Searching for Stillness

Last week there was nothing posted here because I took a 48-hour silent retreat. What follows is a reflection penned on Friday morning.

The noise interrupts the silence like fingernails on a blackboard. You jump as when hearing the screeching tires and squealing brakes of someone desperately trying to stop before colliding with another car. It is not so much absolute silence that it interrupts as it is stillness disturbed.

The birds call to another lusting for a mate or announcing some unknown but important news. The air gently caresses the leaves and then your face and finally breezes past your ears making an ever so faint sound. Leaves rustle as chipmunks and squirrels scurry along looking for food or whatever it is they do in the spring of the year. These all are noise - but noise that constitutes stillness --just now the gentle sound of water sprinkling on leaves. In this stillness I begin again to hear what is deep within creation. It begins with the sound of the rising and falling of my own chest as new air finds my lungs as if I hadn't known how to breathe until that moment. I slow down, I hear the torrent sound of thoughts flooding my mind. I try to just let them pass. Sometimes they do...

The cacophonous sound comes from others entering this space for what they and I say we long for - quiet, peace, rest, and renewal. Perhaps that is not what they want or we just define those words differently. The four of them play first one game and then another. The two men offering all they are in order to conquer the other. I wonder if they have a volume control? Are they longing to impress their wives or just prove their prowess to one another? What would it take to receive what you say you want, the quiet? There are groans intermingled with shouts of joy. After they have conquered the stillness, and one another, they turn to conversation saying not so much anything but saying really nothing about one topic and then the next - there's so much blood in Iraq... I wonder why they speak Iraqi and others speak Afghani? ...they've been fighting there for centuries, they'll just keep fighting... you know when we liberated the concentration camps, the Jews needed a homeland... they were right. the sun never did really set on the British empire... MacArthur didn't listen to Truman... Patton was seriously anti-Semitic... WHY DO THEY SPEAK IRAQI ANYWAY?

When one pair finally departs, the other tires to analyze the first. It turns out the conversation was about winning as well. I wondered if I had made a mistake or if I should have just removed myself from the racket? I tried that and it seemed to work. I walked into a stretch of stillness, which added a rhythmic melody of trickling water. I found a spot absent of any blackboard. Then I heard the faint sounds returning, moving ever closer. Should I move on again? No, these simply were passing through and stillness remained.

The sounds of the earlier encounter though returned to my mind. It turns out they had left a mark - a wound really. The four are not wholly accountable in the sense they didn't know they were cutting so deep. Perhaps they didn't know as well how to find what it was they said they were looking for? But, they represent the wound our culture leaves upon each of us. We are driven to win, to come out on top, to shout our acclamations over the top of others' groans.

I need stillness to heal such a wound. For stillness is a balm that brings life when all else seeks to take it. In the stillness, I can hear again what is deep within creation - the breath of God.