THE LEAST OF THESE

I heard my mentor say it a long time ago. Fred Craddock shared one of his disciplines that helped shape the way he lived and communicated with others. 

He said that every evening he sat on his back porch to tie up the loose ends of his day.  And one of his disciplines was to try to remember the least significant thing that happened to him that day.

Think about that a minute.  When we wander through the memories of our day, there are often noisy moments that cry out and say, “I am really important.  Remember me.” But, if you keep asking yourself the question, “Is there something less significant that happened?” you will remember more deeply the fullness of your day. 

As I meditate each day, that is one of the results of cleaning my mind by paying attention to a single word or listening to my own breath.  The loud and demanding concerns, the anxieties that plague any human heart are often so loud and fill so much space that the “least of these” thoughts and feelings are drown out.  But, when they are quieted, emotions that lie deeply below the surface of each day niggle their way onto the surface of my mind. 

And sometimes those thoughts or emotions turn out to be more important in understanding myself than the loud voices.  Sometimes, when I quiet the self-judging voices, the voices that demand I be more than I am, I hear the quiet and tender voice of self-love that reminds me that I am enough.   

And when I listen to those within myself, I become more attuned to the quiet and shy parts of others who may need special attention.  I come to realize that sometimes others are not just what they let me see, but are rich and complex, highly textured and multi-faceted, beautiful creatures who enrich my life and the lives of others. 

So, try it sometime.  Listen to the least significant part of your day, the quiet and shy voices that sometimes get drown out by the noise of a loud and demanding world. Your soul will be richer for it.

CONVERGENCE

Converging experiences provoke unsolicited thoughts. Deborah and I watched the space movie "Gravity" the other night.  In the midst of exploding space ships and storms of space garbage, Sandra Bullock traveled perilously through space trying to survive. The eerie silence of the sound track provoked thoughts of vast emptiness.

This past weeks scientists reported discoveries through telescopes at the South Pole that they now believe can prove what happened less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. They described the rapid inflation of the creation instantly after the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.

Here I am reeling from the impossible task trying to comprehend this expansive space and the eternal sense of time and I went to a church this morning and sang hymns and heard a sermon about God. And I sat there aware of how incredibly inadequate the human mind is and even less competent is human language when it comes to speaking about the vast mystery of reality. I once read somewhere that words are terrible miners and even more terrible astronauts when it comes to trying to describe the unspeakable mystery of creation (and I would add, the creator).

And yet, we have  no choice. It is a part of the human character to be conscious of ourselves in relation to the fullness of creation. And it is our blessing and curse to need to understand in some small way our relationship to all that is around us. To be human is to be a meaning maker.  We have a compulsion to make sense of life. That is what drives science and religion. As inadequate as we are with words, we have to keep trying.

So, I sat in church today and gave thanks for those who have the courage to try to help us understand. I felt grateful for those who dared to guide us in getting just a glimpse of possible understanding. To form a word and cast it into the vast silence of time and space is such a foolish and courageous act that I was in appreciative awe. 

Funny how convergence of experience messes with the mind.

ONE SQUARE INCH

I was hiking down the road--naked winter trees on one side, green pine on the other. The wind whispered through the pine needles. It stopped blowing and silence descended. My mind began to wonder about book someone gave me several years ago. "One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World" is one man's journey to discover places in the United States where there is no sounds that are not made by nature. Gordon Hempton, a sound recording specialist who lives near Olympic National Park travels from Washington State to Washington DC measuring the amount of noise created by human machines.  He believed that if he could find just one square inch of silence, it could grow to permeate a larger area the way noise spreads to swallow silence.

Fascinated as I was by the book, today I was thinking about how to find a square inch of silence in my own mind. Sometimes the noise gets out of hand. The voices of friends and family, of culture and media, of magazines and blogs swirls around in my head, sometimes chasing each other in circles. I just want to slow it down, to notice something that might sedate the sometimes cacophonous noise.

Today I found a couple of places where I discovered the demands of the voices was lost in silent wonder. The first was sitting early in the morning doing centering prayer. During the past 20 years I have taken time each day to quiet the noise by placing a stillness  in the midst of my mind. It is a discipline because the wordy world has a way of turning up the volume. But, patiently I keep creating a "nothing" space and resting a moment at a time in the square inch of silence.  I do this with the hope that that inch will grow and come to visit me in the mind's noise throughout the day so that from time to time, it's quiet enough to hear my soul sing.

And the other place it happened was as I walked through the park, I kept coming upon clusters of deer. I would round a bend and there seven deer were grazing.  I stopped to stare, transfixed in awe as they stared back. Then I would start walking again, the noise in my mind beginning again and suddenly off in a clearing were four deer staring at me.  My mind quieted in the sheer delight of the surprising life around me.  I saw thirty deer on that hike.

Most of the time my mind chases ideas and thoughts.  But I continue to seek one square inch of silence hoping that it will help modulate the volume and I can also hear my quiet thoughts.