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The Rev. Frank
Logue
Make Room for Silence I am…how do I put this…loquacious, wordy, verbose, given to telling things the long way. Some see this as a sign of a preacher, we are given to talking. This is nothing new for me. My own sainted mother says I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle and swears that I made it to third grade before I realized my first name was Frank. Her side of the story is that until then I thought my first name was Shut-Up and my last name was Frank because all anyone said to me was “Shut up Frank!” This confession makes it clear that my retreat last fall to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, a Cistercian monastery was bound to stretch my growing edges. Cistercian monks are monks’ monks. They are known for their silence. There is the story told of a man who goes to a Cistercian monastery interested in joining the order. He is told that he can say two words to the Abbot every year. The first year he says, “Food bad” and is told, “Brother Jerome does the best he can with what is grown on the property and besides such simplicity is part of the life of a monk.” The following year, the man tells the Abbott “Bed hard.” The Abbott explains, “The bed is hard by design. A monk’s life is not to be one a leisure but of work and prayer.” The third year, the man says, “I quit!” To which the Abbott replied, “I don’t doubt it, you’ve done nothing but complain since you got here. The monastery in Conyers is not that extreme. But, other than the words of the liturgy and perhaps a daily discussion with a spiritual director, the norm at the Abbey is silence. Eating your meal in silence, passing one another in the halls in silence, silence in waking, in working, in sleeping. Silence. I found it easier to make room for silence than I would have imagined as the monastery is designed for silence. If everyone is keeping the same rule, it is not rude to avoid saying thank you to someone who just held open the door for you. You just nod to acknowledge the person and walk on. The silence also allows more contemplative time. It is easy to avoid contemplation in your day to day life. Work or school, family and friends, the demands made on any of us can keep us going through a day without really stopping to be contemplative in any meaningful way. While the day can similarly be filled with pockets of alone time such as while driving some place or even just while using the bathroom. For all but perhaps the parents of infants, we have these pockets of time, but often do not use the time we do have to get connected back to ourselves and to God. But in a monastery, the whole thrust of the place is designed to make just such time. My spiritual director prescribed two times each day for centering prayer of 20-30 minutes each. Centering prayer is the name given to a form of Christian meditation that goes back centuries. Centering prayer involves a time of meditation and so can be confused with Buddhist or transcendental meditation, but this is a wholly Christian practice working from different principles as we seek time with God rather than repeating a meaningless sound endlessly while sitting straight backed and crossed-legged in meditation. The confusion comes as in Centering Prayer one does use a prayer word. A simple word which is meaningful to you in your relationship with God. A word like “love,” or the Greek form of it “Agape,” or the personal name “Jesus.” The word becomes the symbol of your intention to open yourself up to God’s presence. Once you have selected the word, you will need to find a place that you can sit comfortably and without distraction for the 20 minutes of prayer time. Once seated comfortably, close your eyes and bring the word to mind, in so doing you are opening yourself up to the presence of the God who is already present and active within you. Other thoughts or distractions will come to mind. As they do, use the thought of the word to drive away the distractions. Do not get discouraged by the initial inability to focus. Just use the word and focus on that symbol. Once centered again you can let go of the word. Continue this way for 20 minutes, then with your eyes still closed remain in silence for another minute or two, gently returning from the prayer journey. Basil Pennington, a past Abbott of the monastery where I was on retreat gives the most concise definition of Centering Prayer as, “Be with God within. Use a word to stay. Use the word to return.” I had tried Centering Prayer before but found it easier in the silence of the monastery abbey church often with monks nearby also in silent prayer. It was a way to bring the external silence of the abbey into my heart. And while I felt no amazing breakthroughs in prayer, no deep spiritual insight, the 45 minutes or so each day of centering prayer did give me peace. So I mention this specific prayer form and we have some handouts on it in the entry hall for those who are interested in pursuing this form of prayer further [for the cyber-congregation, here is an Adobe PDF file of the Centering Prayer brochure]. It is a way to make room for silence within you. There are other ways of experiencing silence with God. Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop Anthony Bloom wrote about being in God’s presence in his book, Beginning to Pray. He writes how after his ordination he visited at an elderly parishioner at a nursing home. The woman wanted his advice on prayer. She said that she had tried zealously following others advice on prayer and had never perceived God’s presence. Bloom counseled the woman “Go to your room after breakfast, put it right…and first of all take stock of the room. Just sit, look round, and try to see where you live….And then take your knitting and for fifteen minutes knit before the face of God, but I forbid you to say one word of prayer. You just knit and try to enjoy the peace of your room.” Bloom reports that the woman followed his unconventional advice and later told him, “You know, it works.” She went on to say that as she knitted a while she increasingly noticed the silence. She told Bloom she realized “this silence was not simply the absence of noise, but the silence had substance. It was not the absence of something, but the presence of something. The silence had a density, a richness, and it began to pervade me. The silence around began to come and meet the silence in me.” She discovered the God in her knitting, who had eluded her in years of fervent prayer. The thing that matters most is to realize that you are always in God’s presence. Always. No matter what life throws at you, you are always in God’s presence if you will open yourself up to that deeper reality. This is what the prophet Elijah discovers in our Old Testament reading for this morning. Elijah is a prophet on the run. Israel is turned away from the one true God and worshipping other false gods. Elijah flees to the desert to avoid persecution and hears God ask him, “What are you doing here Elijah?” The idea seems to be “Why are you out in the desert?” Elijah then cries out to God, “the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Elijah is then ordered to go stand on the mountain before God as God passes by. Then God sends a powerful wind, which splits mountains and breaks rocks into pieces. But we are told that God was not in the wind. Then God sends an earthquake, and God is not in the earthquake. Then God sends fire, but God is not in the fire. Bibles often translate what happened next as Elijah hearing “a still, small voice.” But the New Revised Version we use for our Sunday readings gets the Hebrew exactly right. After the fire, Elijah hears sheer silence, it could even be translated a fine silence. It is the deep silence of a windless desert. God was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but God is in this deep, heavy silence. Elijah is moved to wrap his face with his mantle lest he see God face to face and then he steps out into the deep silence to hear God anew. Next we get a repetition of the scene before with God asking Elijah what he is doing there, then Elijah retelling the God who already knows about how he is on the run, and finally God sends Elijah back to appoint a new king as well as a new prophet in his own place. Elijah who ran to the desert in fear for his life will now venture out to name a new king and prophet. He does this empowered by the sheer silence. Bolstered by encountering God, he returns to the path already set before him. If nothing else, this story of Elijah’s encounter with God shows that God can be made known to us in all sorts of ways. God could have come in the wind, earthquake or fire. But God is best known to us through silence which speaks to our hearts. I know I have experienced God’s leading in different ways. Once it took a rock. I was leaving a Bible Study at our church in Rome, Georgia. Standing on the curb talking to someone from the study before we got in our cars, a man across the street caught my eye. He had an impossibly large rock held over his head. He was running on a collision course with a car coming down the street. In case we couldn’t read the rage in his eyes, the man screamed, “I’m going to kill you!” at the car and raised the stone a little higher. Then, improbably, he looked up, saw me and let the car pass. He came across the road. I stood planted to the spot, not out of bravery, but in something closer to shock. The man, still clearly enraged, dropped the rock at my feet and said, “Do you know Don Black?” “Yes,” I said, acknowledging the name of my Episcopal priest. He said, “Good, because if I don’t speak to him, or somebody, I’m gonna kill somebody.” “Why don’t we talk,” I said. By the time the Police arrived, the fire had gone out of the man and they went on without incident. He just needed to vent and I provided a listening ear. God used the rock incident to help get my attention about a call to ministry I had already been feeling for some time. Later came the sheer silence. It was a Sunday morning and Victoria and I were back in the worship service for communion after a rather taxing Children’s Church. Trying to settle myself down, I prayed through The Lord’s Prayer, focusing my mind back on God. In the silence of the pew, God did not speak to me, there was only silence, but in the silence I knew that I needed to stop praying for God’s will unless I intended to get back on the way God had set for me. If I wasn’t going to do something about the call to ministry I had felt for sometime, why keep praying for God’s will. I’ve heard the idea put much better by singer and activist Bono, of the rock group U2, who said he learned, why keep doing what you want to do and asking God to bless it. Why not do those things that God wants to bless. That was it for me. In the silence, I knew that I was following a different path asking for God’s blessing. By going where God was leading me, I found that way had been blessed already. So God used the rock and God used the silence and finally God got me to the place where his blessings we waiting all along. But this is not a sermon about ordained ministry, for God’s blessings await in all sorts of jobs and life situations. This is a sermon about making room for silence. For the way to find out what God is blessing in your life and wants to bless can’t be found if you are so busy talking that you can’t listen. Silence can come through centering prayer, knitting in God’s presence, commuting with God, or wherever you can find it. But you have to open up room for God in those pockets of silence in your life. You need that silence like you need oxygen and this comes from a person known for words, and lots of them. We enter this week into the season of Lent, a time of preparation for the joy of Easter. Yes, it can be a time of giving up chocolate or soft drinks, or taking on Bible reading, or some other spiritual reading. But let this Lent also be a time of making room for silence. It’s not to make room to hear God speak so much as to give the silence of God room to be present in your silence. You don’t need wind, earthquakes, fire or even words, just that silent presence of God speaking wordlessly to your heart. Amen.
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