Lexington, KY - My friend Edward Stone Gleason, now "retired," has had a long and distinguished career as priest, teacher, author and editor. But before Ted was any of those things, he spent two years as a naval officer. It's from that time that this story comes, written in the prologue to his book, "In the Presence."
One day when his ship was far north of Hudson Bay, the captain called Ted to his cabin and gave him an assignment. He was to go ashore, gather and identify some geological samples - rocks.
After the ship's boat landed him, it lay offshore a hundred or so yards for the two hours of his mission. Ted began climbing a steep slope and looked back. The ship seemed far away. He walked on, up and up, chipping a rock here and there, dropping the samples in a bucket. When he turned to look back again "the ship was far less visible, now in another world, far, far away. I was alone, all alone, very alone. I could scarcely make out the little 38 ft. boat that had brought me from the ship to shore. The world from which I had come was now unreal, toy-like. Only I was real, and totally alone."
But there was something in the silence, "amazing and wonderful and life-changing. I was enveloped, encased, surrounded and uplifted, as I had never been before by silence." He knew he was in a holy place. "Time lost all meaning and as it did I knew what I was hearing was the voice of God."
"What I realized and now remember was that for most of the time of our lives we never allow ourselves to hear what God says. God speaks in silence."
But where do we in this time and place, far away in every sense from Ted's holy place in the wilderness, find silence? We who are distracted by the noise of things and drowning in tsunamis of the spoken and written word.
Thomas Merton, writing in 1946, when the world was less noisy and wordy, wrote: "We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit, and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible."
Still, silence can be found. Every Thursday afternoon at 5 o'clock a group meets in our church. Sometimes there are four or five, occasionally nine or 10. For a half hour they settle in, most of them at the end of a busy day, discussing a study book or simply talking about prayer and their experiences.
A half hour later the conversation ends. Everyone finds a comfortable way to sit. Someone says a brief quotation from the Bible or a prayer and the main business of meeting begins - silence. Despite noise of afternoon going-home traffic, occasionally a garbage truck, and in summer a rock band from a nearby street festival, there is silence. The silence is within. At the end of 20 minutes a small bell rings. In a moment all say together the Lord's Prayer, then leave quietly.
The rest of the week the people who gather for this Centering Prayer meeting spend 20 minutes once or twice a day, at home or wherever they can, in silence. When their thoughts come in the silence, and they always do, they let them go by, neither embracing nor fighting them. They expect no discernible messages from God nor any other spiritual experiences in the silence. They simply rest for awhile in God.
Silence is so foreign to us that many people are disturbed by it, even fear it. But there are numbers of us, small numbers to be sure, who have recognized our need for silence and crave it. Brother Kevin of the Society of St. John the Evangelist wrote that silence "is in some sense, I think, a pre-primal legacy, and somehow our souls remember it as though it's written in our spiritual DNA.
"Before there was time, before anything was spoken into being by words, before any of that, there was silence. There was unrealized potential. There was God. The appeal of this, it seems to me, is that in silence, before there is any speech, including God's, anything is still possible. Silence may well be the most comforting place we can turn when we are in need of hope and perspective and solaceÖ"