On being a Spiritual Nurturer”; he and his family are members of Goshen MM.
[Introduction]—Have you ever been moved by an inbreaking of the Light—awakened by the inflowing love of God? God is continually calling us to faithfulness and into the gifts and ministries that we are given; it creates a hunger for more. One way to feed that hunger is through expectant listening. [The more] we experience this indwelling nature, the more expectant we become; we grow in expectant listening.
We Quakers are a listening people. We seek God experientially. In seeking, we find. In listening, we hear God’s messages. “Expectant listening” is listening to hear God’s messages. I was in my early 20’s and caught in the midst of a traumatic family tragedy with a schizophrenic wife for 4 years. What was this core of strength that I was discovering deep down, keeping me close to the crisis, yet letting me know that love and forgiveness were part of the mystery and miracle of life as well? My little Quaker meeting, which I had joined 3 years earlier, became a place of innocence for me. I was not judged there, and I was loved.
At first the silence in meeting and when I was alone brought me peace, harmony, & strength. Then I discovered that there was Something alive in the silence. It said: “Accept only the thoughts that come from God.” These thoughts were deeply important to me. They began to change my whole foundation, guiding me & enfolding me in love. An older member felt that the common denominator among those who know Inward Reality was that we had faced serious problems and that he had not experienced any serious problems; he was not sure that the Light was real. No matter how you find it, the most important thing is trying to keep [in touch with] it. I know now that it is not always easy to find and follow the Light. We all need encouragement in our search.
Qualities That Help Nurture Expectant Listening/ “Noticings”—Fox admonished seekers to allow Light to search them & reveal corruptions. This counsel wasn’t to suggest that seekers focus on corruption, but that they release faults & rise above them into the same Light that revealed deceiving self to seeking soul. Rex Ambler has a “Light group” process, where one is encouraged to look honestly at oneself, to wait patiently & openly for truth to come. I found I had to be honest with myself about self. When I was, I could begin to heal & to let go of some of my hurts and mistakes. It helped to share these deep experiences with others, and to be vulnerable.
A “noticing” is when we attend to the in-breaking of the spirit and try to learn from it. Mine had truth, wisdom, and life in them. They encouraged me to spend much more time listening for God. They taught me how to turn toward the Light. God speaks to us in limitless ways, through images, visions, physical shaking in worship, dreams, illness, and a deep inward knowing, well as through the still small voice within.
[Once upon a time], I had a strong attachment to entering my morning worship by reading from Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion. I began to sense that God wanted me to come without Thomas Kelly; I found that difficult. One morning I sat & waited expectantly in the silence. I felt my love for God & God’s love for me beaming within; I felt God hugging me. I was taught to come to solitary worship without another’s writings.
Samuels Bownas wrote of a traveling minister in 1696: “[She uttered to me]: ‘A traditional Quaker, thou comest to meeting as thou went from it & goes from it as thou came to it, but art no better for thy coming; what wilt thou do in the end.’ This was so pat to my condition, that I was smitten to the ground … A voice spoke in my heart saying, ‘Look unto me & I will help thee;’ & I found much comfort, that made me to shed … tears.” Samuel Bownas grew in the ministry; he began traveling in it. One of my favorite exercises is to help Friends to uncover their noticings, & to share these experiences in small groups so that everyone can learn from them. Noticing helped me to learn that God wants a relationship. This experience has greatly deepened my spiritual life.
I often experience God’s messages as something that gives life, in the best sense of the word. I also made a spiritual mistake. I was guided by the Spirit to leave a romantic relationship; I chose not to leave. For 20 years, I cut off my listening. God didn't leave me entirely, but I was outside the Garden gate. At a spiritual retreat, we were told to ask ourselves, “With God at my side, what becomes clear?” I journaled: “I feel a failure because I cut myself off from the Source. I definitely experienced a fall & feel I missed some amazing opportunity to grow spiritually. God said, “It doesn’t matter.” Eventually God asked, “Are you ready to welcome me into the center of your life again?” How do I know if what I hear is a message from God? Stan Thornburg said God’s messages are often distinguished by ways in which they bring, love, humility, wisdom, healing, and growth.
Patience—Another key aspect of expectant listening is the practice of patience. We may look for some great mountaintop experience and not notice the little ways in which the Light “speaks” to us. We may also move too quickly on a spiritual nudge or a leading. I can get carried away with my own great insights and forget to wait, or worry that if I do not speak, there may not be any vocal ministry. There are no substitutes for the Living God. My thoughts are not the same as what comes through me from the Spirit.
Patient spiritual waiting is a hard discipline for us moderns to practice. We spend too much time thinking and analyzing. When we wait [patiently] in worship, allowing our busy thoughts to pass by, God creates space for the Living presence to come in. As I settle into worship, I feel my hearing expand from my outer ears to include my inner ears. My thoughts become less important. As my listening intensifies, I often feel layers of myself slip away. Bill Taber has called this process the “Quaker technology of shifting levels of consciousness.”
Listening & Faithfulness—How does expectant listening increase our faithfulness as Friends? One of the fruits of expectant listening is more faithfulness, both at individual & corporate levels; it is all about God. It is God who gives us glimpses of God, teachings to pay attention, noticings of the Living Presence, hunger for Divine Reality, & ability to sink deep & to listen expectantly. The Living Presence gives us experiences of the Seed, so that we will come again to where we can hear God’s messages.
