In Silence

There’s a meditation exercise that goes something like this: you close your eyes, and let your thoughts flow by like a river, placing no value or attachment to anything that pops into your mind one way or another. The idea is to simply notice.

I often forget this technique, just as I forget that good saying “work without purpose," meaning to stay in the moment, which is not easy to do. Thoughts get in your way, they come flooding in without the slightest provocation—how good is the work I am doing? Will I have enough work? Is it meaningful work? Respected work? Do I like this work? Do I have too much work? When will this work be done? And the list goes on.

Probably what made me think of these mental exercises was Patricia’s sermon this morning. It was about finding God in silence. The scriptural reference was about Elijah, who was to stand before a mountain while the Lord passed by. “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake and fire, but the Lord was not in the earthquake or fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

So that’s where Elijah finds or hears the voice of God, standing at the mouth of a cave. Nothing going on but God.

I think there’s a lot to be said for stilling your mind -- getting rid of all of the mental earthquakes and floods, who knows what’s left? God may well be there when our minds are cluttered, this soft yellow glow, what appears when all the garbage is cleared away. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

In vestry meeting last week, Patricia asked us to do an exercise -- quite optional -- to take three minutes and describe a personal spiritual experience. Patricia wouldn’t use the word “spiritual” so lightly -- that’s my language. There’s a growing irritation among liberal Christians that it is a word that people use to describe themselves who don’t go to church. They take their views of Christianity from TV evangelists and have no real knowledge of what it means to live in a functioning, spiritual (sorry Patricia) community.

And my apologies for the digression, but I think that it must be connected. At vestry, most of us came up with something to share. Now I’ve never actually seen God as a soft yellow mental pulse, but I keep returning to the exercise. Sometimes when I’m sitting on the porch in the evening, just staring up at the canopy of leaves that covers the back yard, sometimes if I sit still enough and quiet enough, I can begin to imagine.