To Finally Stand Still
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 3, 2019

 

I’ve been living in my ‘new’ house for just over two years now. It has been a long time since I have moved to a new home, and I’ve been very aware that it takes a long time for this to truly become ‘home’. It takes time to explore, to come to know a place inside and out, to begin to understand it and make it my own.

One of my favorite walks takes me up the hill behind my house and into the woods, and there I have discovered a ‘listening rock.’ This is an enormous boulder, almost a cliff, really, that looks out over a wooded hillside. I remember wandering off the trail once and discovering this giant rock, and knowing right away that it was a good place, an important place. It is a place for standing still and paying attention. I detour off the trail and onto the top of this rock every time I walk past, and just stand for a few minutes, looking down among the trees below, trying to catch a glimpse of a deer, noticing how the leaves gradually fill in the view in the spring or now, are letting go and carpeting the forest floor.

But only recently have I come to think of this as a listening rock. I tend to be very visual: I am observant, and very aware of the growth of plants, of the angle of sunlight, of the color of the sky each day. But because I am so visually oriented, I tend to not always pay attention to sounds. And so recently, as I have been exploring this month’s theme of Attention, I have given more thought to listening intentionally: to hear everything that I can.

What I find I am doing, in paying attention in this way, is listening for silence. Hearing sounds, and listening for silence are two very different things. Can you hear silence? True silence is quite rare, even in the woods. Even a light breeze rustles the remaining leaves. The dog hears things that I cannot, and I see and hear her react: her hackles raise, there’s a low growl. I listen harder. Are there intervals when I cannot hear cars, or the neighbor’s leaf blower, the heavy equipment all the way downtown, or the waves crashing on the beach? I note all those sounds, but more and more I am waiting for the space between them: the silent space.

Let’s pause now, as we will do a few times in the course of this sermon, to listen for silence. Just relax in your seat, and be still. If we’re lucky and no car alarm goes off, or a dog barks, we might be able to hear and feel the silence in this space.

(Count to 30.)

UU minister Angela Herrera wrote,
“Beneath the hustle and bustle,
beneath the stream of thoughts that clambers and chatters
over the landscape of our interior world,
beneath our habits of momentum and stirring,
there is a stillness, deep and peaceful,
the place where creation begins.
Who lives there?” (Angela Herrera, in Reaching for the Sun: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2012, p. 32)

The prophet Elijah listened for God to pass by him as he waited in a cave on Mount Horeb. He listened to the storm that passed, to the earthquake, to the raging fire, but God was not in those. And then there came a silence in which Elijah heard a still, small voice, and he covered his face with his cloak and went to the entrance of the cave. The voice he heard asked, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (First Kings 19:13)

“Be still,” wrote the Psalmist. “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

Beneath the wind, and the traffic, and the commotion, “there is a stillness, deep and peaceful, the place where creation begins. Who lives there?”

Be still, and know.

We have many names for who or what lives beneath the chaos and the distraction: the numinous. The Holy. The Ground of Being. Ultimate Reality. The soul. Buddha Nature. God. Perhaps what we find in the stillness we can name as truth, or wholeness, or our deepest selves, calling out to us.

Who, or what lives in that still center? What passed by Elijah’s cave? Does a name matter?

Let us pause once again, and wait for the silence. Don’t try to meditate, just listen for the stillness.

(Count to 30)

From our earliest lives, we are ordered to ‘Pay Attention!” Teachers and parents insist on having our attention: “Look at me when I’m speaking to you!” “Listen to me!” “Look out – look both ways before you cross the street.” We grow up expecting others to demand our attention, and we try to give it. The irony is that in doing so, we take the attention away from our own still centers. Think about having to ‘pay’ attention – we offer it outwardly. We spend it. We are not taught to listen to our deepest selves, or to listen for the moments of silence in the world around us. This is a skill we might never have noticed that we are lacking, and something that we have to intentionally work to reclaim as our own. We have to pay ourselves back.

Deep listening, entering into silence, can resemble peeling an onion. We encounter sound in layers, and we wait to hear if they might be stripped away, one by one. The sound of voices, then heavy machinery, then the swoosh of cars. Below the traffic sounds, in the pauses, we begin to find a deeper silence, with sounds we have to listen to in order to name. Oh, that’s the seething of the ocean. Maybe we’re hearing the furnace, or the dryer. What’s below that? It’s hard, in this noisy culture, to get to a place of total silence: sometimes fleetingly in the woods, or if we’re awake deep in the night. If we are fortunate, and patient, sounds can peel away, one by one, and leave us with – What? Our breathing, perhaps, or our faint heartbeat. Sometimes there’s a faint hum, harder and harder to identify the deeper we go. Perhaps we arrive at complete silence for a few seconds, or not at all. But over time, as we practice this, we begin to notice the intervals, and to open ourselves toward them, to seek out the fleeting moments of silence.

What might enter? Or, what might already be present that we cannot usually find or hear?

Perhaps nothing, in that moment. The Bible tells us that Elijah was too overwhelmed to recognize the voice of God in that moment of silence. He had to be given further instructions of what to do next. Apparently, according to Bible commentators, Elijah missed his cue.

We cannot always understand what we might learn in the silence. We might be unprepared, unwilling to listen. And of course, over the course of our lives, there might be many, many moments of silence that offer no gift other than simply the respite from the commotion of our daily lives. And that is gift enough as we navigate the noise and the distraction. Perhaps we do not need anything else.

But what we do know is that without the practice, without the effort to be attentive, to listen for silence, we will not be given the opportunities to sense what might lie beneath the surface, the glimpses of oneness and wholeness that mystics of all traditions assure us can be ours.

Sister Joyce Rupp, author and poet, wrote: “…in busyness I often close down. In deliberate or unexpected awareness, I open up. It is in this openness that I “see” in a deeper or newer way, viewing people, creatures, and nature in a clearer light. As I open and become more aware, something happens inside of me to cause the barriers of my inattentiveness, judgments, or busyness to move aside and for bonding to occur. It is then that I recognize my oneness with the dancing that is inherent in the all of creation…When I take a deep breath and pull in the reins of my “hurry” I begin to find the numinous everywhere…In aware moments such as this, I see more clearly, lean into the mystery of life more deeply, and honor the oneness of life more truly.” (“Awareness,” by Joyce Rupp, https://thevalueofsparrows.com/2012/07/12/mysticism-awareness-by-joyce-rupp/)

Let’s give ourselves one more opportunity to deepen into silence, to hear silence.

(Count to 30)

My friends, when we allow ourselves to be still, to wait, to listen, silence comes to us in brief intervals. Sometimes these are so brief that they might slip past us completely unnoticed. But as we grow in awareness, we might begin to notice ourselves opening to that which is both within us and beyond us. These moments are invitations, as we heard in a reading earlier, to ‘step outside of time altogether.’ (Kathleen McTigue, “Bathing in Starlight,” Shine and Shadow: Meditations, Skinner House Books, 2011, p. 12.). In these moments of silence we are given an opportunity to descend deeper within ourselves, to connect with our most elemental selves, to turn toward that which connects all of life in that web of loving energy that some have named God.

The name does not matter. What is important in our lives is to understand deep listening as a spiritual practice, to cultivate these opportunities, and to recognize them for what they are, gifts of insight and connection.

Angela Herrera wrote this: “The holy waits in your world, too. Maybe today it will find you in a listening posture, and will whisper to you.” (Herrera, “Sometimes it Takes a Little Craziness,” in Reaching for the Sun: Meditations, p. 22.)

May you come to know the great gift of silence, and may you hear in the silence the whispers of your deepest selves.

Blessed Be,
Amen.