The more we listen & follow what we hear, the more guidance we receive. The more guidance we have, the more we will deepen our commitment to follow. Many years ago, I knew God was calling me to ministry, & I wanted to take some time to find & name that ministry. I came out knowing that I was being led to nurture those individuals who are called to ministry. I saw Sandra Cronk & Kathryn Damiano living into their ministry at the School of the Spirit. The Quaker institutions around them weren’t sure what it was about or how to support them.
I was deeply concerned about this problem [& similar ones]. I began speaking & traveling with this concern, & my meeting responded with solid support. Goshen Monthly Meeting gave me a travel minute for religious service. I have led retreats, workshops, & worship-sharing sessions on deepening spiritual life. I still have a concern for Friends who are feeling a deep call to step forward in a service of prayer & ministry. My ministry is about listening, affirming, encouraging, & supporting all Friends to go to, be fed by, & to live in the Deep Place. This is a plowing ministry to help turn the soil, so that God’s seeds waiting within can sprout & grow in us.
Listening & Corporate Faithfulness—Expectant listening helps us to nurture & strengthen our corporate faithfulness by deepening our experiences in meetings for worship & in meetings for business. Many contemporary Quaker meetings have a difficult time settling into deep worship, because we are so busy & so convinced of our good thinking. We come to meeting for worship to be with God & with others who are seeking this Reality.
Queries: What is God? Has God ever spoken to me? Have I ever experienced the Inward Light? Do I really believe in God? How do I know if it is God who is speaking? Do the other people in this room really believe in God? How can I be convinced that God really is present and is gathering us all into a place where “all creation has a new smell”?
1st, it is essential to [have noticings]. They teach us to be receptive to God’s living presence. 2nd, developing a regular spiritual practice is extremely important to deepening meetings for worship. It can include: individual daily worship; prayer; journal writing; solitude in nature; devotional reading; Bible & Quaker history study; & spiritual friendship. 3rd is “still” or “patient waiting.” Worship is nurtured when we allow ourselves to get out of the way. We seek something deeper than our own thoughts. A meeting for worship centered around our own thoughts has a false depth, a shallowness that can never reach divine transformation.
Expectant listening increases our desire to find Inward Light everywhere so that we come to meeting hungry for Living Presence. When we settle into deep, expectant listening, we experience new levels of Quaker worship. Alison Levie offered observations about meeting for [worship with attention to] business. Friends often forget meeting for business is a spiritual practice. It is looking for Truth as a body, rather than about our individual senses of truth. It is sharing glimpses of the Truth & listening deeply for a [better] sense of the whole Truth.
Friends General Conference learned that it would receive a very large bequest of about $2.5 million. The Finance Committee considered this news & recommended that this unusual gift be invested so that the income could be used to support our current programs. Any new programs would require fundraising. Friends wrestled with this recommendation. The presiding clerk helped us to hold our deliberations in worship. After excellent discernment it became clear we had to wait. [I started out with a different view, but] I felt very positive about where we came out. I knew we had been faithful. A year later our patient expectant listening bore excellent fruit.
Barry Morley’s description of how we know when we have found the sense of the meeting sounds quite similar to my experience of expectant listening. My subcommittee was in charge of the yearly meeting’s opening program. In worship, a Friend shared a dream where she heard a voice saying, “I want to speak.” As a result our plan would be to open the sessions with an extended meeting for worship.
Listening Sometimes Becomes Seeing—It has been my experience that expectant listening sometimes evokes spiritual seeing. [There are numerous Biblical examples of visual messages, & even a few among early Quakers]. One of my 1st visual spiritual experiences was after a William Blake poem; it was an image of Christ transposed on the sun. At home, I was sitting still & listening very deeply, when I saw the Miracle of Life brightly shining within & without me. Later, I was drawing an Stream of Life image, when I saw the Living Stream burning like fire. The sense of God as spiritual fire has become a persistent vision for me. These visional experiences have helped me know there are many dimensions to spiritual life. This seeing is another God-language.
Finding God’s Deep, Long Thread of Guidance/ Listening to God is a Lifelong Endeavor—God has given us a deep, long thread of guidance weaving our whole lives. My experiences have led me to cherish a profound relationship with Divine Mystery. In almost every one of my silent retreats, I have been given a significant message to help me along my spiritual journey. In another year, I was told to forgive my mother & to reach out to her. By following message, my relationship with my mother was transformed after 20 years of estrangement.
After reading John's Gospel [on retreat], [I asked while in worship], “When in this place of communion, what is it you would have me do?” [The answer in part was]: come here often; make space in your life for this communion; set your self aside; slow down your activities; trust only in my leadings; ask for guidance; worship me stronger, purer, longer; celebrate me in your heart; do what I ask, and know that the reward is in obedience.
The [deep, long] thread [of guidance] looks like this: Wake up. Help the world wake up. Go deeper. Nurture others who are following me. Share fruits of your searching & finding with others. What are you doing to stay in touch with the Living Source? You must turn your heart, mind, & soul toward me once an hour. God has given a thread to each of us individually & to all of us corporately, in order to pull us into various experiences & awareness of God’s love. Sometimes the thread will bring awareness of weakness, or of God’s love and joy.
We can nurture expectant listening by paying attention, by heeding our “noticings,” and by patient, regular spiritual practices. Expectant listening opens us to a mystical way of knowing that has the potential to transform each of us, and the whole world. We Quakers are being called to greater faithfulness. We are being called to go deep, to listen expectantly, and to respond with the best of our abilities to become channels of the Living God.
