The Silence that Speaks

I just read "Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life", by Patricia Hampl, and a few passages running through my mind. Reading them was not radically different than other passages I have read by kindred spirit authors, but it's still always a joy to stumble across something that invokes the response: "That is SO me!"

"Spiritual life wasn't a quest, it was a disappearing act. I wanted... to fade, to vanish. But I was afraid that sounded macabre, though I didn't feel morbid. It was something else: sink, swim, fly, die, that mystic urge from all those years ago..."

"I was inside. Inside what? Within what I am seeking: the silence that speaks."

"My university friends were writers, artists. I saw those from Lutheran and Episcopalian backgrounds go in for Eastern meditation in a big way, finding someting genuine in the stripped-down style of Zen, something indisputably better than the Scotch-before-dinner habits of their Episcopal priest... They loved the bare bones of Zen, and they clawed at their Christian cages, thrusting imitation Basho poems between the bars."

"Some people speak of prayer as a need to surrender. All that swooning of the mystics, giving over to the Divine Lover. Bernini's St. Teresa in her ecstasy, still scandalizing the rationalists with the orgasmic joy of her prayer. But surrender doesn't say it - and even in silence, how I need a thing said. What is that impulse that has always been there, refuting logic and requiring song?

It must be instinct for praise. A ferocious appetite for humility which we intuit is a proper recognition of our truth: We are not simply made, but embraced. Sing a new song to the Lord, for he has made you. Made you to sing. Surrender - surrender even your voice, enter this silence. And become song.

I have always had a powerful sense of something pulsing which I could not name but also could not deny: a dynamic existence beyond me, yet in me. Spirit it is called - and why not? The invisible essence that is everywhere, including within ourselves...

This rich experience of life is not personal, though it is interior. It is an aspect of what we know to be the Divine, to be God - who was called in Hebrew, the first language of our tradition, Yahweh. That is, Our Integrity. I wished to find this Integrity."

The book is far from amazing, yet contains some wonderful moments. How I love the passage about song... I well relate to St. Teresa and her mystical experience of God.