 Email
 Print |
"Because God whispers"
Being silent means more than just holding your tongue. It means listening for the softest, most subtle sound of all - the sound of the soul.
I’m not listening. “Hurry up, sir. You have just half an hour to reach the hotel. After that the whole island becomes silent.”
Sweating, the man grabs my bags and rushes to a throbbing taxi. I trudge after him, exhausted from the trip and the sultry heat that has enveloped me. When I boarded the plane in Amsterdam 20 hours earlier, it was snowing in the Netherlands.
I arrive at the hotel just before midnight, after a harrowing ride during which the driver does his best to evade the monsters. Literally. It’s March 6, 2008, the night the Balinese celebrate New Year’s Eve. Each village constructs its own monsters—some several metres high—which are ritually carried through the streets.
The next morning I awake to a deafening silence. Only the birds and crickets seem unaware that today is the day of silence. It’s “Nyepi,” the first day of the Hindu new year, when no one talks, travels or works. It’s a day of silence, prayer and reflection that enables the Balinese to start the New Year with spirits renewed.
From my balcony I see a lush green valley and the blue glitter of the Indian Ocean beyond. It’s my first day of silence for a couple of years and I’m excited.
My thoughts wander to my first silent retreat in the Tuscan hills. After a week of silence, I wanted to remain silent forever. I never wanted to open my mouth again to utter words that so rarely reflect reality. Never before had I felt such intense contact with everything around me—precisely because I hadn’t uttered a word. It was as if all my senses were wide open, as if I were tasting ice cream, watching a sunset or seeing someone smile for the first time.
Annemieke Rodenburg, from the Netherlands, is an apostle of silence. For seven years, this inspired fortysomething woman has been organizing silent retreats for those under the age of 28. She never fails to see the magic. “After five days of silence, young people often have the feeling they have developed a deeper friendship with the other silent participants than with friends they’ve known for 10 years.”
As odd as it sounds, Rodenburg says words often create distance in relationships. “If people no longer use words to shield them, they shed their masks. You get to the point that you’re no longer trying to get attention from those around you. You step out of your patterns and stories and make contact with a layer in which everything and everyone is connected.”
Young people clearly long for this, as evidenced by the avid interest in the silent retreats organized by the Own Way Foundation (in Dutch, Stichting Eigenwijze, eigenwijze.org), the organization Rodenburg founded in 2000. By January, summer retreats are already booked solid.
It’s difficult to get those who’ve tasted the beauty of silence to return to the world of noise and masks. The American eco-activist John Francis has witnessed this first-hand. Once he experienced the beauty of keeping his mouth shut, he didn’t open it again for 17 years—at least not to talk. Francis’ decision was prompted by an environmental disaster in San Francisco Bay. When two oil tankers collided there in 1971, Francis initially decided to stop using motorized transport and then stopped using words. Between 1973 and 1990, he made only one exception: to tell his parents how much he loved them.
During those 17 years, Francis discovered not only the beauty of silence, but its effectiveness. “Because I didn’t speak, everyone paid attention,” he says. Francis studied environmental science and even taught silence as a guest lecturer at the University of Montana. He also became a local celebrity who regularly toured for lengthy periods to “speak” with everyone and anyone about important issues, using meaningful looks, gestures and—in extreme cases—pen and paper.
The interesting thing about Francis is he led a relatively “normal” life and didn’t withdraw from his surroundings as most people do who choose to be silent for any length of time. In fact, Francis had girlfriends who, he says, thought it was “rather nice that I kept my mouth shut.”
The South African-born spiritual teacher Isaac Shapiro also experienced how inspiring it is to be around people who are silent. Shapiro is a student of the Indian Advaita (“non-duality”) teacher Ramesh Balsekar who, in turn, is a student of the late Indian spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi. “According to Ramana Maharshi, silence is the only way to convey real knowledge,” says Shapiro. “Maharshi often sat in silence for days on end at this holy mountain in India, absorbed in bliss in the silence of his own being, not speaking to anyone. And when people came around him, their minds didn’t function. His silence was so profound that all their troubles would disappear, and I mean severe troubles like losing children, divorces, all kinds of problems that can happen in life.”
Francis once joked that the decision to hold his tongue was born out of compassion for his fellow humans. “I talked a lot,” he confesses. Like Francis, I also experienced how much people appreciate it when you hold your tongue. At the end of my silent retreat in the Tuscan hills, I received a letter from one of the participants: “Dear Tijn, it was nice meeting you and great not talking to you.”
When you’re silent, you give others the space to be silent too, and to be themselves. That may well be the greatest gift you can give. When you’re silent, you can truly be there for someone. In the book Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time, Francis writes he was never really there for others. He didn’t even hear them. “Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker’s ideas matched my own. If they didn’t, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker’s idea or position to be.”