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299. Vistas from Inner Stillness (by Richard L. Walker; 1991)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Dick Walker is a convinced Friend & presently a member of Wider Quaker Fellowship. He lives in Northern AZ & is a research astronomer & article publisher about binary stars & satellites. This pamphlet is a self-expression, to describe & share common denominators in human experiences.
[Introduction]—[I have come to believe that the restlessness that causes us to feel there is more to the universe than we sense with our own senses or with instruments is caused by a collective consciousness in the universe; we are part and one with all elements in creation. At a point in inner stillness, from an awareness until then obscure, a power flows through me that frees my eyes and mind for what may truly be a glimpse into reality. “Be still and know I am God. (Psalm 46: 10). Chuang Tzu wrote: “To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.” I am moved to write this monograph in an effort to relate a few personal experiences in my life that have created an awareness in me, which I sense is “A Knowing of God.”
THE SOUNDS OF LIVING—When I was a boy we lived on the edge of [an Iowa] town; our home was bordered on 2 sides by lush green fields of corn. Stifling heat made sleep impossible; we would sleep outside, hoping for a breeze of salvation. The stillness of the night held the marvel of the stars for me. Late one night as I lay very still, I heard the corn [& the grass] grow.
[Years later my friend] Mary Campbell said: “The signal is always there, but you have to block out external sensations to hear it… That’s what the Light is like too, a far distant signal that only seems weak; yet it is clear & distinct when we listen with all we have.” Common denominators in our experiences permitted Mary & me to bridge the inexpressible & find understanding of events that were important to us.
[Here I am reaching out with my experience and feelings] to others who are kind, receptive and seeking answers]. I have been blessed with glimpses of the multiple facets of this world. My experiences all arrived from deep inside me, [from a stillness that grew inside me], at a time when I was transfixed in a state of silent awe of the power and beauty of nature. To seek God we must create a god with us in an image we can accept. The greatest truth of my life was an awareness that we are all one and one of the same.
CRYSTALS AND THE BREATH OF GOD—I studied a small depression on a sample of cassiterite, filled with tiny sparkly crystals. Studying the fairyland of light and reflections transported me back in time to my first experience with crystals. When I was 13 in school, the principal sent us out onto the playground in winter. About the sun and in the sky were great circles of light and from the sun grew shafts of light that formed a large cross whose arms arced across the heavens to meet at the cardinal points of the great circle; the cross and circle displayed the colors of a faded rainbow. At the cardinal points were 4 more circles; at their open, [outside] cardinal points were arched cusps of yellow, orange, and red light; the sky began to move.
As the circles became more distinct, mock suns formed with focusing brightness within the smaller circles and then crosses emanated from the “suns”. It was a symphony of light. Principal Meeker said: “There are clouds of 6-sided ice crystals higher than we normally see clouds. They are aligned in different patterns high up in the stratosphere. It’s called a perihelion, a great solar complex. [A short time later it began to snow]. I looked at the first snowflakes; they were 6-sided crystals.
How can one view such majesty, such beauty and not feel that everything about us is governed by laws, greater than physical laws? Laws that we can only hope to feel. Feelings consume me now as I write, and in the meditation and in our Quaker silence I can sense them radiating from the very atoms inside me, atoms which are ordering themselves inside me. They are the same ordered atoms, the same vibrating oscillators that stopped a mid-western city in the 1950s. The sensations, ideas and motivating forces within us that we call consciousness are the same as those which order the universal spheres in their orbits. Celestial consciousness is a source we all touch; we are all tapping it. It is the Good, the Light, the Spirit, an essence that I add to nature of God. There is no self, no individual, no separation of ego in blissful stillness.
THE EYE OF GOD—Herbert Young quotes his father’s answer to an atheist: “How can any man of reason & ordinary intelligence not have seen a power beyond chance in the wonders of nature, in delicate & gorgeous flowers, in beautiful trees, in the variety of animals, & in man’s own abilities? I climbed a 12,000 ft. mountain near my home. At 10,000 ft I turned north and began a steeper climb to the peak. I stood knee-deep in flowers: Indian paint brush, orange, red, and yellow, and creations of lacy blues and violets, mountain daisies, groundsels. In between the flowers were baby pine trees, green with tips of light yellow-green.
[Higher up on the mountain] fired had raged and all about me were burnt stalks of trees all white and dry. I looked back toward the flowers and faced miles of volcanic cinder cones struggling for recognition toward the sky god, and above them, cumuli cast shadows on the quilt work of the earth. I could see across the southern tip of Nevada into California, and in the north I could see the notch in the horizon we call the Grand Canyon.
At this altitude the sky was inky blue, & scattered throughout it were cloudbursts. The air also has half the oxygen content found at sea level; the mind struggles to exist. In that struggle vistas occurred at an accelerated pace. I climbed further into the sky & when I crested a saddle of the mountain I met the most beautiful cloud in the universe. It towered & grew, & billowed all white & grey, pink against the Turrellian blue sky above the mountain. The cloud towered grander than the mountain. It was the grandest in the universe. It lived & grew before me & its radiance & strength infused me with energy. It became a living entity that changed before me in a mocking display of greatness. I was truly in a state of being present, & I became flush with a crushing humility.
A fly landed on my hand. His eyes were hexagonal lenses, red and brown and black and shiny and dull and clear and opaque. In that eye was a vista that rivaled the panorama before me, above me and about me.
