Into the Silent Land, Chapter One
Some years ago, I was a few years past the divorce that ended my 29 year marriage, my children had gone off to college, and I was serving in a congregation which was going through a very difficult transition. The work was hard and not really rewarding. I was working long hours and coming home exhausted, dropping in front of the TV to watch something so that I could just take my mind off work for awhile. I remember feeling very alone and lonely. I was around people more than usual but most of the time it was in the conflicted environment of the church. I tried to spend time with friends to compensate for the isolation which I was feeling; but I only felt more and more alone. I recall going to my spiritual director at the time and complaining about how hard I was working – at God’s work – and yet I was feeling so alone, so tired, so lonely and so unsure of myself. And, worst of all, God seemed nowhere to be found.
Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience through out most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in ; it is the human condition. . . . This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it.) But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside. (Into the Silent Land p. 15)
My spiritual director looked at me and asked, “So how is your prayer life?” Now the truth of the matter is that while I was writing weekly sermons and praying with people or leading prayers or just shooting up prayers like popcorn, for help or strength or direction, I was really not finding time to sit in the contemplative practice that had been a part of my life for many years. I explained to my director that I had not had time to pray and that, feeling lonely, I was more inclined to spend time with friends. He gently suggested that I might try spending time alone with God in silence.
The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God. (Jn 17:21) (p.16)
The contemplative discipline of meditation, what I will call in this book contemplative practice, doesn’t acquire anything. In that sense, and an important sense, it is not a technique but a surrendering of deeply imbedded resistances that allows the sacred within gradually to reveal itself as a simple fundamental fact. . . . this God we seek has already found us, already looks out of our own eyes, is already, as St. Augustine famously put it, “ closer to me than I am to myself” “O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, you were within and I was outside myself.” (p.8)
We might liken the depths of the human to a sponge in the ocean. The sponge looks without and sees ocean; it looks within and sees ocean. The sponge is immersed in what at the same time flows through it. The sponge would not be a sponge were this not the case. Some call this differentiating union: the more we realize we are one with God the more we become ourselves, just as we are, just as we were created to be. (p.17)
Somewhere inside I knew that my director was right, so I restructured my day and forced myself to make time. And it really was incredible: I began to feel more relaxed and could think more clearly in the many difficult situations that I was facing; I regained a joy in just being by myself and found greater comfort and depth in my closest relationships; and, most importantly, I regained a sense of oneness with God and focus on my ministry. The situation was still difficult, the hours long and unrewarding; but, I knew that I was doing good work and I knew that I was OK.
I have been quite personal here and have quoted Martin Laird extensively; because I cannot think of any more important message for Christians today than that which Laird so beautifully articulates in this first chapter. At the very depths of our being we are and always have been one with God and one another and we come to know this oneness (not just intellectually knowing but knowing in our very bones, experiencing, living, awareness) in silence.
What do you think? Where do you experience God?