1
2
3
4
NEXT >>
view as a single page
| Tools:
Discuss
| Email
| Print
| RSS
| Weekly Newsletter Save/Share: |
Even greater than silence is meditation upon God's holy names. Every genuine religious tradition in the world teaches that God’s names are holy and meant to be glorified. The Bible contains numerous references to glorifying God and His holy name. (Exodus 15:3; Deuteronomy 32:2-3; I Chronicles 16:8-36; Psalms 29:2, 47:1, 86:11, 91:14, 96:1-3, 97:12, 98:4-6, 113:3, 116:1-17, 146:1, 148:1-5, 13)
The Lord and His name are praised throughout the Psalms. "I will praise the name of God with a song," says King David. (Psalm 69:30) In other places we read: "All nations whom Thou hast made shall come and worship before Thee, O Lord: and shall glorify Thy name." (Psalm 86:9)
"O give thanks unto the Lord; call upon His name; make known His deeds among the people. Sing unto Him, sing psalms unto Him: talk ye of all His wondrous works. Glory ye in His holy name." (Psalms 105:1-4) "...Praise Him with the timbrel and the dance; praise Him upon the loud cymbals." (Psalm 150:4-5)
Israel Baal Shem Tov (1699-1761), the great Jewish mystic, founded Hasidism, a popular pietist movement within Judaism, in which members dance and chant in glorification of God. The Hasidism were especially influenced by verses in Psalms calling for the joyful worship of the Lord through song. (Psalms 100:1,2, 104:33)
According to The Jewish Almanac: "In the Jewish tradition the name actually partakes of the essence of God. Thus, knowledge of the name is a vehicle to God, a conveyor of divine energy, an interface between the Infinite and the finite...It is curious that a tradition that places such a strong emphasis on the One God possesses such a large number of names for the divine. Each name, however, actually represents a different quality or aspect of God."
When teaching his disciples how to pray, Jesus Christ glorified God’s holy name: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name." (Matthew 6:9) Jesus also approved of his disciples’ singing joyfully in praise of God. (Luke 19:36-40) Of his own name, Jesus said: "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there with them." (Matthew 18:20) The apostle Paul told his gentile followers to speak to one another in psalms and hymns, to sing heartily and make music to the Lord. Ephesians 5:19) He further taught them to instruct and admonish one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. (Colossians 3:16)
Paul wrote to his gentile congregation in Rome: "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Romans 10:13) According to the historian Eusebius, there was "one common consent in chanting forth the praises of God," in the early Christian churches. The Gregorian chants, popularized in the sixth century by Pope Gregory and later by works like Handel’s masterpiece the Messiah, with its resounding choruses of "hallelujah" (which means "praised be the name of God" in Hebrew), are still performed and appreciated all over the world.
In addition to praising the Lord’s name and glories through music, song, and dance, there has also emerged the practice of meditating upon God by chanting upon beads of prayer. St. John Chrysostom of the Greek Orthodox church, recommended the "prayerful invocation of the name of God," which he said should be "uninterrupted."
The repetition of the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me") became a regular practice among members of the Eastern Church. In The Way of a Pilgrim, a Russian monk describes this form of meditation: "The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant, uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart...One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences...so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always, that he can no longer live without it."
"Perhaps you’ve heard about Hesychasm, a technique of mantra meditation that was employed by Christians as far back as the third century after Christ," says the Reverend Alvin Hart, an Episcopalian priest in New York. "The method was the simple chanting of ‘the Jesus prayer,’ which runs like this: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.’ I personally have found great comfort in this mantra."
According to Reverend Hart, "Although it was recently popularized by the New Age movement...’the Jesus Prayer’ has a long and venerable tradition in the Philokalia, an important book on Christian mysticism. The word Philokalia literally means ‘the love of spiritual beauty,’ and I can say that the book definitely brings its readers to that level of appreciation...
Reverend Hart says, "When we call on God—and we should learn how to do this at every moment, even in the midst of our day-to-day work—we should be conscious of Him, and then our prayer will have deeper effects, deeper meaning. This, I know, is the basic idea of Krishna Consciousness. In the Christian tradition, too, we are told to ALWAYS pray ceaselessly. This is a biblical command. (I Thessalonians 5:17)
"In a sense, this could also be considered the heart of the Christian process as well. For instance, in the Latin Mass, before the Gospel is read, there is a prayer spoken by the priest: dominus sit in corde meo et in labiis meis, which means, ‘May the Lord be in my heart and on my lips.’ What better way is there to have God on one’s lips than by chanting the holy name? Therefore, the Psalms tell us that from ‘the rising of the sun to its setting’ the Lord’s name is to be praised. And Paul echoes this idea by telling us that ‘whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.’ (Romans 10:13)"
In Islam, the names of God are held sacred and meditated upon. According to tradition, there are ninety-nine names of Allah, found inscribed upon monuments such as the Taj Mahal and on the walls of mosques. These names are chanted on an Islamic rosary, which consists of three sets of thirty-three beads.
The Sikh religion is a blend of Hinduism and Islam. The Sikhs emphasize the name of God, calling Him "Nama," or "the Name." Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, prayed, "In the ambrosial hours of the morn I meditate on the grace of the true Name," and says that he was instructed by God in a vision to "Go and repeat My Name, and cause others to do likewise."
Rosaries are used in Buddhism. Members of Japan’s largest Buddhist order, the Pure Land sect, practice repetition of the name of the compassionate Buddha ("namu amida butsu"). Founder, Shinran Shonin says, "The virtue of the Holy Name, the gift of him that is enlightened, is spread throughout the world." Followers believe that through the name of Buddha a worshipper is liberated from repeated birth and death and joins the Buddha in the "Pure Land."
posted by vasumurti on 7/15/2008 2:20 pm