Reality exists somewhere between shadows & reflections of one’s thoughts. It takes a lifetime to realize that thoughts can never be distinguished in the shadows of reality. Molecules of still air on my cheek lifted a pale from my eyes. Are sensations of the soul, feelings, & sensed paradoxes the way in which reality is revealed to us? The mountain & the cloud grew ever larger, grander, & more beautiful with each quantum lift of the veil.
Between the voids the structure of galactic clustering appears like a shaped, 3-D lace work, and at each node of that intrinsic beauty a galaxy containing billions of stars glows with a singular beauty. When we become still and journey within ourselves, letting other dimensions emerge, limited and limiting thoughts may also cease.
THE KITE—Something inside me was in preparation for a spiritual lesson that was to manifest itself. I drove to a cinder cone west of my home, high in the Arizona mountains. There, 1½ miles closer to the stars, I flew a kite. To fly that kite at night was a drive within to meet something I sensed was on the edge of consciousness. I ran backwards, held the kite to the sky, & let go. It pulled & tugged before me like a child being born. It had a life then & in an instant it was gone from sight, racing toward the stars. Without a visible image, the principal senses & resulting logic were cut off & feelings were substituted. I centered on the kite, became one with it.
` Suddenly the tugging stopped & was replaced with a steady, firm pull & the nature of that pull told me I was doing more than flying a kite. The pull was gentle, one of kindness, a sweet, peaceful reassurance being transmitted from above; [we reached toward one another]. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the presence of God. All the power of the universe is before us at all times & in all situations. That power has consciousness and is aware of us. My faith in the presence of God was transformed into awareness of that spirit. It is an essence that blends us all. I asked: Will I be conscious of this presence if I let go? As I released the string my answer came.
THE PARIAH—Life just is. We are neither right nor wrong, & life’s purpose is to fulfill an obligation to live. [Walking in the Grand Canyon], I looked up a side canyon to an opposite cliff. High on the cliff [a tree grew, without benefit of ledge or crevice]. It was not a young tree, & that tree was baked each day of its life in one of nature’s most merciless ovens. Worst of all, it was alone. It was isolated. It was an outcast. It was a pariah.
At the base of the cliff, hundreds of feet below its gaol of stone, was a miniature forest of trees. The trees in this microcosm were straight, upright, blessed with sufficient water, sun, and shade. They were offspring of that suffering image of the Christ Spirit high above them. Because it lived there was life more abundant elsewhere in the universe. A lesson had been presented at a time I needed one. I had an obligation to live, and my purpose in my life was to fulfill this obligation. Loving life gives us the beginning glimpses of the edge of the miracle of paradox, the genius of the absurd, the wonder of light from darkness, and light in darkness.
FINGERS OF GOD—In a revelation of liberating death [by a roaring waterfall] I came to know the physically gentle, warm, care of the cosmos’ creative force. There’s a confluence at the Grand Canyon’s western end, where the turbulent, muddy Colorado River meets with crystal, blue-green water from Havasu Creek; it has rapids, 3 magnificent waterfalls, & leads to a very small Indian village. Entrance is usually made by hiking from a dusty hilltop deep in Arizona’s high desert, reached by 60 miles of rustic road which ends at a cliff overlooking a panorama of canyons & cliffs thousands of feet below. The vista’s desolation screams is so intense that one transcends loneliness to enter a revelation of ecstatic beauty that bubbles in the soul. 2 Quaker friends were with me.
From the hilltop one descends into a waterless world of baked stone and down switchbacks shared with Indian horses, [through 30-foot wide canyons and layers of rock laid down 250 million years ago. The 3 waterfalls are: Navajo Falls (50 ft. high); Havasu Falls (150 ft. high); Mooney Falls (200 ft. high). We camped by the 3rd one]. We chose 3 separate rocks on which to sit and settled into an inner stillness.
After a while it seemed as though first one & then another friend had moved closer [actually they hadn’t moved]. Something was pressing against me, not my friends, from behind, front, above, & beneath; I was surrounded. Awareness changed from terror to love as I realized this was gentle force, a brush of power, & my fear changed to awe, then bliss. I was flooded with light, granting me awareness; in this setting of clear beauty, I was surrounded by part of the universe’s infinite force & it was contacting me with an assurance that God was there.
THE GREAT CIRCLES ON MT. HAMILTON—One summer evening [at the “Great Refractor” on Mt. Hamilton], I was distracted [by the moonlight within the dome]. As the moon moved, its light pour down the telescope like pale silver and paused on the great circles high above me. It then dropped to the floor, where my eyes met a confusion of interwoven elliptical shadows magnified by projection. In those shadows was something I had never seen before; not a visible sight, but insight. I saw a glimpse of truth of the universe displayed before me in a show of light and shadows. It was only a glimpse, and I could not fathom it.
I ran from the dome, & stood in the darkness of the hot night air. [There was a great universal meeting of my Self with the stars]. The centering was instantaneous and so deep that my body left me as I became only mind and then that mind, that ego, faded too. The stars became parallel shafts of light all of various hues from white to dark red; I heard the stars. My ego become an illusion, it was a twist of existence. [The universe], the laws of nature, God, Light are incomplete without us. The atoms of my body began to dissolve, disassociate and mingle and then move out and upward through space. It was a very grand osmotic transformation and I became aware I would never cease to be. It, God is one and the parts, the fragments I thought was me, a personality, is part of it.
