An Invitation to Silence

Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda trans. by Stephen Mitchell from Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon:  Selected Poems (Harpercollins)

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,

let's not speak any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,

without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together

in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea

would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,

perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I'll go.


Last week I led the Christian part of an interfaith meditation event for 40 or so participants.  The first presenter was a lovely Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka who guided us in a loving-kindness meditation for about 25 minutes.  I then gave a brief history and introduction to Centering Prayer and we sat in silence for another 20 minutes. 

 I'm used to sitting in silence with others, I do it almost every Tuesday evening.  And I often take the power of collective silence for granted until I talk to someone who is new to the experience, as was the case with my monk friend.  It's probably my own ignorance about his particular tradition within Buddhism and the type of meditation he practices, but that kind of surprised me.  Afterall, here was a man of a certain age, who has spent his adult life living all over the world and teaching meditation, saying that he'd never had an experience of collective silence like that before.  He talked about how there was an energy in the room that was powerful, yet at the same time deeply still and quiet. 

It's often the same way on Tuesday evenings in the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage.  When we shut the outer doors, dim the lights, and sound the prayer bowl, a palpable hush falls over the room.  Often the longer we sit, the more I feel myself descending into that energy almost as if I'm being taken down into the depths of silence in an elevator or sinking into it like a fathomless pool of warm water. 

I can't imagine what that silence would feel like if, as Pablo Neruda suggests, the whole world agreed to be still and quiet at the same time.  The logistics alone would probably prevent that from ever happening.  But maybe we can experiment on a small scale. 

So here's what I'm proposing.  Tonight, 19 May, 2013, from 6:40 - 7 pm EST, I invite you to sit in silence.  If you want to sit with others and you're in the DC area, feel free to join us in the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage at Washington National Cathedral.  If not, just find a comfortable place and take those twenty minutes to sit and be quiet.  It doesn't matter what you do in those twenty minutes-- Centering Prayer, metta meditation, mantra meditation, focusing on your breath, listening, whatever-- as long as you're quiet and still.  Let's see if even a little collective silence can interrupt the sadness and make us more alive . . .