Coming Out of the Silence

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
July 27, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Silence is more than the absence of noise.

— Rev. Kurt A. Kuhwald

First a preface, to orient you properly before my sermon: I spent last week, from Saturday through Thursday, in silent retreat up a winding two-mile long road in a self-contained trailer that sat on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. The trailer is owned by and is on the grounds where a band of Catholic Benedictine, Camaldolese monks lives in hermitage. This was my fifth year retreating in a trailer and about my tenth year going on retreat at this site. I am grateful that these monks generously offer their facilities for retreat, no matter what a person’s theology or religious persuasion, as long as they respectfully observe silence and a few other simple rules like staying on defined roadways rather than wandering off into the gorgeous, but rugged hills.

The trailer, as I said, is self-contained; it has a full bathroom including a shower, a two-burner butane stove and a good little refrigÂerator. The monks also provide food three times a day. As for the monks themselves, outside the work it takes to run a community, to study and to meditate, and to do research on the many books they produce, to work on art projects and to create a delectable Brandy fruit cake they sell — the monks chief activity is to conduct and participate in five and a half daily religious services (the half being 30 minutes of meditation and prayer after Lauds at the end of each day). A few attend none of these, remaining within the boundaries of their own quarters so that they may uphold their commitment to complete silence.

The only time that I talk or am in contact with others when I am there is checking in and checking out — though I will offer a quick “hello” or “peace” to the few retreatants I encounter as I take a 3 mile jog/walk along the entry road each morning.

End of Preface.

Good morning, once again. I hope that this service will touch you in some way so that you will leave here with a deeper consideration of the value and beauty of your one wild and precious life.

That phrase, “your one wild and precious life,” many of you know, was made famous by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, who giving the important Ware Lecture at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly two summers ago in Portland, Oregon, took her place as probably the most important living U.S. poet for the modern UU movement. I commend her work to you; especially this volume entitled New and Selected Poems in which the poem “The Summer Day” can be found. I’d like to read it to you as a way of entering this sermon about silence, and also about going on retreat, going on personal retreat so that one can get into a place of sustained silence. Here is the poem.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
this is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Such a beautiful, quiet, humorous, wild and fierce poem. Let me repeat that: Such a beautiful, quiet, humorous, wild and fierce poem.

Those are the main features of going into silence that I’d like to touch into today as I talk about silence and going on retreat so we can have more of it. The human experiences, that arise within the sanctity of silence: beauty, quiet, humor, wildness and splendid, life-giving and loving ferocity. I’m naming them now, so that they can rest with us, abide in us in some part of our hearts and minds as we share this brief time together.

So let me repeat, one more time, the wonderful human experiences that, when we pay attention, arise within the sanctity of silence: beauty, quiet, humor, wildness and splendid, life-giving and loving ferocity.

We are so distracted in our lives here in the Bay Area, and on this mostly affluent peninsula. Distracted by the traffic and freeway noise, distracted by the din of commercialism, whether over the airwaves on TV and Radio, on in our publications, or on the signs and billboards that line our streets like some eruptive rash on our collective social skin. We are so distracted so much of the time, the beauty escapes us. We are so distracted by visual and auditory nonsense, we become inured to the numerous tableaus of beauty that stud the universe of our days like the stars stud the night sky on the mesas of New Mexico, or like they studded the sky of this our beloved Bay Area before the invasion of Europeans over three hundred years ago.

But there is a din that is more problematic. There is a din that is more costly in some ways because though we have far more ability to deal with it, to end it, than we do the massive assault of what is worst in modern culture, we somehow get overridden. That din is the din inside our own minds, constantly harping, arguing, whining, correcting, judging, evaluating, comparing, competing, denying, disowning, haranguing, debating, criticizing, and generally hassling the quietude, and also the integrity, of our minds and hearts.

Problem is, we think this is normal. Problem is that because we think this cacophony is normal … very often quiet scares us. That’s why I want to talk about it today, so that naming it and touching it may help lessen our anxiety. And/or for those of you who do appreciate quiet, if it’s not used to keep you isolated, maybe this talk here can strengthen your relationship to silence, and thereby, perhaps, to your self.

The damndest things happen when I am quiet for a long time, for days on end. I find a deeper self respect and self compassion; I get depressed; I get insights that are astounding that lift me out of depression in wholesome and sometimes glorious ways; I end up laughing at the wonderful paradoxes of life that had been hiding in the rabbit warrens of my ego; and, I get to take some of the most delicious naps I’ve ever had. And then, of course, when the silence comes on a ridge overlooking the Pacific in the outrageous magnificence of Big Sur, well, I get to deal with the pain of too much beauty.

But before I launch into the depths of this sermon, maybe I better lay out a few pointers about silence. For that, let me offer this description of silence written by Deborah Smith Douglas for an organization called Forward Movement, an official, non-profit agency of the Episcopal Church committed to deepening the spiritual life. I found it in a little pamphlet that the Monks provided in the writing desk in the trailer. In what I will quote, Douglas is talking about silence, with a capitol “S.” It is a “particular kind of silence — silence within silence within silence, like the kernel inside a fruit. The outside layer, the peel is taciturnitas, one kind of silence mentioned in the Rule of St. Benedict [who was the early Christian Father from whom the Monks at New Camaldoli shape their own present discipline of practice]. Taciturnitas means merely not speaking: it can be a tight-lipped, fuming-inside, negative kind of silence. But if we peel that tough rind away, we discover the rich nourishing fruit of silencia: primary, positive quietness of mind. Right inside silencia is the heart of the matter; hesychia, the wonderful Greek monastic word for contemplative silence, ‘the peace of heart in which God dwells.’”

