For the last few weeks I have properly engaged the practice of silence… or at least, I have devoted time to it and am attempting it. The time given is half an hour, followed by verbal prayer and then readings both from the Bible and other Christian spiritual writings. It totals an hour between 6 – 7am. For the extra readings I am currently working through The Cloud of Unknowing and also The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. One focuses on the contemplative life and the other focuses on desert spirituality. There is large overlap.
The motivation is hard to explain. I guess at its simplest, as strange as it may sound to many readers, I just want to be in the presence of God. I’m not looking for some amazing experience, anything transcendent, I just want to have a daily rhythm of putting myself aside for a moment, shutting up and just being before God. I want my ego to take a back seat with all its knowledge, desires, frailties, insecurities, wants and needs, so that during that time I am nothing and He is everything.
This means being still and being silent. It sounds easy, but I have quickly discovered that it is anything but easy and the work of silence is revealing a lot to me about myself, some of which I don’t like.
Through my journey over the last 16 years of having a life dedicated to God, I have tricked myself. You see, in Evangelicalism we have elevated what one knows and believes as the centre of faith. So if one can quote scripture left and right to support their views, expound on doctrine at length, introduce new thinking that can be backed up by good knowledge, debate someone and come out trumps, pray great sounding prayers and of course, deliver a memorable sermon then we have assumed they’re a really good Christian. To this end my theological study, critical thinking, position in church, former job as a Christian radio talkback host and now my job as TEAR Fund’s education guy, naturally carry a lot of weight in some Evangelical circles and I, sadly, have often believed my own hype – I thought I was doing really well as a Christian. I didn’t think I was some sort of superstar, but I was comfortable that I was doing ok. Silence, after only a few weeks, has torn down that façade inside myself.
It’s hard to write this because it’s hard to explain. For quite a while there was a longing inside me to engage silence to simply sit with God. Trying to give it 5 minutes here and there wasn’t working so I decided to go the whole hog and give it a good chunk of time every morning. I thought I would sit silently, have a serene experience and then the day would flow nicely from that start. Whilst the impact on my overall mood and how I respond to everything is different (better), the discipline has been anything but serene and far from easy. It’s nothing like the feeling of the picture I’ve added to this post.
Some words over at the Prodigal Kiwi blog provide some form to what’s going on:
This going deeper always involves a leaving behind. We cannot go deeper unless we let go of the place we have known. To descend into the depths of ourselves we must be willing risk losing the security and the safety of that to which we have become so accustomed. It may mean leaving behind a certain self-image or some deeply rooted concepts…
The safety net is gone. There are no theological questions to answer, no one to advise, no biblical conundrums to explore, no injustices to fight, no allowance for the TV to be turned on, my iPad to flick through, a computer to find solace in, nothing to distract me – none of those things I have fallen towards in order to construct the person I believe I am and shield me from those parts of me I don’t like. There is simply myself in all my rawness and the expanse of God before me… and that construct, my broken ego, doesn’t want to let go and fall into that expanse.
As soon as I try to sit still, in silence, my head fills with thoughts about how I can’t do it. My mind turns to chaos, running at a million miles an hour darting here and there to find something to grasp on to and a trail to dig into in order to distract me from focusing on God alone. It doesn’t allow me to empty myself so He can fill me up in the image He desires. It holds on for dear life and I can’t stop it. Some of the thoughts that come through are ones that I don’t mind, others I abhor. They all act as a mirror of myself.
What have I discovered so far? Part of myself, and what I have realised is that before a holy God, I am nothing. I have discovered that I am not some pillar of Christian thought and life in New Zealand, but am a baby not even crawling on my belly when it comes to what really matter in the Christian life – my connection to God. All of a sudden I don’t have any answers to the deep questions except to say, seek God and may he have mercy on us…. and thank God for Jesus!
At the moment I am resting in the belief that this sort of self discovery is the first step in the contemplative life and my prayer is that the Holy Spirit will enable me to move forward… but I don’t know what forward looks like. I’m cautious of having some measure for progress as I don’t know if I ever want to be in a place where I can say I am successful at silence – that sounds counter intuitive and almost defeating of the purpose. One day I do want to be able to say that I have encountered the expanse of silence though. That will feel more like a beginning than what my current experience does – maybe then I will be able to say that I think I might be crawling.
As hard as it is and as much discipline as it involves to keep doing it, the two days I haven’t done it, I’ve noticed a difference in my attitude throughout the day. I prefer who I am on the days when I have done it. I think it was Henri Nouwen who talked of silence and said that it can feel like hard work and like we are getting nowhere, only to find that when we don’t do it, we miss it. That’s already true for me.
There. It’s out there. I’m not the person some people think I am – or that I thought I was… I’m just a lowly beginner in the art of the heart of Christian faith – closeness to God.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.