"silence...."

"Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again.
Because a vision softly creeping,
left its seeds while I was sleeping..."

I think the first verse of Simon & Garfinkel's "Sounds of Silence," says it all for me today. 

Mother Teresa once wrote:

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls. "

Whether this is a Truth, or just true for her...I do not know.  But something about it calls to me.  It's an inviation that I can't ignore.  It seems like a living, pulsing something asking for space in my life. I glimpsed its promise this summer, when...quite serendipitously...I had some time to just sit with myself. And what did I do with it?

Well, I ended up finding that I couldn't seem to silence the "self" that always wants to record it all in my journal, try to immediately make sense of what I was "hearing," and then search for the words to make it "make sense" for others.  In doing so, something was "lost in translation."  Besides which, I seemed to lose the true chord each time I tried to give it a name, a form, or put the substance of its message into words.

And in the midst of it all, I kept coming back to something I have long-loved, but have always been too busy trying to "find words" to explain it to others, to let its message move in, unpack, and take up real residency in my own hungry heart. Mary Baker Eddy suggests in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure has come to this age through a "still, small voice," through silent utterances and divine annointing which quicken and increase the beneficial effects of Christianity.  I long to see the conssumation of my hope, namely, the student's higher attainments in this line of light."

I want to understand this...more than I can say.

There is a seed of something growing in my heart...I don't know what its voice will sound like...or if it will even have a voice that reaches beyond the silence.  But I want to sit with it, and let it take whatever shape God wants it to take.   I don't know if its song will have lyrics...but I know I have to listen. 

This time, I dare not...

"...disturb the sound of silence...."

with Love,

Kate