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"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.
According to Francis, truly being silent means much more than just holding your tongue. “Silence is not just not talking. It’s a void. It’s a place where all things come from. All voices, all creation comes out of this silence. So when you’re standing on the edge of silence, you hear things you’ve never heard before, and you hear things in ways you’ve never heard them before. And what I would disagree with one time, I might now agree with in another way, with another understanding.”
Meanwhile, back on Bali, breakfast is served in silence by a young woman with a smile so serene it nearly frightens me. I realize this introverted dignity is rare in my part of the world. Not so strange, perhaps, if you consider that we normally ring in the New Year with a hangover instead of silence. Not to mention the rest of the year. Most of my friends have agendas that resemble busy train schedules and can’t imagine where they’d fit in a silent moment. But the Balinese do things differently. The Western business people I meet here are driven to distraction by their employees, who seem to have one ceremony or another every day.
Of course, we can look on them with pity, describing those poor Balinese as impractical and unproductive, but the fact is their way of life makes them beautiful people. The Italian psychiatrist Piero Ferrucci would be proud of them. According to him, silent contemplation is a necessity. In a 2005 interview with Ode, he said, “Our culture is suffering from an overdose of action and a shortage of contemplation. I consider contemplation a basic need; you even see it in animals. Just think about dogs and cats. You often see them staring off into space. I think that’s their way of meditating, their way of recharging their batteries. We have that need too. But we deny this basic, physiological need—as if an entire society were to forget to go to the bathroom. That’s serious!”
In Western countries, the modern, runaway 24-hour economy has clearly won the battle against people who want to “go to the bathroom” regularly. Forget about days of silence, occasionally leaving the car in the garage or shopping-free Sundays. Many countries are literally never silent. A few years ago, a Belgian radio journalist was given the task of recording five minutes of silence somewhere in the Flanders region. The poor man spent months working on the project, day and night. Each recording was interrupted by trains, cars, airplanes, radios, voices, sirens. He was finally forced to conclude it was impossible to find five minutes of silence anywhere in Flanders.
And Flanders is nothing compared to a city like Cairo. A recent study showed that the sound level in the Egyptian city between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. averages 85 decibels. That’s comparable to the noise made by a lawn mower left on or a freight train rushing through your house.
What on earth is wrong with modern people that makes us bent on doing whatever we can to chase away the silence? Are we afraid of it? French philosopher Blaise Pascal felt that way. “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces fills me with dread,” he once wrote.
Lama Drimed, the American-born Buddhist monk, put it this way: “Silence is confrontational to the unstable mind. It won’t allow you to escape from all the voices in your head.” He should know. Drimed has been leading silent retreats for 20 years and several times has withdrawn into complete silence for three months at a time. It doesn’t surprise him at all that some institutes that organize silent retreats require their participants to undergo a psychological test.
Of course it’s scary to be confronted with all those voices in your head. It’s unpleasant to hear voices of pain, despair or depression. But the point is it’s far scarier not to hear these voices. Silence may be scary, but a lack of silence is much scarier. Those who don’t seek occasional silence to make contact with their deeper core, higher self, pure soul, Buddha nature or whatever you want to call it, become detached from God.
As a yogi friend said, “To hear the voice of God, you must be silent.”
I asked why.
He looked at me as if the answer were obvious. “Because God whispers.”
It has become warm on my balcony in Bali. It’s nearly midday and I still haven’t spoken. It feels wonderful, yet I have a problem with silence. You see, when my mind is silent, I become more receptive to inspirations, so I get the most beautiful ideas. Afraid I’ll lose them, I run to my laptop in an attempt to capture these flashes of the sublime. I know it’s a fruitless effort, but I can’t help myself. It reminds me of what Cistercian monk and priest Thomas Keating said: “Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation.” Still, I keep looking for the right words.
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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