For You alone my soul waits in silence;
From the Beloved comes my salvation.
Enfolding me
with strength and steadfast love,
My faith shall remain firm….
In the Silence rests my freedom
and my guidance,
for You are the Heart of my heart,
You speak to me in the Silence.
Trust in Love at all times, O people
Pour out your heart to the Beloved;
Let Silence be a refuge for you.
~Psalm 62, Nan Merrill, Psalms for Praying
Gathering together to focus our attention on God during our silence, we pondered this psalm by engaging in a modified Lectio Divina (sacred reading) ... As you hear the sacred text, are there words that call to you? As I read and heard the words, "let silence be a refuge for you" I knew God was calling me. And is there an invitation here for you? The invitation that God is extending to me is to see my ditch as a refuge and to let the silence envelop me, to let God wrap me in gentle presence as I sink into the silence. And how do you respond to that invitation? Gasping for soul-breath, I smile on the inside ...
and I write, from my journal: As I enter the silence, I am finding the ditch I am laying in is a river of grief and more but what more I don't know yet. As I find myself laying in that ditch, looking upward for God, trying to make sure all is well ... For you alone my soul in silence waits, O God and I try to lay in the ditch allowing silence to be my refuge.
You have called me into this silence
to be grateful for what silence I have
and to use it by desiring more.
~Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence
I am so grateful for the silence. The silence is a refuge. The ditch is a refuge for I find Silence within it. And I smile again for I have found myself to be a "ditch-dweller" and that is just fine with me.
I am one who, while laying on her back in the water staring up at the sky, wonders about God. I am the rocks impeding the peacefulness of the water, causing ripples and splashes and chaos in the river. I am the water, soft and pliable, moving around all obstacles in my path, finding a new way of being. I am the waves, I never stop, flowing in and flowing out. I am the hedges, a growing wall to keep others out of my inner sanctum. I am the pathway, inviting others on the journey. I am the sand, gritty and irritating, finding a way to cause trouble just by being me. I am the bridge, ornate and beckoning others to journey from one side to the other, but why? and to where? no where? I am the pinnacle, watching over the land of my soul, remote and distant ... yet perhaps I observe from afar, keeping my distance but also keeping my perspective. This is what I hope of myself, the ditch-dweller.When God threw me, a pebble,
into this wondrous lake,
I disturbed its surface with countless circles.
But when I reached the depths
But when I reached the depths
I became very still. ~Kahlil Gibran
Oh how still nature is ... and may I become that still, may I find rest and peace in the Silence
The most basic experience of Silence is intimacy.
We feel an intimacy with the world,
as if we are within everything around us
rather than behind or alongside
things that we are looking at ...
we feel how we, in our individuality,
are a part of a vast and mysterious world ...
when we cultivate Silence to the point
that we are consciously within it
rather than imagining that it is in us,
we cannot be other than what we are."
~Robert Sardello, Silence: the Mystery of Wholeness
journaling with an image in my journal ...
I am a tiny vessel on a vast sea. This isn't a bad thing when I am feeling God's love as the sea, relentlessly rolling in waves upon the beach, never stopping, never ending. However, I am not feeling God's love. I am not feeling God's ever presence. O so deeply I am feeling God's profound absence which is rather surreal because I still "know" that you are there, God, you are here. I just don't feel you or rather I can't "sense" you. And yet, here I am, talking to you as if I am talking to myself. Today, I use this lovely word "vast" to speak of you. You are as vast as the ocean, as the sky, as the world, as the universe and all of creation beyond what the eye can see or the mind can imagine and that is vast! You are all that is and interestingly, you are all that is not. You simply are. And there is something about the depths of the ocean and the expanse of the sky that invites me to let go and melt into the vastness of creation ... In you alone do I find rest and peace, my sweet, incredible, invincible, amazingly absent God ... In you alone do I find my rest and peace.
Amen!
No comments:
Post a Comment