(This week the group was led by Jenny Collins.)
It
seems we, as a culture, are deeply afraid of silence. The running from silence
is undoubtedly running from God, from our soul, from ourselves, from the truth,
and from freedom.
Richard
Rohr (A Spring within us)
The
Dominican Sisters who taught me were fond of mottoes. One, ‘ Veritas’ meaning ‘truth’ or ‘the search for
truth’ was embroidered on our school
blazers. A second, ‘Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere’, meaning ‘to contemplate and to give to others
the fruits of contemplation’ they attributed to St Thomas Aquinas a
philosopher, theologian and Doctor of the Church who was also a Dominican
Friar. As the Sisters explained it, ‘contemplare’ underpinned their life as
women religious and was the foundation for their work as teachers.
As a
young person, I rather liked ‘Veritas’; I could relate to the idea that my life
could be shaped by a search for truth. If I think about it, it is probably one
of the reasons I became a teacher and later an historian. And I am sure it explains why so many of us
love music – that ethereal expression of
truth and beauty. Aldous Huxley put it this way, ‘After silence, that which comest
nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music’.
Over
the years I’ve had more trouble with
‘contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere’.
The Latin is rather poetic but putting it into practice is rather more complex. As a teacher of a class of 30+ adolescents, silence was an
unusual occurrence; for a parent of four children silence offered a rare escape from the demands of family life.
Recently
I have come to value meditation for the peace it offers, the truth it touches
and the surprisingly shifts it bring to life. Of course there are still the
distractions of a busy brain and the wayward thoughts that chase you out of
stillness. Speaking the mantra can help but its so easy to drift away.
I
find Richard Rohr reassuring on this subject. He tells us that God meets us
exactly where we are – not in some imaginary state of perfection. And we can
find the way to silence when we learn to let go of our carefully created ego and return to what
the Zen masters call the ‘face we had
before we were born’. So now I begin to understand;
to practice ‘contemplare’ is to be in an empty space, made emptier by my
failure. There, as Richard Rohr puts it, God is able to speak to us and
sometimes we are able to hear. In that
space, where we ‘stop thinking and just look’ we encounter
the nothingness, nakedness, and emptyness where God can most powerfully meet us
and teach us. (Jenny Collins)
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