Silence

Propers: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 16), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest for a while.” What a balm are these words for the suffering of the sin-sick soul. Brothers and sisters, for all our prosperity, all our entertainments, all our distractions, the one thing we seem to lack here in the wealthy Western world is true and fruitful silence, solitude, rest for the weary of spirit.

In the Christian tradition there are three sorts of prayer: oratio, meditatio, and contemplatio. Don’t let the Latin throw you. Oratio is oration, spoken prayer, the simplest and most straightforward communion we have with God. We speak to Him—either silently or aloud—trusting not only that He will hear us, but that in Jesus Christ God also prays with us, even within us, as the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. We are made bold to speak to the All-Father of All Worlds because in Christ we have been made one with God, as a family is one.

Oratio is the milk of prayer. We pray together as a congregation. We pray as families in the home. We pray as individuals in our hearts and on our beds. We speak in words to the God who is the Word. And He hears us, speaks with us, as once He spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting in the desert.

The next level of prayer is meditatio, meditation. And this tends to require silence, of mind if nothing else. These days we often associate meditation with Eastern religions: Buddhists meditate; Hindus meditate; Confucians meditate. But so do Christians, and we always have. There are certainly similarities. Buddhists speak of meditation in ways that often seem to echo the Church Fathers. Yet for us meditation is not something separate from prayer, but rather a type of prayer.

In meditation we focus on an image, or a verse, or the simplest line of prayer, and we hold it in our minds, repeating it, letting it fill our vision to the exclusion of worldly distractions and cares. We fill our mind with the simplicity of prayer. In the West the most popular form of meditation is the Rosary, our prayer beads. We pray the Our Father, over and again. We repeat the greetings of Elizabeth and Gabriel to Mary, over and again. Hail Mary, Our Father, Hail Mary, Our Father.

And we focus on episodes in the life of Christ as we do so: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. And these images, these stories, these words, well up within us, filling us, rejuvenating us, so that all the worries and frets and fantasies that fill our frenetic monkey minds from day to day are pushed out, are let go, are banished into silence. And we are filled instead by the Light of Christ within us.

In the Eastern Church, meditation tends to be even simpler. They recite the Jesus Prayer, silently, scores of times, hundreds of times: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Over and over again, until it is the background of every action, of every thought. Yes, it can easily become meaningless repetition if we’re not careful, but that’s where mindfulness comes in, concentrating on what we’re doing, what we’re thinking. Our minds, they say, are always filled with noise. Why not fill them with simplicity and beauty and truth instead?

And finally there is contemplatio, contemplation. This is the most mystical form of prayer. It is wordless, thoughtless—and for most of us, extremely rare. It is often the fruit of meditation, though sometimes it comes as a “God-bomb,” a bolt from the blue. We find it in the deer stand, the lake boat, the sanctuary.

In contemplation we are simply overwhelmed by the wonder and presence and achingly beautiful grace of God. When you walk into a soaring cathedral, or gaze into the depths of the Grand Canyon, or see the world in the eyes of a stranger, and you find yourself agape, completely at a loss for words: that’s contemplation. It is a flash of true reflection in a shard of shattered mirror. For one timeless moment we are completely unattached to anything, a pure flow of experience—and thus find ourselves aware of everything, everyone, everywhere, everywhen.

It’s hard to put into words that which is beyond words. But we’ve all experienced contemplatio, intentionally or otherwise. And it is at those times that we feel most transcendent and yet most human.

But to do any of this, to hear and see and experience the depths of reality through meditation and contemplation, we need silence. We need rest not just of body but of mind and of soul. We need to come away to a deserted place all by ourselves and rest a while. The Buddha used to do so three hours a day and three months a year. In the Gospels Christ often tries something similar, but we simply won’t let Him. Our need is too great, His compassion too powerful, and His time too short.

Now, maybe peace and solitude seem all but unobtainable in our busy modes of life. Who has time to rest under the Bodhi tree and wait for the world to pass away? If so, I would commend you to Martin Luther who put his own twist on the traditional schema of prayer. For him, meditation was a close reading of the Scriptures, wrestling with the text, fighting with it as Jacob grappled God.

And instead of contemplatio, Luther spoke of tentatio—which is struggle, agony, anguish. It is that very German sense of anfechtung, that is, of life, and especially of religion, as the painful process of fighting rebirth, of dying and rising again. Luther made it clear that if we don’t make time for prayer, prayer will hunt us down. Tentatio is aggressive, and often comes to us brutally and unbidden. The world will break us, Luther knew, like the threshing of wheat, like the treading of grapes, until we are so broken down that Christ at last can raise us up. There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

As a teenager in the Nineties I grew up, like most of my class, listening to Alanis Morissette on the radio, and that album of hers, Jagged Little Pill. I know this dates me. But she had that remarkable little line in one of her songs: “Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?” And the air would go dead for a beat, then two, then three. And then she’d strike like a viper: “Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines, or when you think you’re gonna die? Or did you long for the next distraction?”

And that was so dead-on. Because we are uncomfortable with the silence, uncomfortable with not having entertainments and purchases and all the things Pascal called divertissement—distractions, diversions, pretty little lies filling up our lives. We’re uncomfortable because we know that if we let the silence in, if we take the blinders off, if we stop sprinting through life for just two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes a day, and stop to rest and listen—God will be there waiting for us. In the silence. In the quiet. In the rest we need for our souls.

And if we see Him there waiting, if we let Him in through the silence, the game’s done. The lies are through. We will have to acknowledge that He is there, that He’s always been there, within and around and above and through us. We will have to let go of all our purchases and preferences and politics and embrace the sublime agony of the real.

And if we do not do this of our own accord, if we do not take the time and the effort to let go in prayer and meditation and contemplation of the mystic, then it may well be that God will come for us in tentatio—in the anguish, in the struggle, in the breaking down that builds us up. For our God is a consuming fire, an ever-burning love that will not be denied. And if we will not turn to Him, I wonder if He will not take us in tentatio, rip us out from this cocoon of consumeristic death, back into the truth of life. That doesn’t seem to be His style, I confess. But people do crazy things when they’re in love.

Take the time to pray, even if it’s nothing more than “Thank You.” Take the time to meditate, even if it’s but two minutes of quiet in an otherwise busy and blustery day. Most of all cherish those wordless moments of beauty and of bliss when God seems to be reaching out to us from behind the false fabric of this world. Even our struggles can be a type of prayer.

God is always around us, always with us, always waiting in the silence. It’s simply a matter of letting go, that the silence may then seep into our souls.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.