from howling into silence...

“We cannot become so impatient for the destination that we arrive before we are ready.” Christine Valters Paintner

This weekend I tapped into my deep longing for human connection during this season of contagion. I wrote about it, I felt it while speaking with my brother by phone on his birthday (he lives in SF), I sensed it swelling up within as we Zoomed with our sweet Brooklyn kin, and I listened to its empty aching last night before going to sleep. Looking out upon the now golden mantle of the wetlands this morning as her deep reds disappear and bright oranges fade, I caught a foretaste of the grays that await us in November. They will shimmer whenever the sun shows up and swirl across the field in nuanced silvers should the shadows prevail. Cumulatively, these sights and sensitivities send me back to words Dr. Valters-Paintner shared in The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred. 

One way to practice peregrinatio (pilgrimage) in our lives is to follow the thread which for me means to listen to the synchronicities and patterns being revealed daily. When we are discernment... and pay attention to the other moments that shimmer, we may begin to notice symbols showing up to call us forward.

And maybe not always forward, but also deeper, too. The late James Hillman used to insist that the dominant metaphor of our culture is growth. Accumulation is one-dimensional, however, a construct of economics and adolescent ideology. It is rooted in the mistaken belief that if to have is good then to have more is better. But unrestrained growth becomes cancerous and crowds out the maturation of our soul. To become wise - and authentic - requires going deeper, beyond the obvious, into insights, stories, experiences, needs, desires, and feelings that take time to comprehend. To paraphrase Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, they must simmer and percolate before they achieve significance. Going deeper is how we grasp our purpose, our calling, our essence within our community and our role in any given season of our life. Accumulation merely gives us more of the same old shit. (I am reminded of the Different Drummer ad that prophetically graced NYC subways in the 60's in a manner beyond its creator's imagination...)

This yearning for community, my ravenous appetite for engaging others in words and songs of the soul, has clearly been heightened during the pandemic. But I know it to be a lifetime in the making as well. "The soul's ripening is never to be rushed," Dr. Paintner writes, "it takes a lifetime of work" to realize. "The gift of the contemplative path is a profound honoring of the grace of slowness." My feelings are clues: Hillman speaks of a clue as a symptom, "a compromise between an appropriate relation/action and a sick or wounded one." And like Fr. Ed Hays has taught, our feelings/clues/ symptoms carry meanings. They are the wisdom of our wounds wherein the feeling gets our attention, but our response must almost always be inverted. "When we feel like running away, we would be better served by staying put. When we ache to shout, we should be silent." Call it a revelaltion from the upside-down kingdom, the Paschal Mystery, or the spiritual wisdom of autumn, another invitation to go deeper is brewing.  

We can grow impatient when life does not offer us instant insights or gratification. We call on the wisdom of the Celtic monks to accompany us (in these times) to teach us what it means to honor the beauty of wating and attending and witnessing what it is that wants to emerge rather than what our rational minds want to make happen. The soul always offers us more richness that we can imagine, if we only make space and listen. (The Soul's Slow Ripening, p. XV)

So, as best and as imperfectly as I am able, I seek to celebrate this season's call to enter yet again the acumen of silence. Not only will the stillness guide my Sunday reflections, but it will shape my personal contemplative practices, too. This coming Sunday will be an anticipation of All Hallow's Eve en route to All Saints and All Souls days. And then it is on to the quiet of the ancient Celtic Advent that begins on November 15 and runs a full 40 days. Last week I was mostly filled with Ginsberg's "Howl." And rightly so - but now it is time for emptying of T.S. Eliot's "The Rock."

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.