There is a gap between each thought we have. That gap, that interval of time & space, is our inner stillness. It is there that peace resides, inner peace, the stillness of our soul. Friends in meeting can tap a tremendous source, a vantage point for an extra view of the universe. Through the inner stillness we become a portion of the wonderful vista. Our inner silence is like a gate through which the good of the universe flows through us. It is a good amplified in our lives that flows back leaving us reborn each time with greater love. [I have seen many if not most of the wonders that the universe has to show us]. It is of no importance to me how many voyages I complete about the sun, for some day I will experience the ultimate experience, disembark and walk about for a time.
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At first the silence in meeting and when I was alone brought me peace, harmony, & strength. Then I discovered that there was Something alive in the silence. It said: “Accept only the thoughts that come from God.” These thoughts were deeply important to me. They began to change my whole foundation, guiding me & enfolding me in love. An older member felt that the common denominator among those who know Inward Reality was that we had faced serious problems and that he had not experienced any serious problems; he was not sure that the Light was real. No matter how you find it, the most important thing is trying to keep [in touch with] it. I know now that it is not always easy to find and follow the Light. We all need encouragement in our search.
Qualities That Help Nurture Expectant Listening/ “Noticings”—Fox admonished seekers to allow Light to search them & reveal corruptions. This counsel wasn’t to suggest that seekers focus on corruption, but that they release faults & rise above them into the same Light that revealed deceiving self to seeking soul. Rex Ambler has a “Light group” process, where one is encouraged to look honestly at oneself, to wait patiently & openly for truth to come. I found I had to be honest with myself about self. When I was, I could begin to heal & to let go of some of my hurts and mistakes. It helped to share these deep experiences with others, and to be vulnerable.
A “noticing” is when we attend to the in-breaking of the spirit and try to learn from it. Mine had truth, wisdom, and life in them. They encouraged me to spend much more time listening for God. They taught me how to turn toward the Light. God speaks to us in limitless ways, through images, visions, physical shaking in worship, dreams, illness, and a deep inward knowing, well as through the still small voice within.
[Once upon a time], I had a strong attachment to entering my morning worship by reading from Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion. I began to sense that God wanted me to come without Thomas Kelly; I found that difficult. One morning I sat & waited expectantly in the silence. I felt my love for God & God’s love for me beaming within; I felt God hugging me. I was taught to come to solitary worship without another’s writings.
Samuels Bownas wrote of a traveling minister in 1696: “[She uttered to me]: ‘A traditional Quaker, thou comest to meeting as thou went from it & goes from it as thou came to it, but art no better for thy coming; what wilt thou do in the end.’ This was so pat to my condition, that I was smitten to the ground … A voice spoke in my heart saying, ‘Look unto me & I will help thee;’ & I found much comfort, that made me to shed … tears.” Samuel Bownas grew in the ministry; he began traveling in it. One of my favorite exercises is to help Friends to uncover their noticings, & to share these experiences in small groups so that everyone can learn from them. Noticing helped me to learn that God wants a relationship. This experience has greatly deepened my spiritual life.
I often experience God’s messages as something that gives life, in the best sense of the word. I also made a spiritual mistake. I was guided by the Spirit to leave a romantic relationship; I chose not to leave. For 20 years, I cut off my listening. God didn't leave me entirely, but I was outside the Garden gate. At a spiritual retreat, we were told to ask ourselves, “With God at my side, what becomes clear?” I journaled: “I feel a failure because I cut myself off from the Source. I definitely experienced a fall & feel I missed some amazing opportunity to grow spiritually. God said, “It doesn’t matter.” Eventually God asked, “Are you ready to welcome me into the center of your life again?” How do I know if what I hear is a message from God? Stan Thornburg said God’s messages are often distinguished by ways in which they bring, love, humility, wisdom, healing, and growth.
Patience—Another key aspect of expectant listening is the practice of patience. We may look for some great mountaintop experience and not notice the little ways in which the Light “speaks” to us. We may also move too quickly on a spiritual nudge or a leading. I can get carried away with my own great insights and forget to wait, or worry that if I do not speak, there may not be any vocal ministry. There are no substitutes for the Living God. My thoughts are not the same as what comes through me from the Spirit.
Patient spiritual waiting is a hard discipline for us moderns to practice. We spend too much time thinking and analyzing. When we wait [patiently] in worship, allowing our busy thoughts to pass by, God creates space for the Living presence to come in. As I settle into worship, I feel my hearing expand from my outer ears to include my inner ears. My thoughts become less important. As my listening intensifies, I often feel layers of myself slip away. Bill Taber has called this process the “Quaker technology of shifting levels of consciousness.”
Listening & Faithfulness—How does expectant listening increase our faithfulness as Friends? One of the fruits of expectant listening is more faithfulness, both at individual & corporate levels; it is all about God. It is God who gives us glimpses of God, teachings to pay attention, noticings of the Living Presence, hunger for Divine Reality, & ability to sink deep & to listen expectantly. The Living Presence gives us experiences of the Seed, so that we will come again to where we can hear God’s messages.
The more we listen & follow what we hear, the more guidance we receive. The more guidance we have, the more we will deepen our commitment to follow. Many years ago, I knew God was calling me to ministry, & I wanted to take some time to find & name that ministry. I came out knowing that I was being led to nurture those individuals who are called to ministry. I saw Sandra Cronk & Kathryn Damiano living into their ministry at the School of the Spirit. The Quaker institutions around them weren’t sure what it was about or how to support them.
