Healing the Pain of Silence

For most modern westerners silence feels empty at first, boring, something that needs to be filled.  When we are given encouragement and space to really enter and stay with it, silence can become filled with beauty, with gratitude, with life.                                   ~Seena B. Frost, Soul Collage Evolving

I often hear people talk about silence making them feel lonely or uncomfortable, afraid or reprimanded.  These feelings and a myriad of other feelings lead people to avoid silence when with others, preferring to be constantly stimulated in order to drive away those feelings.

And yet one of the things I know about spiritual disciplines, such as silence, is that there is a symbiotic relationship.  What I mean is that experiencing God in the silence alone enhances our presence in community and being in silence in community enhances our presence in solitude.

The experience people have in communal silence can enriched silence when alone.  Over time silence is filled with Presence, the gentle God who is always with us.  It is never that God is sometimes not with us but it is that we are often not aware of God's presence.  Silence heightens our awareness.

Silence teaches us how to "be" in the silence.  What perhaps people need is not to run from silence but to lengthen and embrace silence.  In the beginning this is very difficult because if we open ourselves up to the Presence who IS silence many painful things begin to emerge, like loneliness.  Sometimes, memories of being silenced by others, especially in childhood emerge.  We may also find feelings of unhealed grief, inadequacy, unworthiness, shame, deep pain, other lost memories, and fears of the future ... just to name a few of the things we may have tucked away hoping never to encounter again.  If we can bring any of those pesky feelings that emerge into the Light to be understood, accepted and let go, then perhaps we become more integrated and whole.   Yes, it is a difficult process but also one that brings the fruits of healing, wholeness, and integration. 

We are invited to ask ourselves about the feelings and the thoughts that emerge.  When we confront long dormant reasons for our feelings of desolation, we may find out why silence is such a painful visitor.  

Hear this beautiful poetry from Rumi and ponder.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

 

Questions for Reflection:

• How difficult is the silence for you?
• What are some of the feelings that emerge for you?
• How is your soul like a guesthouse? 
• Who has come visiting you lately?
• How have you welcomed the stranger within?
• How has that "stranger" been sent to guide you?

The Great Silence: Invitation to Healing

Easter on the calendar may not be Easter in my soul.

~John Winn, For All Seasons

If there is one line in one prayer that resonates with me every single year during Lent, it is this line from John Winn's "A Lenten Prayer for Slow Walkers on the Road from Bethlehem to Jerusalem."  In my experience, sharing it with others while warming the labyrinth, I am not the only one.  

As I led a Holy Week Service of Wholeness, reading this prayer with a small group of women, I found a home in these words.  As a small group of early-risers stood together sharing communion at our "sunrise" service, watching the clouds drift by, no "sunrise" for us, the words once again rose up within me.  Easter on the calendar is not Easter in my soul.  I felt like those bewildered women at the tomb on Easter morning.  I think the sense of the words of this prayer were true for them that day, there was no joy.  This year's lectionary text from the book of Mark (16:8) says this of the women who went to the tomb in the early morning and found it empty, "they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."   I know the words of this prayer have never been truer for me right now, I am not feeling "Easter" in my soul.  And that is OK ... for this year, I have been profoundly affected by the loss of my niece, Clarissa.

The Great Silence staff gathered on "Easter Monday" to prepare for retreatants to arrive on Tuesday.  It was a glorious day by the lake ... to breathe, to ponder, to invite silence

Lakeview Methodist Conference Center, Palestine, TX

All the streams carry the wisdom of the forest to the lake, 

and over there silence replaces the noise!  

~Mehmet Murat Ildan

As I walked to my cabin, I stopped by the beautiful Dogwood tree in bloom to drink in the beauty of its delicate blossoms and its fragile strength.   When I was young, I remember taking long drives with my parents.  I would lay my head in my mother's lap and when the dogwood bloomed amongst the pine trees along the side of the road, she would tell me the Legend of the Dogwood.  It was a story that connected my fledgling faith and nature in a way that nothing else did at the time.

As a staff, we finished setting up the kitchen and the lodge with

prayer stations, formational reading material, lots of battery tealights, 

and the small labyrinth.   

Then we sat with one another to share the sacred stories of our lives with one another.  I asked a question that I was asked many times by a former mentor, Wendy J. Miller.  This question held much of our sharing and was particularly helpful for me that night as it carried me into the silence and up out of the silence to awareness, "What ditch did you cross to get here today?  To my surprise, I said, "It is the grief I carry and the tears that refuse to fall.  I fear I will never cross the ditch for I am laying in it, unable to move and all I can see is chaos.  I am hoping that entering the silence will create a space for my tears to fall so that I might begin to crawl out of this ditch or perhaps to learn to live from within them." 

 There is a sacredness in tears.

~Washington Irving

As I laid my head down to sleep that night, I pondered the invitation to healing that I sensed God was offering me. I wasn't sure I would be able to enter into this invitation but I slept well thinking of it and of the God of Silence who so gently holds each one of us and loves us right where we are. 

Take this link for Part 2: The Great Silence: Invitation to Silence

Holy Friday

Is it possible to drown

in my sorrow and grief

Is it possible to cry a river

and go underneath

never to resurface

Is it possible the grief abides within

a constant companion

Is it possible I cannot be

who I am

without my sorrow

 © 2004 Cindy Foster Serio