Silence and Communion

Last week we held a couple of online small groups discussion sessions following the workshop I gave from India a couple of weeks ago titled, A Kaleidoscope of Light: Christianity and other faiths. I was really heartened to hear people speak about how meditation can be a meeting place.

My teacher, the Benedictine monk Sylvester Houédard, embodied a synthesis of deep commitment to the Christian path with a profound openness to other spiritual traditions. He saw the contemplative dimension as a common thread that can draw people and diverse traditions closer together — not by diluting their differences, but in their shared commitment to depth.

Silence practices, such as meditation, allow us to encounter each other in the silent ground of our being, in the truth which is before all our words and ideas, before all our religious metaphors and doctrines.

I’d like to share a few words about this.

We enter silence in meditation not to escape the world, but to enter more deeply into its heart. Silence is not a withdrawal from relationship. It is the vast interior space in which relationship is revealed, in which relationship is healed.

Silence is the gateway into the depths of our heart, where notions of separateness dissolve, where self and other, God and creation, are revealed as one living whole.

In meditation, we learn this truth not as a concept but as a lived experience, through encounter. We begin to understand the ancient teaching that God is like a boundless circle whole centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

When words fall away, when the grasping mind loosens its grip, what remains is presence, the silent presence of God which holds us all. In the noise and commotion of life, we can easily forget this shared ground. We live as though divided: me and you, sacred and secular, human and creation.

But when we enter the stillness of the heart, we begin to discover something deeper, flowing underneath. This flow is communion. It gathers rather than separates. It allows and accepts. It enfolds and joins all things in love.

Silence teaches us to be at home with mystery. As we let go of the need to know, a new, deeper kind of knowing awakens from within, accompanied by reverence and wonder. In silence, a subtle shift takes place that opens the heart to others. Instead of defining ourselves against the world, we find ourselves within it, not as separate, but belonging.

To live from this place, is to live from the heart that knows its foundation. It is to discover that silence is not emptiness, but a fullness beyond measure, that the heart of who we are is quiet radiance of God’s being shining in all things, that creation is the luminosity of infinite love.

In the silence of meditation, love ceases to be a feeling we generate. It becomes the very atmosphere we breathe. The divisions that once seemed so real between us, begin to soften in the light of this shared presence. We increasingly see that every person, every creature, every moment of our lives arises from the same depthless depth.

Silence is the meeting place of all that is. It is where creation prays without words, where the Spirit intercedes ‘with sighs too deep for words,’ where God’s love meets our longing and they are found to be one.

When we return from silence into speech, to where, as St. Augustine says, words have beginnings and ending again, something has changed. We listen a little more deeply, we speak a little more gently, we look upon one another with a quiet sense of connection. Our lives become more transparent to the still centre that sustains us. We increasingly live from the centre which is everywhere.

This communion does not remove us from the world’s pain. It makes us more present to it. The heart that has touched the silent centre that is communion, can never again pretend to be separate. It feels the suffering of the world as its own, yet knows a deeper truth. It trusts the boundless peace that holds everything.

The Carmelite Sister Mary McCormack says of her journey within silent prayer and deepening sense of communion:

‘Inner rules that had always governed me, began to give way to something more free and authentic. As I learned to tolerate ‘unknowing’ in prayer, I became more at ease with the questions and perplexities of human existence in our uncertain age.

‘I became conscious of a simple oneness with God that pervaded everything in life, without effort on my part, and there was also the beginning of a sense of oneness with the rest of humanity and with all of creation.’ (1)

This is the fruit of silence – the awakening of a heart at rest in God, a heart that sees the world as one living communion. To enter silence, then, is not to lose ourselves, but to find ourselves in all that is.

In the silence of meditation, we meet God, not as an object of our imagination, but as the ground of our being. We discover that our being is God’s Spirit within us, the Spirit of love, the love which unites us with every other person, with every atom of creation.