Category: Blog

‘Silence is Golden,’ goes the proverb. Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, calls it ‘The perfectest herald of joy … I were but little happy, if I could say how much’. And Hamlet, at the end of his tortured journey, declares, ‘The rest is silence.’

One of the fruits of meditation is that we become less prone to impose our own ideas and more aware that, just as there is a time to speak, so there is also a time to be silent.  The media is awash with words, so that one is reminded of T S Eliot’s question: ‘Where is the wisdom that has been lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge that has been lost in information?’  One of the great joys of a deeply committed relationship with another human being is when neither feels the need to speak, but is simply content to rest in the deep silence of love.

Even if you pay a considerable sum to learn Mindfulness meditation, this does not qualify you in any way. We each make our individual journey, and it is a journey that will continue well beyond this present existence.  There are no diplomas in enlightenment!

A few may approach the summit of awareness, such as Thomas Merton, the Buddha, Dom Bede Griffiths, St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Rumi, and many of the Jewish mystics. But even they will find more ranges to climb and explore. Meanwhile, the rest of us plod along! We are the foot troops. And in that sense we encourage others, showing that the journey into silence is possible for everyone.

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic, The Secret Garden, the orphan Mary asks her guardian if she may have a bit of earth.

‘Earth?’ he replies. ‘What do you mean?’

 ‘To plant things in. To make things grow. To see them come alive.’    

‘Do you care about gardens so much? A bit of earth?’ he asks. ‘Then you can have as much earth as you want. When you see a bit of earth you want, take it, child, and make it come alive.’

Which is exactly what Mary does with the help of Dickon and the old gardener.

When we nurture the seeds of meditation in our inner garden we, too, begin to come alive at a deeper level. Happiness is elusive: it comes and goes. What grows and becomes evergreen in our innermost garden is contentment.

In his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes:

The plant that you have in your house, have you ever truly looked at it?  Have you allowed that familiar yet mysterious being called ‘plant’ to teach you its secret?  Have you noticed how it is surrounded by a field of stillness?  The moment you become aware of a plant’s emanation of stillness and peace, that plant becomes your teacher.

When we emerge from meditation we often encounter people and things as if for the first time, seeing them in their essence.  The practice of meditation leads us to a deeper and fresher awareness of all things and of each another.

Sometimes in mid-life there is a wake-up call to change direction, realising we have other potentials. The privilege of a lifetime, wrote Carl Jung, is to become who you are. As Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses it:

Myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, ‘What I do is me: for that I came.’ 

Those who practise meditation and arrive at this station in their journey will be quicker to recognise the announcement: ‘All change’! 

For Etty Hillesum, the most important skill to be learned in the spiritual life was the skill of listening.  In one of her last letters from the transit camp before she was put on the train for Auschwitz, she wrote to a friend,  ‘Things come and go in a deeper rhythm, and people must be taught to listen; it is the most important thing we have to learn in this life.’ On 17 September 1942, aware of her own exhaustion in the midst of that terrible war, she wrote:

Even if one’s body aches, the spirit can continue to do its work, can it not? It can love and  ‘hearken unto’ itself and others and unto what binds us to life. Truly my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others, unto God. And if I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God.

Loneliness has become a symptom of the times in which we live. In the U.K. alone some 7.7 million people live alone, while the Alzeimer’s Society reports that 5 million people over 75 say their only company is television.

In addition to this, we know that, rather than feeling more linked with their peers as a result of digital technology, some children are feeling increasingly isolated. One can have a thousand friends on Facebook but not one with a flesh and blood face.

We must never lose the precious sense of being part of a community. In the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, ‘The greatest suffering in the world is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no-one. I have come more and more to realise that the worst disease today that any human being can experience is being unwanted.’

We all travel two paths: an outer path which involves certain goals such as the exercise of ambition and commitment to a task; and an interior path. All too often the pressures of the first can result in a failure to nurture the inner self, with the result that, on reaching a peak of outward success, some people feel an emptiness within themselves. 

I think often of a remark made by Joyce Grenfell during one of her lunchtime dialogues at St Mary-le-Bow in London: ‘I am less and less interested in being Joyce Grenfell the performer,’ she said, ‘and more and more in becoming the person God meant me to be.’ It is only when we are still, when we have learned to listen to the promptings of the heart, of that still small voice within each of us, that we begin to perceive who we are meant to be.

Personal note from James:

For those who may read these blogs and who are in their ninth or tenth decade (I am in the latter). If when meditating you find you fall fast  asleep, don’t worry! Such a sleep is often very deep and healing. Regard it as a gift! In the late 1970s when I was at Glasshampton Monastery in Worcestershire, preparing for ordination, I would spend three or four hours each evening in the chapel in silent meditation. My only other  companion was Brother David, then aged 80,  who had been the first Provincial Minister of the Society of St.Francis. He would sit in his  pew wrapped in a plaid shawl given him by a Scottish shepherd, while I would sit at the back of the chapel. Sometimes I observed he fell fast asleep, but always there was such a stillness about him. Whether we are awake or asleep we are always in the Presence. Accept what comes as a gift from the beyond!

We are in danger of becoming like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland: ‘I’m late, I’m late for a very important date. No time to say “Hello – Goodbye!”’ We find ourselves constantly rushing places, caught up in a whirl of activity, afraid to stand still for a moment … until one day we wake up and find that time has run out like sand through an hourglass. Then, like Richard II, we realise, ‘I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me.’ Suddenly, with a shock, we realise our time is up.  It is because we don’t take time that repeatedly we fail to heed the wisdom that is in our bodies, in our dreams and intuitions. Yet once we do begin to listen then we realise, as in the words of the famous passages from Ecclesiastes, that ‘For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under the sun.’