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COME TO A QUIET PLACE WITH ME

A sermon preached by Tristan Jovanović on 31 May 2015

The modern world is uncomfortable with silence.

London is a noisy city. There is an underlying noise here, even when the people

and the cars are stripped away. The hum of air conditioning units, the distant

rumble of the underground. When you get out of central London, though, either

into the countryside completely or just into one of the suburbs, like Wimbledon

or Dulwich, the silence is surprising. I find it comforting; my partner, who has

always lived in a city, finds it unnerving.

I find it comforting because in the silence, I can actually hear myself. There’s

nothing to block out, no need to wear my earphones unless it’s windy and I want

to prevent earache. And when it’s quiet and we want to talk, we can hear each

other. In the silence, Sara Maitland writes, we are bare and naked. We let go of

language and thus we let go of one of the main organising principles of

civilisation, allowing our inner wildness to emerge. Maitland notes how, during a

40 day silence she undertook on the Isle of Skye, she began to engage in

behaviours considered completely unacceptable in polite company: picking her

nose, farting etc…

When we are on our own and quiet, we also begin to find parts of our mental

lives we’re not usually as comfortable with. Thoughts we don’t want to think

begin to surface and it is possible to hallucinate aurally. Maitland describes

something that I’m familiar with, and perhaps you are too: hearing voices after

it’s been quiet for an extended period. These voices are really just noises,

perhaps of the outside world or even just inside our own heads. The call of our

name on the wind pricks up our ears, more intense listening spooking our

already fragile state. Fragile because perhaps it’s beginning to heal. Was this

what it was like for Elijah, listening for the voice of God on the whirlwind but

instead hearing it carried on the gentle breeze, that still small voice?

As people of a liberal faith, we each find a different way of addressing that of the

divine within us. Some of us are comfortable with the word God; others find it

deeply troubling—likewise for prayer or worship. If those words trouble you and

you have your own substitute, please use it as I continue.

The silence allows us to explore our relationship with God on different terms.

Our verbose society, where speaking quickly and confidently is highly valued, as

well as our religious traditions, sometimes make it feel as if we should be in

constant dialogue with the divine. ‘Pray unceasingly’ counselled St Paul. Curt

Gardner, a Quaker who wrote a beautifully gentle book called God Just is:

Approaches to Silent Worship, writes about the strangeness that sort of

relationship with the divine leads to: do we only want God on our own terms? If

we were to meet Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, would we insist on doing all the

talking? Prayers, spoken and unspoken, as well as listening, are needed in the

dialogue. We might feel that our prayer is pointless, unneeded by the Great

Spirit, but I find Jesus’s words very comforting: When you pray, go into your

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room, shut the door and pray in secret. This private time, Gardner writes, is an

opportunity not only for sharing our lives but waiting with anticipation.

I would add that going into the room is also metaphorical. When I’m not with

Unitarians, I’m often at a Quaker meeting, engaged in the special kind of silent

worship that helps make the Religious Society of Friends distinctive. The

influential Friend Robert Barclay describes silent worshippers thusly:

Each made it their work to return inwardly to the measure of grace in themselves,

and not being only silent as to words but even abstaining from all their own

thoughts, imaginations and desires.

And the American Friend Elias Hicks states:

Center down into abasement and nothingness. ... This is what I labored after: to be

empty, to know nothing, to call for nothing, and to desire to do nothing.

We sit together, not shut away, and learn to sink slowly to what John W Graham

describes as the ‘place where God and me mingle indistinguishably.’ We do not

sit in silent worship to worship privately but to engage in active, communal

waiting upon the Spirit, aware of the great responsibility it is to break silence,

made even greater for those of us, like me, who test ministry again and again

before almost being forced to speak out. There was a time when Quaker

meetings were very chatty by today’s standards and also a period when those of

my word-testing bent held sway. So maybe all silence isn’t just waiting to be

broken, as Sara Maitland’s friend says, for when such words are spoken from the

depth of such a group’s collective spirit, the words ‘do not break the silence but

continue it. For the divine life who was ministering through the medium of silence

is the same…ministering through words.’

Sitting with my thoughts in silence, I realise how little I know about that of God

within me. We must be careful of those who claim much certainty about God,

saying confidently that God approves or disapproves of certain behaviours, lest

we create a god in our own image, idolising ourselves or another person or an

interpretation of a holy text. In the silence, we have time to listen to the leadings

of our hearts and contemplate deeply the leadings that others experience. From

what else are we able to speak?

Curt Gardner relates the story of a French peasant who sat in the church for

hours at a time, seemingly idle. When the priest questioned him he said, ‘I look at

him, he looks at me, and we’re both happy.’

In general, we have quite short attention spans in which to give our complete

attention: five to ten minutes perhaps. Meditation guides often speak of

emptying the mind as one of the key steps to the practice, today often putting it

in quasi-Buddhist terms instead of the more florid language of the 17th and 18th

century Friends. This always sounds so wonderful: stilling the monkey mind,

silence at last. But it is incredibly challenging. It’s hard to sit in an empty room

with a fly and not follow it with the eye. Words can, in that case, prove helpful.

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You may have a favourite prayer or hymn or text that you know by heart and

when your thoughts begin to go, you can begin to allow these familiar words to

flow over you again and again, focusing not on their form but on their meaning.

When you once again let go, the freedom is immense.

I’ve been speaking as if we’re all equally comfortable with silence, but I know

that’s not at all true. I hope you won’t mind if I suggest that practice being silent

or in the quiet is very beneficial, and you do, eventually, get used to it. It’s then

easier to slip into your quiet place, whatever is going on around you. Being quiet

and being silent are not quite the same thing. They do, however, ebb and flow

into each other. Learning to let go of the monkey mind, to be brave and turn the

TV off or shut the laptop are all challenges in their own right.

In the meantime, we always have our inner rooms. So come to a quiet place with

me.