Silence is everywhere if we are journeying deeply.
Silence is elicited in all of the Four Paths that creation spirituality names as our deep spiritual journey. In the Via Positiva, awe and beauty often render us silent—just as in Job’s case discussed in yesterday’s DM.
In the Via Negativa of course silence is an entryway to the divine and a practice in itself. “Be still and learn that I am God” say the Scriptures.
The silence, emptying and letting go of the Via Negativa often leads to birthing something new in the Via Creativa. Most writers, painters or musicians, for example, seek solitude and quiet to call up their images and bring them forward. What they gift others often calls forth awe from recipients–and therefore still more silence (see Via Positiva above).
The Via Transformativa often calls for silence—and being silenced. A political person in prison knows about silence—and being silenced. Before the Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for daring to bring Copernican science and religion together, they cut out his tongue. A silencing doubled by his burning at the stake.
When Sister Dorothy Stang was assassinated and martyred for standing up to landowners in the Amazon on behalf of peasants and the rainforest, they were silencing her. Jesus’s crucifixion was an act of silencing by the authorities of the Roman Empire and certain religious leaders in cahoots with them.
Gandhi’s assassination was a silencing. Mandela’s imprisonment was a silencing. MLK Jr’s assassination was a silencing. Meister Eckhart’s condemnation was a silencing.
All prophets know about silencing—after all, to be a prophet is to interfere by “speaking out” and “speaking truth to power.” Sometimes silence is holy; sometimes it is to be broken; and sometimes it is punishment for telling the truth.
Godly darkness is also godly silence.
“The Ground of being” that Eckhart evokes is developed when he distinguishes “God” from “Godhead.” In one amazing sermon he speaks of “core, soil, stream” as “sources of the Godhead.” We hear him shedding light on his use of “Ground of being” as a synonym for the divine.
When I was still in the core, the soil, the stream, and the source of the Godhead no one asked me where I wanted to go or what I was doing. There was no one there who might have put such a question to me. But when I flowed out from there, all creatures called out: ‘God!’ I was asked, ‘Brother Eckhart, when did you go out of the house?’ For I had been inside.
In this way all creatures speak about ‘God.’ And why don’t they speak about the Godhead? Everything within the Godhead is unity and we cannot speak about it…..
When I come into the core, the soil, the stream, and source of the Godhead, no one asks me where I’m coming from or where I’ve been. No one has missed me in the place where ‘God’ ceases to become.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, p. 77.
Banner Image: “The moonlight and the boat,” photo by Claudia Dea on Flikr.
Do you regularly return to the core, the soil, the stream and source of the Godhead? Is this also the Ground of being for you? Is it your experience that each of the Four Paths contain silence within them?
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5 thoughts on “Darkness, Ground and Silence in our Spiritual Journeying”
Paul Simon’s song The Sound of Silence speaks of “darkness my old friend..” goes on to speak of his vision seeded in the night and concludes by warning the people who bow and pray to the neon god they made…
I think Simon would relate to Matthew’s depth charge meditation today.
Gwen, I think Matthew would appreciate it too…
Gwen, yesterday after reading the daily DM, I listened to several versions of this song on U-Tube…one by Simon and Garfunkle, one by the Gregorian Chanters and one by Disturbed. I find it interesting that this same song came up for both of us. Today what came to me was the importance and value of spiritual journaling … which for me in its various forms, which I combine from my faith traditions as well as other methods, has become a pathway of entering into the silence and hearing the sounds within this silence, that small still voice within of the I AM, that is also there amongst the other voices vieing for my attention. Recently I have been exploring another expression of this entering into the sound of silence through the book titled Writing the Mind Alive. When I think about spiritual journaling as a spiritual practice of relationship with not only aspects of myself but also aspects of the Divine Spirit, I see that this is the pathway that the mystics too engaged with. I find that the sacred writings that they left behind encourage me to trust also in my own journey of discovering and engaging with this same personal and intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit and Wisdom of the living presence and essence of Unconditional Love …. what I am coming to know as the Divine Mother/Father accessible to all in many diverse and direct ways.
Jeanette, You write, “When I think about spiritual journaling as a spiritual practice of relationship with not only aspects of myself but also aspects of the Divine Spirit, I see that this is the pathway that the mystics too engaged with. I find that the sacred writings that they left behind encourage me to trust also in my own journey of discovering and engaging with this same personal and intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit and Wisdom of the living presence and essence of Unconditional Love…” What you say is the truth for many. Journaling has been a big part of my spiritual journey, and I have read saints whose writings were their journals, and diaries, such as Sister M. Faustina Kowalska of the Congregation of Sisters of our Lady of Mercy, as well as the various “confessions” such as St. Augustine and Matthew Fox’s CONFESSIONS.
Thanks Jeanette,
I have been journaling in a very similar fashion for several decades.
I am happy to say that I am learning to play Sound of Silence on the piano.