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 2nd 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
Hi Tessa,
ReplyDeleteYour post stuck a chord if only because I watched the documentary Into Great Silence yesterday. It simply defies comprehension, mine anyway, being able to sustain such a way of life for a lifetime. It would seem such monastics must come to understand Silouan's words ... and deeply so. Or they just wither away. Or must leave.
This is one end of the spectrum perhaps of the human capacity for silence, stillness, and listening to that which rises and falls away.
The film is worth watching if you have not seen it. We all must learn from how unscarred the monastery and surrounding terrain are even though people have been living there for so long. And the chanting during night services is exquisite.
A lovely post. Thanks.