Please don’t be put off by the word “God” here. Regardless of whether you are a theist, atheist, agnostic (or some wonderful hybrid of them all that is so welcome and common in Unitarian Universalism), what Douglas is exposing here is that there are levels of silence that reach into territories in the human interior that aren’t about providing a crutch for the difficulties of existence, they aren’t about delusional thinking — rather they open us to unique, yet quite natural, realms of human consciousness — realms that provide a greater capacity to be loving, to be objective, to capture a sense of a wide and very detailed quality of existence that takes us beyond the limitations of our usual self identity and puts us in touch with something far larger. You might call it life.

It is a vast realm — one that Sigmund Freud, one of last century’s greatest medical explorers of human consciousness, in one of the more cramped and stingy analysis he made, called an Oceanic Feeling; he purported that it was actually some kind of regressive return to the womb — spacious dwelling that that is!. Despite Freud, that kind of experience of vastness, that at its most potent is apprehended at the same time as both internal and external to us, (a vastness out there, a vastness in here, and we’re in it and conscious), that kind of vastness can give color and texture to a life, can deepen compassion and integrity as well as stirring a commitment to work for justice and for the welfare of the planet that can last a lifetime, even if we are graced to have it for only a brief moment of insight. I feel blessed and humbled that, in my life, a few of those moments have come my way.

One of the main activities that a retreat requires is getting there. Getting there is a journey that it is good to pay attention to because it reveals the presence of thresholds in life. Getting there — and staying there. Staying there as well as getting there because even though we get ourselves physically to a retreat doesn’t mean we really go on retreat and get quiet. The mind is a miraculous creation and in our civilization, it has been trained well to keep the din flowing. Monkey Mind the Buddhists call it. Chatter, chatter, chatter.

The threshold of passage to get into a retreat was best described, for me, not about getting to a retreat, but about actually living life. And since entering silence on a retreat, for me, is all about living life, I want to share that description with you. It is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever read about the passage through thresholds, and the intersection of worlds. I found it in Shambala Sun Magazine (a Buddhist publication) in a piece written by Bonnie Myotai Treace, then a Priest with the New York City Zen Center.

What is the gate of Zen? Is there a way to live in the threshold of every moment?

In practice, we explore this threshold, this place where old and new meet in a body. We explore the “liminal” — the realm in which we’re touched beyond personality, beyond the limits of what we understand or have assigned ourselves as our life. A practitioner of Zen is most basically one whose life is awakening each moment to that threshold, the still point where all the possibilities exist. To practice is to release oneself from the momentum of the past, the karma of what seems to be indicated as the only next step. It is to turn one’s face towards the unknown as a way of life.

That is a huge statement. Huge. Going on retreat is one of the ways that I get to taste the possibility of turning towards the unknown as a way of life. For the simple fact is, everything beyond this very moment now … is unknown. And an even deeper fact is that what we know about this very moment, if we probe it just a little reveals that there is more mystery than there is surety. Silence, retreating into it, on retreat, or in meditation, helps me step out of the conviction that I have that I know how to live … and instead allows me to just live. The “liminal” space of silence gives me a chance to breath more fully, and to honor my deepest understandings, feelings, insights that are not convictions but rather living, pulsing sensibilities that spring right from the center of my body and being.

Treace says, “To practice is to release oneself from the momentum of the past, the ‘karma’ of what seems to be indicated as the only next step.” I love that: “the momentum of the past that seems to be the only next step.” What, simply put, silence does is to offer creative options. Wonderfully, interesting, out of the box, options for what to do next.

One more thing about being in silence. Singer, songwriter, poet Leonard Cohen said it this way:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in ….

No matter how hard we try to be good, to live right, to treat people fairly, to be honest and loving, we will miss the mark … often. Very often, it seems to me, our errors come from distress we’ve sustained in our lives; defenses we’ve built to try to finesse the pain in living; and lack of information about others that we lack because we have convinced ourselves that it is better to defend than to welcome, better to judge first and learn later. All, all of this, done because we are human beings … enormously sensitive, sophisticated and intelligent beings hopelessly malleable, inescapably shaped by circumstance, cracked through the heart by life.

That crack, or more accurately, those cracks running through our heart become available for the light of healing when in the nurturing power of silence, we give them the respect they merit, the attention they require, and the opportunity to relax into the curative compassion they deserve.

Let us end with a brief period of silence. I will ring us in and ring us out. And let me prime the moment of quiet by offering you some words that we will repeat together. Once we have spoken them, you can let them go, or not. In either case, they will help to open the door to our inner walk in quiet. The words are: “Just as long as I have breath, I must answer ‘Yes,’ to life.”

Say them with me: “Just as long as I have breath, I must answer ‘Yes,’ to life.”

[ Bell. Silence. Bell. ]

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Coming Out of the Silence

Reflection: Soft Sweet Silence by Florence Haas