Tag: silence

SILENCE AS HOME

Rev. Dr. Kate Winters, “Dwelling in Presence,” January 26, 2024

Tiny snowflakes are flying gently by on this Friday morning. They are almost too small to see. But they are a harbinger of more to come, at least according to the forecast. I begin the day with a sense of deep peace. This is my favorite kind of day. Nothing on my calendar and a lovely snowfall to enjoy outside my window as I burrow under blankets with books to read and time to write. And there’s Joel in the next room getting ready to feed his birds. I hope he keeps on his big brown hooded terry robe. It suggests that our St. Francis statue in the garden has come to life. Sometimes Joel does seem like St. Francis reincarnated. That is until he watches a Green Bay Packers game. Then we both allow ourselves to get a little loud and crazy. But not today. Today is a day for joyful silence.

It may have been a blessing that I was unable to begin my retirement with three months of silence as I had planned. Imposed silence (even if by myself) might have skewed my relationship with it. As it is now, on a day like today the silence feels like my true home. It doesn’t have to be continuous. In fact, there is something delicious about being able to return to it after a day has been too scheduled and noisy. Then I feel embraced by the silence, even as I am challenged to learn the mysteries and the wisdom within it. There is just an endless depth to silence that I am constantly drawn to. I’m learning more and more what Meister Eckhart meant when he claimed that nothing is “so much like God as silence.”

I wonder if this romance began in my childhood when I would go alone into our big city church and the heavy wooden doors closed behind me. Space and time were transfigured as wax, incense smells, and filtered light combined with the sudden hush from the traffic outside to create a truly mystical sanctuary. I’m sure I didn’t know the word “mystical” then, but I knew the experience. In that space, I felt an inexplicable presence that I could rest in. 

I know a lot of people have rejected the Roman Catholocism they were born into. But I know I was also given great gifts by that tradition. It truly nurtured in me a “felt” sense of God. I grew up with a bodily sense of the holy, a sacramental view of life and creation, and all the joy it conferred over my lifetime. And, of course, it nurtured my love for silence. I am finding that silence loves me back.  

 

 

Keeping Silence

Harbor in Belfast

When I first went public with the intent to go into silence for three months, just about everyone asked the same question. “Aren’t you even going to talk to Joel?” Joel is my beloved husband who just recently retired along with me after co-pastoring an active church on midcoast Maine for the last eighteen years. Our personal and work lives have been so intertwined that it seemed impossible that I would make a decision to take this separate path. Especially while living in the same house.

The first thing I want to say is that keeping silence is about more than “not talking.” It is, I think, about attending to life and the world in a more intentional way, including attending to the man who lives in my house. We will not be fully separate in this silence.

But it will be different. We will not be filling our space with words, or at least, I won’t. My own spoken words, the television chatter, music lyrics, all will cease. I will be listening to and for something else, something I haven’t allowed myself much of since entering ministry, which is ironic since I do have a strong feeling that silence is the environment in which God dwells. I love Meister Eckhart’s assertion that there is “nothing so much like God as silence.” So I can pretty confidently say that all of this springs from my deep longing for God, whoever, wherever, and whatever that is!