Life is so filled with paradox! Words so often get in the way -- yet, we go into the Silence to hear the Word. And what a blessing are the words of Scripture, the words of individuals in every age that continue to live as gift. Isaac of Niniveh, a Syrian monk, offers us reflections on silence:
"If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God ... More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this "something" that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence ... After a while, a certain sweetness is born in the heart and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence."
Words are unimportant in approaching God. Instead let us go to God with the same attitude one child had as she sat almost hidden in the midst of a field of waving wheat. When her grandfather went looking for her, from a distance he heard her going through the entire alphabet, softly saying, "A, B, C, D, E ..." Curious, her grandfather asked, "What are you doing?" "I'm praying, Grandpa. But I don't know the right words, so I'm saying all the letters and letting God put them together."
~ from THE ALCHEMY OF AWARENESS by Lorraine Sinkler
The silence of meditation is not the silence of a graveyard; it is the silence of a garden growing. There is no deadness in a garden, but in that all-pervading silence an intense activity is going on in the ground which will later take form as buds, blossoms and fruit. So, too, in meditation there is not a blankness, but a rhythmic activity of the Spirit. As the mind exhausts itself the Spirit comes through, and we are in the realm of heaven. True, we are still on earth, our feet are solidly on the ground -- the holy ground of spiritual awareness.
~ from THE ALCHEMY OF AWARENESS by Lorraine Sinkler
