By Peter Longley
I was sent the following article by a good friend the other day. It appeared in the Springfield News-Leader, a local newspaper of Springfield, Missouri that until relatively recently was my home in the USA.
Searching for the sound of silence
Last week, my wife, Becky, and I took a bargain flight to the sun-drenched volcanic island of Hawaii, retreating from the threatening snow in our California foothills.
We spent much of the monotonous five-hour trip watching videos, but the sweeping sight of the endlessly smooth beaches on final approach had me imagining how I might find some peaceful silence.
The noise in my life had been building so slowly that I hadn’t realized how it had squelched so much of what God wants me to hear in the silence of his creation.
A few days after landing on the ‘Big Island,’ we set out to find what Simon and Garfunkel called ‘The Sound of Silence.’ We began our search with a one-hour road trip from our Kona hotel to Mauna Kea, a 13,677-foot dormant volcano.
We broke through the clouds at 8,000 feet and finally reached the visitor’s center at 9,200 feet. As we stepped from the car, we were spotlighted by the slanting rays of the fading sunlight.
We layered our summer clothing and donned sweatshirts to ward off the chilling threat of hypothermia. We then set out to ascend another 200 feet to grasp the pallet hues of the setting sun. Within a few minutes, the sun was gone, and I found myself eager for our pending engagement with silent beauty.
In the darkening dusk, I was excited to peer into the night skies described on the park website as being ‘among the clearest, driest, darkest places on the planet.’
‘What,’ I asked myself, ‘would darkness look like? What would silence sound like?’
Little holes began poking through the sky like sparkling glitter on black canvas. This was the kind of sky that likely inspired pilot and poet John Gillespie Magee to claim he had ‘put out my hand and touched the face of God.’
Silence is the unspoken partner in this darkness. Mauna Kea is so high that astronomers say they sometimes hear meteors pass in the silence.
In this solitude, if God had a hearing booth, this might be it. I could imagine the booth as a place where God played some tones and asked you to indicate which ear you were hearing from — your spiritual ear or your secular ear?
The silence told me that, as of late, I’d heard too much with that secular ear. My head seemed to be overflowing with a colluding cacophony of the distracting emails and voicemails, flight times and deadlines.
In that moment, I was anxious to hear with my spiritual senses.
But up in that thinning air, the only sound I heard was my weight nervously shifting over the obsidian rocks. I heard my breath and my heartbeat.
I was wary of being alone and covered, nearly smothered by the silence.
I strained to hear something. Anything at all.
What else might I hear?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Yet I’ve never known ‘nothing’ to sound so sacredly wonderful. It was as if I could hear the planets spin above me, as if I could hear myself aging, as if I could hear the clouds as they ran away searching for a new home.
This silence offered me a window into my soul as I stood honoring the sacred injunction to ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
As I walked back to the visitor’s center, guided by the sound of a car alarm, I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad. Had silence become such a threatened commodity that it now belonged on the acoustically endangered list?
Has the modern day made silence so threatening, distrustful and formidable that it must be sequestered to lonely mountaintops?
I certainly hope not.
We need to find silence every day, but in my case, I was privileged to acquire an extra dose of it on Mauna Kea.
By the way, that car alarm that so carelessly broke the silence — it was mine.
Chaplain Norris at comment@thechaplain.net
This article was forwarded to me by my dear friend because she thought I would like it. I certainly did!
Truthfully, I could have written this article myself. The style of writing is very similar to my own with interesting use of language and alliteration, but it also encapsulates my own spiritual philosophy.
I have spent my life seeking the answer to a visionary experience I had at the age of nine. I did not come from a particularly religious family background, for the most part we were not churchgoers, but at the age of nine I experienced a vision. I saw this huge wooden cross rise up in front of me on a hillside opposite my boarding school on the south coast of England. The cross was empty, but a voice boomed from it “God needs you.” The image became my vocation, and in varying ways I have tried to fulfill it.
The interesting thing is that the cross was empty. I don’t think I have ever really believed that Jesus Christ died on a cross to save me from my sins. In fact, I don’t think I have ever believed in sin or any Christian theories of a fallen angel tempting us as the anti-Christ. This does not mean that bad things don’t happen in our lives, they assuredly do, but I believe that evil is the result of man’s inhumanity to man, which affects our lives and often the lives of lesser species, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, creating villains and victims. I would rather see our task in the fight against evil like that found in most Eastern philosophies where two forces lie behind all things, ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’, and when they are balanced there is always harmony, but when they become imbalanced that harmony is destroyed and the result is evil. They are like the negative and positive forces of a battery that will only give us energy if they are in balance, and they bear no resemblance to good and evil unless we create imbalance and evil results.
Because the cross was empty does not mean that I do not believe that Jesus was crucified, however. The crucifixion is the one certain fact of Jesus’ life that has historical provenance. He was crucified and died ‘under Pontius Pilate’, who was the undisputed Prefect of Judea from 26-36 AD.
From earliest days on my spiritual journey, nature has always played an important part. Indeed, my earliest spiritual experiences were to escape from the noise of school and seek strength in the peaceful silence of escaping ‘out of bounds’ into a spinney and field adjacent to my school. One day I was caught. In those days, I could have been caned for being ‘out of bounds,’ but it was difficult to punish a boy who was merely praying in silence!