I was deeply concerned about this problem [& similar ones]. I began speaking & traveling with this concern, & my meeting responded with solid support. Goshen Monthly Meeting gave me a travel minute for religious service. I have led retreats, workshops, & worship-sharing sessions on deepening spiritual life. I still have a concern for Friends who are feeling a deep call to step forward in a service of prayer & ministry. My ministry is about listening, affirming, encouraging, & supporting all Friends to go to, be fed by, & to live in the Deep Place. This is a plowing ministry to help turn the soil, so that God’s seeds waiting within can sprout & grow in us.
Listening & Corporate Faithfulness—Expectant listening helps us to nurture & strengthen our corporate faithfulness by deepening our experiences in meetings for worship & in meetings for business. Many contemporary Quaker meetings have a difficult time settling into deep worship, because we are so busy & so convinced of our good thinking. We come to meeting for worship to be with God & with others who are seeking this Reality.
Queries: What is God? Has God ever spoken to me? Have I ever experienced the Inward Light? Do I really believe in God? How do I know if it is God who is speaking? Do the other people in this room really believe in God? How can I be convinced that God really is present and is gathering us all into a place where “all creation has a new smell”?
1st, it is essential to [have noticings]. They teach us to be receptive to God’s living presence. 2nd, developing a regular spiritual practice is extremely important to deepening meetings for worship. It can include: individual daily worship; prayer; journal writing; solitude in nature; devotional reading; Bible & Quaker history study; & spiritual friendship. 3rd is “still” or “patient waiting.” Worship is nurtured when we allow ourselves to get out of the way. We seek something deeper than our own thoughts. A meeting for worship centered around our own thoughts has a false depth, a shallowness that can never reach divine transformation.
Expectant listening increases our desire to find Inward Light everywhere so that we come to meeting hungry for Living Presence. When we settle into deep, expectant listening, we experience new levels of Quaker worship. Alison Levie offered observations about meeting for [worship with attention to] business. Friends often forget meeting for business is a spiritual practice. It is looking for Truth as a body, rather than about our individual senses of truth. It is sharing glimpses of the Truth & listening deeply for a [better] sense of the whole Truth.
Friends General Conference learned that it would receive a very large bequest of about $2.5 million. The Finance Committee considered this news & recommended that this unusual gift be invested so that the income could be used to support our current programs. Any new programs would require fundraising. Friends wrestled with this recommendation. The presiding clerk helped us to hold our deliberations in worship. After excellent discernment it became clear we had to wait. [I started out with a different view, but] I felt very positive about where we came out. I knew we had been faithful. A year later our patient expectant listening bore excellent fruit.
Barry Morley’s description of how we know when we have found the sense of the meeting sounds quite similar to my experience of expectant listening. My subcommittee was in charge of the yearly meeting’s opening program. In worship, a Friend shared a dream where she heard a voice saying, “I want to speak.” As a result our plan would be to open the sessions with an extended meeting for worship.
Listening Sometimes Becomes Seeing—It has been my experience that expectant listening sometimes evokes spiritual seeing. [There are numerous Biblical examples of visual messages, & even a few among early Quakers]. One of my 1st visual spiritual experiences was after a William Blake poem; it was an image of Christ transposed on the sun. At home, I was sitting still & listening very deeply, when I saw the Miracle of Life brightly shining within & without me. Later, I was drawing an Stream of Life image, when I saw the Living Stream burning like fire. The sense of God as spiritual fire has become a persistent vision for me. These visional experiences have helped me know there are many dimensions to spiritual life. This seeing is another God-language.
Finding God’s Deep, Long Thread of Guidance/ Listening to God is a Lifelong Endeavor—God has given us a deep, long thread of guidance weaving our whole lives. My experiences have led me to cherish a profound relationship with Divine Mystery. In almost every one of my silent retreats, I have been given a significant message to help me along my spiritual journey. In another year, I was told to forgive my mother & to reach out to her. By following message, my relationship with my mother was transformed after 20 years of estrangement.
After reading John's Gospel [on retreat], [I asked while in worship], “When in this place of communion, what is it you would have me do?” [The answer in part was]: come here often; make space in your life for this communion; set your self aside; slow down your activities; trust only in my leadings; ask for guidance; worship me stronger, purer, longer; celebrate me in your heart; do what I ask, and know that the reward is in obedience.
The [deep, long] thread [of guidance] looks like this: Wake up. Help the world wake up. Go deeper. Nurture others who are following me. Share fruits of your searching & finding with others. What are you doing to stay in touch with the Living Source? You must turn your heart, mind, & soul toward me once an hour. God has given a thread to each of us individually & to all of us corporately, in order to pull us into various experiences & awareness of God’s love. Sometimes the thread will bring awareness of weakness, or of God’s love and joy.
We can nurture expectant listening by paying attention, by heeding our “noticings,” and by patient, regular spiritual practices. Expectant listening opens us to a mystical way of knowing that has the potential to transform each of us, and the whole world. We Quakers are being called to greater faithfulness. We are being called to go deep, to listen expectantly, and to respond with the best of our abilities to become channels of the Living God.
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299. Vistas from Inner Stillness (by Richard L. Walker; 1991)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR—Dick Walker is a convinced Friend & presently a member of Wider Quaker Fellowship. He lives in Northern AZ & is a research astronomer & article publisher about binary stars & satellites. This pamphlet is a self-expression, to describe & share common denominators in human experiences.
