Walking the Walk ...

It is easy to talk about stillness and silence, but for something so simple it can be elusive in practice. Time set aside can be eaten up – or not even be set aside in the first place, good intentions side-lined by all sorts of ‘good’ reasons.

I find that a regular practice of stillness and quiet is really helpful – essential even, like the air that I breathe. This is not in order to become better at it – there seems to be a sense of always beginning at the start every day. No, the practice for me is so as to become more hungry, more empty, more available to the infill of God, to the Beloved. This work is one of commitment to being and beholding, as the Cloud of unknowing says, to ‘smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for thing befalleth.’ Feelings of failure are normal and part and parcel of the whole - what matters is the trying. The rest is up to God.

Still Waters provides an opportunity for an open ‘community of practice’ to meet regularly. Our local sessions here on the South Downs, in a little church in the middle of a farmyard, consist of a few minutes of shared insight offered, before keeping silence together for about 30-35 minutes. The session is then repeated and we leave as we arrived, in quiet, taking the silence with us into the day. It happens even if nobody else comes – an opportunity for each us to be still, to enter silence, to wait, emptying ourselves into the void for the sake of love …

Still Waters:

A time to enter silence, still the mind 

and encounter the present moment in quiet

Saturday 2^nd November 2013

8 – 10 am

St. Mary’s Church, Sullington, 

West Sussex RH20 4AE

Come for an hour at 8 or 9 or stay for the whole time.

Stillness just is.

Attentive but effortless, 

wise stillness lets be what is arising

and lets go what has arisen.

At the still point, we let strain and stress arise

without strain or stress.

For stillness as such is neither strain nor stress.

It is open, boundless and free.

Nothing to gain. Nothing to lose.

Priest-monk Silouan

Wisdom Songs

 Peace be with you

Silence & Beholding

A Service of Silence & Beholding

A time of unhurried silence in which to dwell at the heart of the Eucharist

8 a.m.

Sunday 27^th October 2013

St. Mary’s Church,

Sullington RH20 4AE

  The presence of the Incarnate Word penetrates like a universal element.

It shines at the heart of all things.

Teilhard de Chardin

Peace be with you

Wild Geese

Autumn has arrived at Wild Fortune; following a few mild weeks, the temperature is dropping as are acorns, conkers and leaves. The water butts are full once again. Fungi arrive as if from nowhere and the apples are now picked, crisp and sweet, waiting to be either stored or given away. This is my favourite season. The clarity of light along with the rich colours of earth and foliage and the sharpness of the air is for me enlivening and inviting. And everything seems to be slowing to a pause; days shortening, the year turning, from fruiting and harvest to withdrawal and rest.

                                                   

And every day for the last couple of weeks, the wild geese have been passing by overhead, announcing their impending departure with their harsh calls and straggling v-shaped formations. Sometimes they seem to be practising, flying in wide circles, in small clusters and large groups early morning and late afternoon.  

In Celtic spirituality, where creation is 'God’s big book', the wild goose is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. I can see why. Some years ago on retreat on the Welsh coast my little room overlooked the bay. Each evening dozens of geese would pass over, strong-winged and determined in their flight. I would run outside barefoot to greet them and to be caught up in their calls, often interpreted as being ones of encouragement, blessing them on their way. Here at home this year, the tree tops framing their fleeting presence, they continue to inspire. Crossing boundaries of land and sea, journeying together, they seem to epitomise the raw energy, strength and beauty of the Spirit of God. In doing so, I sense they offer creative insight into what it is to journey with one another.  

Peace be with you.

Absence

A few weeks ago, we arrived home from taking our youngest daughter to university. We have for the first time in 26 years come home to an empty nest. The house is full of reminders of recent presence – a newly vacant bedroom, old shoes, cat sprawled in her usual place, a half pack of favourite breakfast cereal, odd socks in the airing cupboard, photo on the sideboard, the piano (and the television) silent. It is very still, very quiet … and we are aware of the felt-sense of vacuum and absence.

It would be easy to shift our focus and to fill up the place with people, to fill the diary with activity. Whilst that is an option, it feels to me that it is also to turn away from being at the unfurling edge of being present in this place; this is a recurring invitation to attend to the felt-absence, spoken of by poets and mystics alike as painful and raw, a searing ache, a numbing sense of lack, a gaping vacuum. Despite what others might say, I have found that this feeling of absence is an invitation to go deeper in silence and solitude, in loving attention, waiting on God. Allowed to be present and heard, it speaks of the heart’s desire, bringing its wisdom and gift of emptiness into place and time.

  

The Absence

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come.

I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here

than before. Genes and molecules

have no more power to call

him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail

as my words do. What resources have I

other than the emptiness without him of my whole

being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

R.S.Thomas