I said the prayers at the ANZAC Day dawn service in my local town this morning and the occasion was deeply moving. Whatever one thinks about this public holiday with all its nationalistic overtones and how it can be co-opted for the glorification of war, it was still a remembrance with meaning and sombre feeling. One phrase stood out for me - ‘securing our freedom’. It is such an interesting phrase. Almost an oxymoron. How can freedom be secured by an act of securing? Yet it is about doing something, often something difficult, that protects something or someone we hold dear. Freedom is something to be cherished and I am grateful for all those people before me who have sacrificed so much to secure it. There are layers and layers to freedom. There is physical freedom, political freedom, social freedom, freedom of thought, the freedom of conscience and the freedom of expression to name just a few. Then there is the freedom that we humans can gift each other each moment. You see, I think we bind each other in the narratives we create about the world and the person to whom we are relating. We hold stories in our head about the people around us. He or she is this or that. He or she must think this or be effected by that. We weave threads of assumptions, interpretations and criticisms around our friends and family, around our neighbours, around our colleagues and leaders. Sometimes our weaving is so tight, so secure, that the person disappears under all the colour and texture we lay around and on them. It is of course impossible to ever know or see someone clearly in all their wonder and beauty. In the end reality is interpretation. Everything is filtered through our limited human capacities to truly see and hear. Of all the possible sounds and colour in the universe we see and hear only a small spectrum. Beyond our basic animal abilities we can only measure that which for which we have invented the instruments. Each human being is a glorious mystery whose facets and depths are beyond our limited understanding and sight. However, at the very least, we can stop the noise of the stories we tell ourselves about each other. In the practise of silence the threads can unravel and we can behold the mystery of each other. Maggie Ross (whom, if you have been reading any of my other blogs, is a key source for my musings) says that the work of silence restores our true humanity for it restores our subjectivity and the subjectivity of those to whom we relate. Through silence we let go of the noise, the self-conscious critical, analytical narrative that turns the world and others into an object. As we dwell more fully in silence we begin to open up the channels between our heart, our deep mind as Ross calls it, and our self-conscious mind. With heart and mind working in harmony, more fully as one, our perspective is changed. The other becomes not an object to codify, to box, to safely assume we have understood, but a holy other to behold and hold in loving wonder. As we engage with the work of silence more and more, quietening down our interesting but no doubt faulty stories about each other, we find that freedom is much more than the freedom to think or say or do something. Freedom is won when we let go, when we sacrifice that which we hold dear - all the layers of story and meaning we tell ourselves and have been told - and simply meet the other, listening to their deep truth, listening to their beauty, their wonder. “He calmed the storm to a silence: and the waves of the sea were stilled Then they were glad because they were quiet: and he brought them to the heaven they longed for” (Psalm 107.29-30) Peace & Love Rebecca _____________________________________________ “The term work (of silence) may be slightly misleading for the only effort involved is to choose to be still, to allow the noise to fall away, to be receptive and to ungrasp so that we may be grasped by illumination” (Ross, M. Silence: A Users Guide. 2014 p23)
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Rebecca Newland:
Exploring balance, silence and contemplative living Archives
November 2016
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