An excerpt from Laurence Freeman, OSB, “Dearest Friends,” Christian Meditation Newsletter, Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 3, 4, 5, 6.
In a noisy and overactive lifestyle, drenched in media buzz and bombarded by visual intrusions, the times of morning and evening meditation purify and recharge our silence. Attention is the muscle of silence. It is built up through regular exercise. [But] our contemporary lifestyle and the institutions that monitor us do not set much store by silence. The very nature of silence makes it easy to lose, without even realizing it. The more distracted you become the less you notice that you are not paying attention. The more external stimulus occupies the mind, the less we know that we have lost inner spaciousness. When we do eventually sense that something is wrong, or missing, we struggle to find a name for it. [. . .]
Learning to be silent involves taking the attention off ourselves, at least in the way we are usually and compulsively thinking about ourselves, looking over our shoulder or peering at the horizon. What should I do? How can I be happier? Am I a failure or a success? What do people think of me? Am I in control?
Such questions normally determine our decisions and our patterns of growth or decline. Each question arises from a self-objectifying sense of self, which has, of course, a necessary pragmatic role to play in life. . . . But very easily these questions can become the dominant cast of mind from which we live all the time. We become their slaves. How we see ourselves (the ego like a continuously running security camera catching every word and gesture) and how others see us (the sense of being evaluated and found wanting) has, with the help of the media, generated a cultural obsession with self-image. Unchecked and unmodified, it destroys the confidence of the true self that enables us to live. [. . . .]
We all find excuses to avoid the stillness and run from the dawning silence. But when we do become silent, life bursts open with a freshness and poignancy that is the energy of the life of Christ. In an instant the fears, prejudices and the self-constructed prisons of the human condition begin to crumble. We go into the inner room, as Jesus [describes it], and as we enter this room we discover that we are moving through space boundlessly.
After meditation: Mary Oliver, “A Thousand Mornings,” in A THOUSAND MORNINGS (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 35.
All night my heart makes its way
however it can over the rough ground
of uncertainties, but only until night
meets and then is overwhelmed by
morning, the light deepening, the
wind easing and just waiting, as I
too wait (and when have I ever been
disappointed?) for redbird to sing.
