Opening to Joy ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
December 13, 2020
I sat quietly, allowing this homily to emerge from my head and heart, through my fingers and onto the page, and as I sat, I was accompanied by the sound of rain pounding on the roof of my house. I don’t have dropped ceilings, so rain tends to be very loud at home. I sat, surrounded by sound, and yet, in stillness.
A few weeks ago our service asked the question, “What grounds us?” Several of you participated, and offered several important thoughts about what grounds us, including gratitude, listening deeply, meditation, prayer, nature, and forgiveness. It was moving, and made me want to explore in more depth.
I spent time considering the role of silence and stillness in helping us reach that grounded center within ourselves, that mysterious place with many names, such as the soul, or our being. We call it a place, but can it be, really? We can think of it as our essence, our wholeness.
We are taught by most religious traditions that the way to find that essence, our being, is to work our way deep within ourselves. And often, we try to achieve that through silence. As I read I could see that people used the words ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ almost interchangeably. I asked myself, is silence the same as stillness? What is the difference?
Some time ago, I preached a sermon about deep listening, and how I was finding that listening for silence is a spiritual practice. I described how I had found a huge boulder in the woods near my home and would pause there, noticing all the sounds, and noticing when they stopped. Bird calls came and went, faraway traffic noise, the blowing wind, the rustling leaves. There would come a moment when none of those sounds could be heard. I came to love those fleeting moments, for they are rare. I could feel my body relax. And in the silence, I would become still.
There are so many paths to stillness – silence is one. The poet Mary Oliver writes,
“I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.” (Today, by Mary Oliver, in A Thousand Mornings, Penguin, 2012.)
Music is an important path to stillness, and any form of creative pursuit, really. Our conversation in our service two weeks ago offered many paths to stillness. At the time we were naming them as ways to ground ourselves, to find our way back to our centers. But it is stillness that grounds us, without requiring silence, or even sitting still.
I am learning that silence is not the same as stillness. I have developed tinnitus – tinnItus – and find these days that the more I try to listen for silence, the louder the sounds inside my head. I work now to find ways to cover the ringing in my ears with other sounds: music, or ocean waves. TV works great! Rain on the roof, as I was hearing yesterday. I know now that it is possible to sit in stillness without surrounding myself in silence.
Father Richard Rohr, the head of the Center for Action and Contemplation, distinguishes between outer and inner silence. And it is outer silence that I have lost; the silence to be found in the outside world around me. Inner silence, however, arises through contemplation. “Stillness,” wrote Mary Oliver. “One of the doors into the temple.”
Stillness implies solitude more than silence. In order to ‘travel a great distance,’ we must find a way to remove ourselves, to create space and time. It is an act of courage, really, to be willing to create space for what may emerge, to open ourselves to finding our essence. It is an act of courage, and an invitation.
The author of our reading, Jan Richardson, put it this way:
“Let there be an opening
into the quiet that lies beneath the chaos,
where you find the peace
you did not think possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.”
To encourage the travel toward inner silence, to what might be shimmering, Father Rohr encourages a spiritual practice known as Centering Prayer. It is based on a teaching of Jesus of Nazareth from the Sermon on the Mount, a famous passage in which Jesus teaches the disciples, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Mt. 6:6)
We have always taken this passage at face value, understanding it to mean that God prefers that we pray privately – in secret. But what if, as Father Rohr suggests, the room Jesus refers to is our inmost self? And what if the door to be closed is our monkey mind, the incessant thinking and noise we carry around with us?
Centering Prayer invites us into stillness. To maintain the stillness of our minds, it teaches us to practice gently bringing ourselves back to the present by the quiet repetition of a simple word or phrase. As with all contemplative prayer or meditation, it sounds simple but takes years to become practiced, to be open to what might emerge.
The reward for the practice, perhaps, if we can find our way into the room of our heart, and close the door on the daily commotion around us, could be an opportunity to deepen, to open ourselves to the Holy, to wholeness. What a gift this could be. The gift that we often call awakening, or enlightenment, or Love, could be granted to us through this deepening of the spirit.
The reward for this effort, the gift, is Joy.
Joy, of course, is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness is the feeling we have when something good happens to us: when someone gives us a gift, or we have a fun day with families or friends. Joy, though, is a way of life, an orientation of the heart much like gratitude or forgiveness. Joy arises out of a decision to seek connection, not just with other people, but with life itself, with the universe, or with the Divine. Joy finds us when we decide to live with wholeness, to live out of the depth of our being, to live in Love.
Joy to the world! We will sing in about 10 days. Joy to the world, for the Holy is emerging. Let heaven and nature sing. May all that is holy, and whole, appear in your lives, and may you rejoice!
Blessed Be.
Amen.
