Be still and know

A response to "poor little talkative Christianity"

As Parker Palmer says, the soul is like a wild animal, it will only come out of hiding if it knows it is safe. Silence and stillness are key. Rafa seems to know this.

“Poor little talkative Christianity.” Thus Mrs. Moore reflects in E.M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, when she has a mystical experience in the Marabar caves. Mrs. Moore is religious, even devout, but she has become bored by her experience of English Christianity and has been drawn to explore the riches of Islam and Hinduism in India. Her spontaneous reflection about “poor little talkative Christianity” is easily dismissed by insightful theologians, but her words have an arresting effect on many who are drawn to contemplation.

Martin Laird, a renowned scholar of ancient Christian contemplative practice with a wonderful sense of humor, briefly mentions Mrs. Moore’s musing in an essay that was recently presented at Cambridge University. The occasion was a celebration of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a renowned theologian and advocate of contemplative Christianity. The Cambridge gathering included some of the most robust theologians at work today, and I wondered how some of them received Mrs. Moore’s indictment.

Laird’s paper focused on insights of the 5^th century bishop and saint, Diadochos of Photiki, who warned about “theological verbosity” that only spreads confusion and fantasy.  Diadochos likens religious wordiness to the door of a steam bath that is continually left open, so that the heat inside quickly escapes: 

“Likewise,” Diadochos writes, “the soul in its desire to say many things dissipates its centeredness on God through the door of speech…. Ideas of value always shun verbosity. Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.”

When I heard Professor Laird’s paper read, I immediately recognized myself and the vanity of my own theological verbosity, as I have regularly left the door to the steam bath open. But I also recognized what has surely been a divine prompting throughout much of my life, a gentle nudging that urged me to return to a place of stillness and centeredness on the Holy Spirit who dwells within each of us.

A poem by R.S. Thomas entitled, “In Church” comes to mind, in which the poet priest remains in church after his small congregation has left. He waits quietly, analyses the silence inside the stone church and asks, “Is this where God hides from my searching?”  Thomas was at times relentless in probing God’s silence and apparent absence. He shunned theological certainties and wrestled with deep doubts. But something makes him return attentively to silence; and in my experience, churches are sometimes most fecund when they are silent. The poem ends:

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

Hardly a warm and fuzzy ending. In the dark, empty church, the only sound is that of the poet’s own breathing, as he nails his questions one by one to an “untenanted” cross. The cross is untenanted, with no one there to answer the poet’s questions, because Christ has been laid in a grave – now an “untenanted” grave, of course, an empty tomb not unlike the empty stone church where there is no other sound but the sound of a man breathing. 

The imagery is primordial and personal – God in Genesis breathing into the first human’s nostrils, and God now no longer on a cross, nor in a now untenanted grave, but taking up tenancy in us. Who is breathing?

If there is truth here, it is sensed beyond the reaches of the discursive mind, beyond our ability to speak about it, beyond “poor little talkative Christianity.” The psalm perhaps says it best, “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10).