[Introduction]—[I have come to believe that the restlessness that causes us to feel there is more to the universe than we sense with our own senses or with instruments is caused by a collective consciousness in the universe; we are part and one with all elements in creation. At a point in inner stillness, from an awareness until then obscure, a power flows through me that frees my eyes and mind for what may truly be a glimpse into reality. “Be still and know I am God. (Psalm 46: 10). Chuang Tzu wrote: “To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.” I am moved to write this monograph in an effort to relate a few personal experiences in my life that have created an awareness in me, which I sense is “A Knowing of God.”
THE SOUNDS OF LIVING—When I was a boy we lived on the edge of [an Iowa] town; our home was bordered on 2 sides by lush green fields of corn. Stifling heat made sleep impossible; we would sleep outside, hoping for a breeze of salvation. The stillness of the night held the marvel of the stars for me. Late one night as I lay very still, I heard the corn [& the grass] grow.
[Years later my friend] Mary Campbell said: “The signal is always there, but you have to block out external sensations to hear it… That’s what the Light is like too, a far distant signal that only seems weak; yet it is clear & distinct when we listen with all we have.” Common denominators in our experiences permitted Mary & me to bridge the inexpressible & find understanding of events that were important to us.
[Here I am reaching out with my experience and feelings] to others who are kind, receptive and seeking answers]. I have been blessed with glimpses of the multiple facets of this world. My experiences all arrived from deep inside me, [from a stillness that grew inside me], at a time when I was transfixed in a state of silent awe of the power and beauty of nature. To seek God we must create a god with us in an image we can accept. The greatest truth of my life was an awareness that we are all one and one of the same.
CRYSTALS AND THE BREATH OF GOD—I studied a small depression on a sample of cassiterite, filled with tiny sparkly crystals. Studying the fairyland of light and reflections transported me back in time to my first experience with crystals. When I was 13 in school, the principal sent us out onto the playground in winter. About the sun and in the sky were great circles of light and from the sun grew shafts of light that formed a large cross whose arms arced across the heavens to meet at the cardinal points of the great circle; the cross and circle displayed the colors of a faded rainbow. At the cardinal points were 4 more circles; at their open, [outside] cardinal points were arched cusps of yellow, orange, and red light; the sky began to move.
As the circles became more distinct, mock suns formed with focusing brightness within the smaller circles and then crosses emanated from the “suns”. It was a symphony of light. Principal Meeker said: “There are clouds of 6-sided ice crystals higher than we normally see clouds. They are aligned in different patterns high up in the stratosphere. It’s called a perihelion, a great solar complex. [A short time later it began to snow]. I looked at the first snowflakes; they were 6-sided crystals.
How can one view such majesty, such beauty and not feel that everything about us is governed by laws, greater than physical laws? Laws that we can only hope to feel. Feelings consume me now as I write, and in the meditation and in our Quaker silence I can sense them radiating from the very atoms inside me, atoms which are ordering themselves inside me. They are the same ordered atoms, the same vibrating oscillators that stopped a mid-western city in the 1950s. The sensations, ideas and motivating forces within us that we call consciousness are the same as those which order the universal spheres in their orbits. Celestial consciousness is a source we all touch; we are all tapping it. It is the Good, the Light, the Spirit, an essence that I add to nature of God. There is no self, no individual, no separation of ego in blissful stillness.
THE EYE OF GOD—Herbert Young quotes his father’s answer to an atheist: “How can any man of reason & ordinary intelligence not have seen a power beyond chance in the wonders of nature, in delicate & gorgeous flowers, in beautiful trees, in the variety of animals, & in man’s own abilities? I climbed a 12,000 ft. mountain near my home. At 10,000 ft I turned north and began a steeper climb to the peak. I stood knee-deep in flowers: Indian paint brush, orange, red, and yellow, and creations of lacy blues and violets, mountain daisies, groundsels. In between the flowers were baby pine trees, green with tips of light yellow-green.
[Higher up on the mountain] fired had raged and all about me were burnt stalks of trees all white and dry. I looked back toward the flowers and faced miles of volcanic cinder cones struggling for recognition toward the sky god, and above them, cumuli cast shadows on the quilt work of the earth. I could see across the southern tip of Nevada into California, and in the north I could see the notch in the horizon we call the Grand Canyon.
At this altitude the sky was inky blue, & scattered throughout it were cloudbursts. The air also has half the oxygen content found at sea level; the mind struggles to exist. In that struggle vistas occurred at an accelerated pace. I climbed further into the sky & when I crested a saddle of the mountain I met the most beautiful cloud in the universe. It towered & grew, & billowed all white & grey, pink against the Turrellian blue sky above the mountain. The cloud towered grander than the mountain. It was the grandest in the universe. It lived & grew before me & its radiance & strength infused me with energy. It became a living entity that changed before me in a mocking display of greatness. I was truly in a state of being present, & I became flush with a crushing humility.
A fly landed on my hand. His eyes were hexagonal lenses, red and brown and black and shiny and dull and clear and opaque. In that eye was a vista that rivaled the panorama before me, above me and about me.
Reality exists somewhere between shadows & reflections of one’s thoughts. It takes a lifetime to realize that thoughts can never be distinguished in the shadows of reality. Molecules of still air on my cheek lifted a pale from my eyes. Are sensations of the soul, feelings, & sensed paradoxes the way in which reality is revealed to us? The mountain & the cloud grew ever larger, grander, & more beautiful with each quantum lift of the veil.
Between the voids the structure of galactic clustering appears like a shaped, 3-D lace work, and at each node of that intrinsic beauty a galaxy containing billions of stars glows with a singular beauty. When we become still and journey within ourselves, letting other dimensions emerge, limited and limiting thoughts may also cease.