I became a theologian as I sought to answer that call, and to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. I read theology at Cambridge and I was licensed as a lay-reader and preacher in the Church of Ireland. It was in my early days in Ireland that Simon and Garfunkel’s moving hit ‘The Sound of Silence’ came out in 1964. I remember preaching one of my first sermons in Cashel Cathedral in 1966 on ‘The Sound of Silence.’
Prayer is interesting as I early gave up on any idea that prayer is a conversation with God. I believe that prayer is really a conversation with yourself that causes you to focus and seek that balance of eternal harmony. For me, this is very much how I interpret Jesus’ teaching on prayer found in just a few verses of the gospels (St Matthew 6:1-15; St Mark 11:25; and St Luke 18:10-14) Jesus’ teaching is about inclusion and forgiveness and he says very little about personal petition other than to say, ‘Your father knows what you need before you ask him.’ Jesus did live, however, in a praying society and we really do not live in a praying society today. This does not discount the value of prayer as focus, however. We all need focus in our lives.
I am sure a good part of the decline in prayer is because we no longer see God as that super-human being up there in the sky. Jesus almost certainly did. He was a Jew brought up to believe in the monotheistic God of his people—Yaweh or Jehovah. He lived in the Graeco-Roman world of the First Century where gods freely mixed with humans to create the pantheon of gods found within the ancient world under a loose hegemony of Zeus or Jupiter. All gods were in the image of mankind, including according to Genesis 1:26, the God of the Jews. Since Darwin and his theories on evolution, and with a deeper understanding of the non-monotheistic religions of our planet, that concept of God has faded fast and been replaced by a belief in a Cosmic God that is not in the image of man, but in the image of the vibration of the Cosmos—the creator of all that is, past, present and future—infinite. This is the kind of divine presence that we meet in the ‘Sound of Silence.’
I have not personally been up to the top of Mauna Kea, but I am familiar with the ‘Big Island’ of Hawaii. I have, however, had very similar experiences with the ‘Sound of Silence’.
I felt the ‘Sound of Silence’ in the Canadian Wilderness, and in the ice floes of the polar cap. In 1999, a Native American led me to a rock in New Mexico and we stood looking across a valley experiencing the ‘Sound of Silence.’ I have stood half way down a trail in the Grand Canyon, away from the South Rim tourists, and felt that same presence. It is awesome in the true sense of the word awe. Perhaps strongest of all, I have felt the ‘Sound of Silence’ in the dunes of the desert of Namibia in southern Africa.
In 2000, I went to Colorado on an Avatar conference and struggled with the strictures of their training. I took myself up into a plateau of wildflowers surrounded by mountain peaks and stood on a rock looking up at the clouds vaporising into nothingness as they scurried above me. Later, I drove up onto the Great Divide where snowflakes were softly falling in the still silence of the Rockies roof on the world and I shouted into the silence, “I am me, I am free; I am God and God is free.” I felt I was no longer bound to any ‘thing.’
What is nothingness? It is ‘No thing ness.’ The ‘Sound of Silence’ eliminates all things animate and inanimate. It takes us into ‘bliss,’ a state of mind where we no longer have any allegiance to any ‘thing’ whether it be in the darkness, the bright light or the depths of our emotions. It is our meeting with the Cosmic God—the vibration of the universe, and like the author of this piece, I have experienced it.
From his cave, Elijah (I Kings 19:9-19) could not find God in the howling wind, an earthquake or the fire, but they led him to eventually hear the still small voice of God in the ‘Sound of Silence.’
The author of this piece about Mauna Kea at dusk and into the darkness of night, wrote:
I was wary of being alone and covered, nearly smothered by the silence.
I strained to hear something. Anything at all.
What else might I hear?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Yet I’ve never known ‘nothing’ to sound so sacredly wonderful. It was as if I could hear the planets spin above me, as if I could hear myself aging, as if I could hear the clouds as they ran away searching for a new home.
This silence offered me a window into my soul as I stood honoring the sacred injunction to ‘Be still and know that I am God.’
Again, I have experienced that stillness in the mountains of Bavaria. The awe connects us and then as we experience it, we become one with it. The temporary sounds of the awe melt into the mystery of oneness in the ‘no thing ness’ that is God. We become one with God. We take on the bliss and power of the Universe. Those are the moments I treasure, for once you know it, you never have to seek it.
All religions provide us with stepping stones on this path of discovery. Within Christianity, Jesus, just as much as in other faiths the Buddha, Muhammad or all the saints, shamans and guides, gods, gurus and yogis that mankind leans upon, can take us a long way on our path, but deep down I do believe that the real message Jesus tried to teach us was not that he would be sacrificed on a cross to save us from our sins, but that we are all ‘sons’ of God. It was impossible in the scientific world of the first century for his followers to ever understand this without elevating Jesus to being the one and only son of God. In the universalism of our present thinking, it is easier to see the divinity in all things, and mankind as only a passing part of that experience. However, it is only in these mystical moments, when in the ‘Sound of Silence,’ we sense unity with the divine in nothingness that we truly experience ‘Bliss.’ The joy is that once we know this, it just is. We do not have to seek it any more. We know we are one with God as the vibration of our joint universe because we have sensed our oneness with the Divine.