As we grow older it is important to be open to change, and when we reach our seventies onwards it is important to learn how to let go. It may be letting go of too many possessions, or too busy a social life. As we grow older it becomes ever more important to listen to the silence within. From a busy outgoing life we realise our task now is to cultivate our own garden, to practise silence, and just being, not having to do anything. In this way we become a still centre to which, perhaps, others are drawn and we find ourselves listening to their needs. The wisdom of old age is something that our society needs to rediscover.
Silence
At the end of the play, Hamlet’s last words are ‘The rest is silence.’ Words can convey so much, but not everyone has the ability to articulate their feelings. As Robert Frost once said, ‘If I write a poem about heart-ache or heart-break, and a reader says, “That is exactly what I feel but I couldn’t have put it into words,” then I know I have achieved what I set out to do.’ Again to quote Shakespeare: ‘I were but little happy if I could say how much.’ Which is why silence between close friends is such a gift, just as silence is at the heart of the spiritual journey.
That three letter word
The word ‘God’ can be a stumbling block, partly because of the anthropomorphic image, cultivated over the centuries, of an aged man with a long white beard. The Arabic word ‘Abba’, which Jesus used, means both parents, mother and father, as well as the divine source of all being. Yet, even to refer to God as father and mother is to remain stuck in anthropomorphic imagery. Meister Eckhart wrote, ‘God is no thing.’ For myself, Hamlet’s use of the word Divinity (i.e. a force, an energy) is helpful, as when he says, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.’ And the image that comes closest for me is St. Paul’s reference to God as ‘an ocean of Love … in which we live and move and have our being’.
Spreading the flame
Gustav Mahler wrote that ‘Tradition is the handing on of the flame, not the worship of ashes’. It is all too easy for spiritual teachings to become enshrined as part of an organisation with rules and regulations. It is often forgotten that Jesus said, ‘I have come to bring fire to earth and what will I but that it be spread!’ The simple practice of meditation is one important way in which we can keep that flame alive within us.
Harry Burton interviews James Roose-Evans
Rock Bottom
There are times when, though we lower our bucket down into the well of meditation, the source seems to have dried up. What is the point of it all? we cry. And yet, unknown to use, there are many mountain springs deep down, so that, if we persevere, then our well begins to fill again.
It is the same in any marriage or committed relationship. The American author Madeleine L’Engle, writing in Two-Part Invention, observes:
The growth of love is not a straight line but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis. Most growth comes through times of trial.
And so it is with the practice of meditation.
Renewal
Society can only be renewed by renewing individuals. And in order to do this we have to give individuals the opportunity to contact their own inner resources. As the psychotherapist Ira Progoff once observed:
We gradually discover that our life has been going somewhere, however blind we have been to its direction, and however unhelpful to it we ourselves have been. We find that a connective thread has been forming beneath the surface of our lives, carrying the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in our existence. It is the inner continuity of our lives. As we recognise and identify with it, we see an inner myth that has been guiding our lives unknown to ourselves.
The Blueprint
Joyce Grenfell once said, ‘I think what I am doing is losing Joyce Grenfell and finding out the person God made me, as in the quotation, ‘become what you are’, in other words become what your true potential is, your spiritual wholeness.’
Carl Jung maintained that we each begin with a blueprint for life. Each one of us has an unique destiny. But what counts is how we relate to that destiny. It is like being given a hand of playing cards. Some are given a good hand, with all the aces, and yet end up throwing away their chances; while there are others who start off with a poor hand but, by playing skilfully, end up winning the game. We each have a destiny but we are not pre-destined. It is our task to work with our individual destiny and yet, at the same time, allow life to shape and make us, for there are surprises in every game and we have to learn how to improvise, how to remain open to the unexpected and to absorb it into the final blueprint. If we are to live our meaning, to sing our own song, tell our own tale, before we go hence, then we have to be prepared to go on a journey into the interior, in search of the riches that lie within each one of us.
Words from the Dalai Lama
Keep up your practice. The results do not happen fast; this is no instant realisation. And as you practise, you will become aware of a change of consciousness. Do not become attached to your method, for when your consciousness changes, you will recognise that all methods are intending the one goal.
In other words, persevere in practice but also be open to change.
An increasing dilemma
The suicide rate for young people, especially men, has risen sharply in recent times. In addition to this there is a major problem which no Government has yet begun to consider seriously, namely that as technology takes over more and more jobs, increasingly people are going to be without meaningful occupation or purpose to their lives. And so there is an urgent need to find an inner centre which, all too often, our churches no longer provide. For some, if they can afford it, therapy can help, but even simpler is the practice of silent meditation which enables one to reach the centre of one’s being and to become more aware of how each of us is meant to live our lives. This is perhaps the greatest challenge of our times.