A Time to Keep Silence
Sunday 26th January 2025, led by Julia Chalkley
Gathering
Let us start by settling and stilling our bodies centring ourselves in this place and this moment. Becoming aware of the sounds around us …
Readings
From ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ by Annie Dillard:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters, it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Julia’s Reflection
The first time I encountered this reading there was a profound recognition of silence as ‘a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same’.
I am astonished by silence, astonished that in this world of noise we live in silence can be indeed all there is, absolutely present. Perhaps you have had the experience of walking through a door into a room and being arrested by the silence within; perhaps you have sought out a hallowed place and found it to be what Celtic Christians called a ‘thin place’,* a place where God seemed present. In either, silence absolutely present.
And it is encountered everywhere: a few weeks ago out in the Kenyan bush, silence manifested itself in the perpetual swaying of the branches of trees mirrored by the swaying of the animals strolling among them: the stately sway of the elephant and the graceful sway of the giraffe. Back at home, in an East Sussex garden on a perfectly still winter’s afternoon a tree’s reflection gently swayed on a pond’s surface in rhythm with the current of the stream passing through it.
* M. Pitt: Echoes of Celtic Christianity Thin Places and Tall Crosses, p 27
Individual Contemplative Time (15 minutes)
Take a few minutes now to walk silently around the garden or if you are online to give your attention to the view from the window. Silence the conversations inside your head, surrender what is preoccupying you. Become aware of the silence just beneath the noise and become aware of the movement, the life within it.
Regathering
If you would like to, please share any particular response you have had.
Reading
From Consolations by David Whyte: ‘Silence’ p 156
Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving, internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing, listening elemental powers.
To become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling, or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives.
Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.
Prayerful thoughts
The present moment is eternity.
In God’s unchanging quiet is our trust.
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