THE KITE—Something inside me was in preparation for a spiritual lesson that was to manifest itself. I drove to a cinder cone west of my home, high in the Arizona mountains. There, 1½ miles closer to the stars, I flew a kite. To fly that kite at night was a drive within to meet something I sensed was on the edge of consciousness. I ran backwards, held the kite to the sky, & let go. It pulled & tugged before me like a child being born. It had a life then & in an instant it was gone from sight, racing toward the stars. Without a visible image, the principal senses & resulting logic were cut off & feelings were substituted. I centered on the kite, became one with it.
` Suddenly the tugging stopped & was replaced with a steady, firm pull & the nature of that pull told me I was doing more than flying a kite. The pull was gentle, one of kindness, a sweet, peaceful reassurance being transmitted from above; [we reached toward one another]. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the presence of God. All the power of the universe is before us at all times & in all situations. That power has consciousness and is aware of us. My faith in the presence of God was transformed into awareness of that spirit. It is an essence that blends us all. I asked: Will I be conscious of this presence if I let go? As I released the string my answer came.
THE PARIAH—Life just is. We are neither right nor wrong, & life’s purpose is to fulfill an obligation to live. [Walking in the Grand Canyon], I looked up a side canyon to an opposite cliff. High on the cliff [a tree grew, without benefit of ledge or crevice]. It was not a young tree, & that tree was baked each day of its life in one of nature’s most merciless ovens. Worst of all, it was alone. It was isolated. It was an outcast. It was a pariah.
At the base of the cliff, hundreds of feet below its gaol of stone, was a miniature forest of trees. The trees in this microcosm were straight, upright, blessed with sufficient water, sun, and shade. They were offspring of that suffering image of the Christ Spirit high above them. Because it lived there was life more abundant elsewhere in the universe. A lesson had been presented at a time I needed one. I had an obligation to live, and my purpose in my life was to fulfill this obligation. Loving life gives us the beginning glimpses of the edge of the miracle of paradox, the genius of the absurd, the wonder of light from darkness, and light in darkness.
FINGERS OF GOD—In a revelation of liberating death [by a roaring waterfall] I came to know the physically gentle, warm, care of the cosmos’ creative force. There’s a confluence at the Grand Canyon’s western end, where the turbulent, muddy Colorado River meets with crystal, blue-green water from Havasu Creek; it has rapids, 3 magnificent waterfalls, & leads to a very small Indian village. Entrance is usually made by hiking from a dusty hilltop deep in Arizona’s high desert, reached by 60 miles of rustic road which ends at a cliff overlooking a panorama of canyons & cliffs thousands of feet below. The vista’s desolation screams is so intense that one transcends loneliness to enter a revelation of ecstatic beauty that bubbles in the soul. 2 Quaker friends were with me.
From the hilltop one descends into a waterless world of baked stone and down switchbacks shared with Indian horses, [through 30-foot wide canyons and layers of rock laid down 250 million years ago. The 3 waterfalls are: Navajo Falls (50 ft. high); Havasu Falls (150 ft. high); Mooney Falls (200 ft. high). We camped by the 3rd one]. We chose 3 separate rocks on which to sit and settled into an inner stillness.
After a while it seemed as though first one & then another friend had moved closer [actually they hadn’t moved]. Something was pressing against me, not my friends, from behind, front, above, & beneath; I was surrounded. Awareness changed from terror to love as I realized this was gentle force, a brush of power, & my fear changed to awe, then bliss. I was flooded with light, granting me awareness; in this setting of clear beauty, I was surrounded by part of the universe’s infinite force & it was contacting me with an assurance that God was there.
THE GREAT CIRCLES ON MT. HAMILTON—One summer evening [at the “Great Refractor” on Mt. Hamilton], I was distracted [by the moonlight within the dome]. As the moon moved, its light pour down the telescope like pale silver and paused on the great circles high above me. It then dropped to the floor, where my eyes met a confusion of interwoven elliptical shadows magnified by projection. In those shadows was something I had never seen before; not a visible sight, but insight. I saw a glimpse of truth of the universe displayed before me in a show of light and shadows. It was only a glimpse, and I could not fathom it.
I ran from the dome, & stood in the darkness of the hot night air. [There was a great universal meeting of my Self with the stars]. The centering was instantaneous and so deep that my body left me as I became only mind and then that mind, that ego, faded too. The stars became parallel shafts of light all of various hues from white to dark red; I heard the stars. My ego become an illusion, it was a twist of existence. [The universe], the laws of nature, God, Light are incomplete without us. The atoms of my body began to dissolve, disassociate and mingle and then move out and upward through space. It was a very grand osmotic transformation and I became aware I would never cease to be. It, God is one and the parts, the fragments I thought was me, a personality, is part of it.
There is a gap between each thought we have. That gap, that interval of time & space, is our inner stillness. It is there that peace resides, inner peace, the stillness of our soul. Friends in meeting can tap a tremendous source, a vantage point for an extra view of the universe. Through the inner stillness we become a portion of the wonderful vista. Our inner silence is like a gate through which the good of the universe flows through us. It is a good amplified in our lives that flows back leaving us reborn each time with greater love. [I have seen many if not most of the wonders that the universe has to show us]. It is of no importance to me how many voyages I complete about the sun, for some day I will experience the ultimate experience, disembark and walk about for a time.
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