“Listen to the Silence”

Grammatically speaking, it would seem to be a contradiction, an oxymoron.  How can you listen to silence if "silence" means the absence of sound?  And yet it was the first thing my wife said to me when we got out of the car upon arriving at Big Bend National Park in Texas.  Few other tourists had arrived yet for the coming weekend, and we were many miles from any city.  "Listen to the silence," she said.

And I knew exactly what she meant because I "heard" it myself.  I heard how quiet it was. The absence of even any distant noise from cars on any highways was what made it so striking.  The irony was that because there was nothing to hear, we were listening more attentively.

In our increasingly technological (and increasingly urbanized) lives, silence is counter-cultural, almost radically so.  We have so many forms of electronic entertainment and communication that we are almost constantly receiving or sending sounds or messages.  To be silent and to listen to silence is rare.

The more important question, however, is not why our silence is rare, but instead, why is it so important?  And why might Nature be a key to obtaining it?

Part of the answer is that silence is a door into attentiveness.  If a friend is talking to me, I can better attend to what they are expressing if I listen silently, rather than looking for an opening to inject the busy thoughts of my own mind.  In parallel with that principle, the 20th-century spiritual director Evelyn Underhill taught that to be prayerful, a person had to be attentive.  Silence and attentiveness can lead to prayerfulness.

Many objects in the natural world emit no sound.  Thus, to truly attend to them -- to "listen" to them in silence -- can be a good way of becoming meditative.  This is one of the gifts of Nature.

We might expect to find in Mother Teresa's writings only thoughts about her ministry to the poor in India, but she knew the secret of this connection between silence and Nature.  She wrote:

"See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, 

how they move in silence.  We need silence 

to be able to touch souls."

There is also a link between inner silence and appreciating beauty.  The symmetries, colors, and harmonies in Nature that we experience as beauty can be a window into the Divine.  However, as Henry David Thoreau reminds us:

"You cannot perceive beauty
but with a serene mind."

~~~

Is there some way you have of coming to a greater inner serenity?  What is that way?

(The Mother Teresa quote is from A Gift for God
by Mother Teresa, © 1975, p. 69.
The Thoreau quote is from

 his Journal X, Vol. 16, Nov. 18, 1857.)

Darkness

waning moon

I did not myself notice a possible meaning in the way the prayer was worded.  So, at first I thought the Iroquois prayer was a simple prayer of gratitude, perhaps used at bedtime to relieve anxiety about the night ahead:

"Great Spirit who puts us to sleep in darkness,

We thank thee for the silences of darkness."

I had even liked saying the prayer, finding that it helped bring upon me a grateful spirit, so as to overcome worried thoughts about the day ending or the day to come.

But one day my wife made a comment that made me see in the prayer a possible added dimension.  She said, "It implies that the night has more than one silence."  Indeed, the wording was plural:  "silences of darkness."  I had taken the plural to refer merely to the many nighttimes we experience, one following the other, periods of darkness separated by each day.  But could the prayer's idea be that each night has more than one silence?

The image of a series of silences brought back to me the first night my wife and I camped in a state park in east Texas.  Taking longer than usual to get to sleep because of the unfamiliar feel of the air mattress on the uneven ground, my ears were particularly sensitive to the unfamiliar sounds of Nature around me.  As I tried to drop off, my mind was brought back to keen attention with each click or scrape or seeming moan I heard.  What was it?  Was I safe?  And after I did at last fall asleep, my rest was interrupted time and again by the silence being interrupted by sound (including the local raccoon's making the rounds of the park's trash cans).  Oh, how I would have enjoyed having the night be a single long, uninterrupted silence.

What trust a person would have to have to choose to live in total darkness!  If we imagine not being able to see anything (as many of the legally blind cannot), it should be no surprise that one of the Bible's most powerful symbols for ignorance is darkness.  And the very word "Buddha" is a title meaning "en-lightened one."

Earth's regular darkness

That night camping, however, reminds me that Nature's world is not dead even when people are, as we say, dead to the world.  For many creatures, the night is the time to truly live!  Not just that raccoon, but also bats, moths, and countless other creatures.  The biologist Francisco J. Ayala has described evolution as being "opportunistic." Life on earth began with bacteria that evolved sensitivity to light, followed by plants that required light for photosynthesis.  However, the alternate world of nocturnal life opportunistically evolved the ability to take advantage of darkness.

Darkness is thus essential to this planet's biodiversity.  Moreover, this planet itself would have burned to a crisp on one side long ago if it did not rotate frequently, thus bringing nights of cooling darkness.  We should not be in the dark about the importance of darkness to this Earth.

~~~

How do you use your nights?