Silence

It's always something. There are always things. Factors, something going on, happening, seen or unseen, surface or undercurrent. Active or lying dormant. Thought of, or unconscious, out of mind. Thoughts, actions, silence, noise, the sound of silence, silence itself. Silence itself, what it stirs, and what it lets lie.

People who see you, in ways that you don't see yourself. Remembering a proverb or saying that I saved and clipped from a worship bulletin one Sunday morning at First Baptist Church, Gainesville, Florida in 1955 or 1956. I carried in my wallet for years, decades, and I'm sure it's still around here and I can find it if I stop and search; because there are things that I don't throw away, not only memories, but a few things temporal. The proverb went something like this. "Somewhere, someone is following you as you make your way through life, perhaps going your way because they know no other direction to take. The power of leading others is inevitable, and no one is so insignificant that they do not by their own life influence the lives of others."

As with me, the fact of it may not jump out at you until you see your eighty-seventh birthday on the calendar and someone contacts you to talk or to meet, and you have no idea why, and it was because of the truth of the saying on that clipping. I had no idea.

But, mind, I'm not the same person you thought you knew, and remember, or admired, all those years ago. Not now, or at least no longer, if indeed I ever was. To me, I was nothing but some anonymous no-name in the background, watching life from the shadows; thinking, believing, knowing that no one knew me or was even aware of me. Apparently it wasn't so.

What was it? Who was I? I don't know, I can't imagine.

Father Rohr's meditation for today, which is always waiting when I open my computer mornings, I think it goes online about midnight, introduces Catherine de Hueck Doherty, a former Russian baroness born in 1896, her life. It was interesting, and after reading Fr Richard's piece I detoured and read more about her. But this morning's meditation quoted de Hueck Doherty on Silence. It was intriguing, and I found it helpful.

Most Christians, I think, are confident of John 14:2 and what's expressed, in our Book of Common Prayer, in the Proper Preface for Commemoration of the Dead, "For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens." It's an assuring promise that offers hope to many, but that has tilted Christianity away from Jesus of Nazareth's gospel of Godly life, toward our idea of St Paul's theology of death: not a religion to live by, but a religion to die by.

My hope for eternity leans more toward silence, as the silence of God that one might know, "hear" if one were alone in the blackness of space, moving toward the edge of the Universe. From my own experience, I was there while deeply anesthetized that day at Cleveland Clinic. The oblivion was total: I thought I had prepared myself by conceiving what I would dream while away; but there were no dreams because, in a mortal sense, I was Not. Silence that's not space as foreboding darkness, but ultimate silence, even the silence before God said "יְהִ֣י" for us.

Then our "next" as whoever or whatever we have been rejoins whatever or whoever created all this. The Silence.

It isn't, wasn't, the silence that de Hueck Doherty describes, it was beyond that. These days, as I see brilliant images from NASA's new Webb Telescope, the probability out there is my hope for myself.

RSF&PTL