Sunday, June 10, 2007
Silence is Golden
I've been using the Northumbria Community's "Celtic Daily Prayer" book, recently.If you haven't used it yourself, I can throughly recommend it. It's like the Church of England Book of Common prayer, but it has different readings, and wordings - same idea, but a bit more earthy. Carey and I have found the Complines particularly good - a great way to revivify a flagging prayer life. There's a link to it, in the resources section on moot.uk.net.
Anyway, I came across this reading in it a week or so ago. Its very interesting on the subject of silence and isolation:
"It is not the desert island, nor the stony wilderness, that cuts you off from the people you love: it is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wonders lost - a stranger from onself, and a stranger to others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others. How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us, or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. As for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
We are all, in the last analysis, alone. How one hates to think of oneself as alone. how one avoids it - it seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
We seem so frightened, today, of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void.
Even daydreaming was more creative than this: it demanded something of oneself, and fed the inner life. Now, instead of planting our own dream-blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops, there is no inner music to take its place.
We must re-learn to be alone."
How do you cope being alone? Do you crave solitude? Or do you run from it at all costs? Any thoughts/discussion welcome in the comments box..
