The result of justice will be silence and trust forever. -Isaiah 32:17
Let stillness be the criterion for assessing everything. -Evagrius
If you love truth, love silence. -Isaac the Syrian
THE BLACKBIRD SINGING
With hopes of teaching them all how to draw, Kathleen Norris stands before her classroom of elementary school students. She recounts in Amazing Grace her remarkable way of going about this. Before teaching them to draw, she first needs to teach them how to be silent and aware. She explains to the class that when she raises her hand they are to make as much noise as they possibly can, but when she lowers her hand, they must all be completely silent. No noise, no movement, no making funny faces. The lesson begins: she raises her hand, and an almighty racket ensues. But as soon as she drops her hand the noise indeed stops instantly. They were “so still,” she says, “that silence became a presence in the classroom.”
What fascinates Norris most is how the “silence liberated the imagination of so many children.'” Her simple exercise with these school children shows us something important about the nature of silence. Silence is not simply about the absence of sound waves. It is concerned with attention and awareness. Silence and awareness are in fact one thing.
Poets seem to know about this unity of silence and awareness. Wallace Stevens shows this in his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
The song of the blackbird evokes the same attentive wonder as when the blackbird stops singing. Robert Penn Warren likewise perceives the porous union of sound and silence, in his famous poem “The Enclave”:
Out of the silence, the saying. Into
The silence, the said. Thus
Silence, in timelessness, gives forth
Time, and receives it again, and I lie
In darkness and hear the wind off the sea heave.
As vital as physical silence is for opening up the depth of the present moment, silence does much more than simply tiptoe around; its essence has little to do with the absence of sound waves. For Silence has no opposite. Its embrace is wide and generous enough to receive all, both sound and the absence of sound. The practice of contemplation gradually reveals the Silent Presence Rowing through the mud and reeds and rushes of both noise and sound.
Without doubt, regular periods of physical silence play a crucial role in the spiritual life. It must be cultivated and reverenced. We don’t make retreats alongside highways. Places of retreat, centers of recovery and h a ling, even some religious communities purposely cultivate physical silence in service of something else. Stretches of physical silence and contemplation, especially on a daily basis, help distress the nervous system.’ While the constant stimulation of the noise of everyday life keeps anxiety levels high and our attention fixed on objects that we are (more or less) aware of, whether an exterior object such as a computer screen or an interior object such as a thought or feeling or mind-tripping inner video. But God is not an object in the way these things are objects and therefore cannot be an object of our awareness in the same way. This is one of the implications of what theology calls the Divine Simplicity. All creation emerges from and points to (at one and the same time) this simple, grounding Source that is not a particular thing in the way creatures are. An environment of physical simplicity and silence helps relax the tight grip of our mind’s reactive preoccupation with objects in order that deeper ways of encountering God, which we all have within us, may emerge and open and receive that Light that constantly gives and sustains all that is.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
