Today is my birthday and I am yearning for silence of a rare kind. I've been yearning for silence for years, as may be clear to one reading many of my preceding weblog articles here over the past five years or so. Today, as the sun rises and I am contemplating my life in the annual "it's your birthday, whatcha doin with your life" kind of way, this yearning is ludicrously acute.
For more than a couple years, I've been struggling with all of my might in a rigorous, daily, inward, manner to be silent in a way which speaks volumes. It's painful to put into words how fervent is my desire, and yet how ridiculously unfruitful are all efforts toward this end. As one who has prayed and sometimes received answers from heaven, I've prayed to God for his assistance in this endeavor. Although he answers with gentle improvements in how to structure my thoughts and my attempts, he always stops short in the answer at a very specific point. At that point, when I go to him for help, he responds, not in words, but in bringing to mind the awareness: "Remember, this is your gift to me, therefore I cannot do it for you." He's respecting my free will, as he does. I should note: this is not a verbal conversation, but an intuitive one of gentle impressions and hints being translated into words for the purpose of this article.
I long ago determined, thanks to the couplet "What shall I give him, small as I am / If I were a shepherd, I would bring him a lamb," that I want to bring him a kind of listening which I discovered at the end of many separate thought experiments, a lot of which were oriented around math and physics or scriptural references. For example, the common quote from scripture "Be still, and know that I am God" comes with a special meaning for me. Most people think this passage is simply saying "be quiet, and trust." To me, it's saying "Be still, like I am, and then you will know me."
Or another example: in my long pursuit of understanding God as he appears in physics, I have found myself following thought experiments to the time period before the Big Bang, where there is a condition of perfect order (where the 2nd Law of Thermodymics says entropy=0), and, in my mind, a perfect stillness. This place of stillness is not just the condition before the Big Bang, but it is within everything ever since, too, a subatomic zero-point substratum which lies beneath even the "quantum foam" that comprises the foundation of modern quantum physics.
Or another example: the stillness that I seek during quiet meditation. Or another: the stillness described in a document once published by the CIA, written by the US Army Intelligence and Security Command in the early 1980s, which explores the nature of reality and talks about a point beyond spacetime which they call "the Absolute" which is a condition of perfect stillness:
Energy in this state of inactive infinity is termed by physicists as energy in its absolute state, or simply "the Absolute." Between the Absolute and the "material" universe in which we experience our physical existence are various intervening dimensions to which human consciousness in altered states of being may gain access. Theoretically, human consciousness may continue to expand the horizons of its perceptual capability until it reaches the dimension of the Absolute at which point perception stops because the-Absolute generates no holograms of or about itself.
There are many more examples, found in poetry, religion, science, art, mysticism, throughout all of history, all talking about a condition of perfect peace. All of them can be grouped together in my mind as the silence which I seek and laughably fail to find, over and over.
I do make progress, but ever. so. slowly. I look forward to the day this is embedded in me, rather than something for which I seek.
[Update, late December:]
Yesterday I discovered Thomas Aquinas was finishing his magnum opus, the great Summa Theologica, when he had an experience with God which so astonished him that he stopped writing altogether, and never wrote again for the rest of his life. As the America Magazine, a Jesuit publication put it in an article entitled "Thomas Aquinas fell silent when he learned this truth: The mystery of God is impossible to grasp":
In his classic study, The Silence of St. Thomas (1957), Josef Pieper drew on canonization accounts to share an oft-told story about Thomas Aquinas, whose influence in Catholicism is surpassed only by Sts. Paul and Augustine. "On the Feast of St. Nicholas, in the year 1273, as Thomas turned back to this work after Holy Mass, he was strangely altered. He remained steadily silent; he did not write; he dictated nothing. He laid aside the _Summa Theologica_ on which he had been working. Abruptly, in the middle of the treatise on the Sacrament of Penance, he stopped writing. Reginald, his friend, asks him, troubled: 'Father, how can you want to stop such a great work?' Thomas answers only, 'I can write no more.' Reginald of Piperno seriously believed that his master and friend might have become mentally ill through his overwhelming burden of work. After a long while, he asks and urges once again. Thomas gives the answer: 'Reginald, I can write no more. All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw.' Reginald is stunned by this reply." St. Thomas never wrote again, though much has been penned about this great theologian’s descent into silence before his death in 1274.
Finding this small fact, including the point that he died young only a few months after this incident, is somehow comforting to me. Whatever Aquinas saw in his epiphany is in the direction of where I'm headed. I do not intend to stop writing, but I do want to see what can only be seen when one has learned James 3, and learned to bridle their tongue.
Now, more than ever.