Silence is the Sister of the Divine

Artist: Michal Lukasiewicz

The 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. "The central silence is there where no creature can enter, nor a thought, where the soul does not think or act, and keeps herself occupied with ideas about herself or anything else."

Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You need to make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. 

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what remains inexpressible between two people. In modern life there is a great drive towards self-expression, with emphasis upon the individual. Sometimes the quality of what is expressed is superficial and repetitive. A greater tolerance of silence is desirable, that fecund silence which is the source of our most resonant language. The depth and substance of a friendship mirrors itself, not in what is openly said, but in the quality of the silence between two people.

As you begin to befriend your inner silence, one of the first things you will notice is the superficial chatter on the surface level of your mind. Once you recognize this, the silence deepens. A distinction begins to emerge between the images which you have of yourself and your own deeper nature.

A Blessing of Solitude

May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and Light of your soul.

May you realize that you are never alone,

that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you

intimately with the rhythm of the universe.

May you have respect for your own individuality and difference.

May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique,

that you have a special destiny here,

that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good and eternal happening.

May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride, and expectation 

with which God sees you in every moment.

*

Drawn from: "Silence is the Sister of the Divine" in Anam Cara, a Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O'Donohue; Harper Perennial publishers.

Sophia - the Breath of Life

To approach Sophia is to approach that vital spark of the divine within ourselves, for Sophia is the essential spirit which infuses all things. She is the spark - the very life-force - without whom matter would remain inanimate. Her presence has been shrouded from view for some two millennia, hidden beneath an obscuring layer of doctrine, and treated as heresy. Her light endures, however, in texts, in symbols and secret teachings, and in our own most inner being. But who is Sophia?

The first condition of God permeates the cosmos. This first condition is unknowable, unfathomable, and unable to be experienced directly within human experience. This ultimate form of God is, as it were, removed from our vision for our own safety, for any direct perception or experience of God in this primal form would mean obliteration. The first manifestation of this ultimately unknowable God is the female manifestation, Sophia ('Wisdom'). Sophia is the spirit of grace which we feel when we allow ourselves to become open to it. All grace, all compassion which is beyond simple human compassion, emanates from Sophia. The third emanation, which is therefore twice removed from the original godhead, is the male creator God - 'God the father' - also known as the Demiurge. This is the God whom Christians think of as being the ultimate God, the male God who created the heavens and the earth. But the demiurge in his masculine ignorance forgets that he himself is an emanation from Sophia, and therefore imagines that his creative powers are his own, whereas these creative powers are derived from Sophia.

Before the manifested worlds came into existence, there was this source of oneness from which worlds of light, spirit and soul streamed. Humanity carries a primal image of these worlds of spirit and soul within itself. But Sophia is the primal force that, in union with the source, permeates - as female and life-giving principle - these unseen worlds. At the same time, she is the mother of the manifested world, the manifested cosmos.

Studying ancient books will not bring Sophia back into our consciousness and into our life. We have to search for her in our own inner self. Sophia reveals the knowledge of the heart, the primal knowledge which tells us that we own all the knowledge there is to know within the province of our own heart. Our heart of hearts knows that sacredness is not only outside of us, but also lives within us. But first we have to learn "inner silence".

The return of Sophia as the feminine aspect of creation is vital. Awareness needs to be raised of the importance of a male/female balance in every aspect of life, for if there really is a path towards peace both within ourselves and in our world, then the first step along that path is the realization of this Divine Oneness.

"The divine Sophia have I loved and sought from my youth,
I have desired her to be my spouse.
Ever have I loved her beauteous and radiant form.
Ever have I prayed that she might be sent to abide with me,
that she might work with me to the end
that I might know what I lacked
and what in me God would find acceptable.
And since she had ever known and understood,
had guided me in all my life's activity,
I am persuaded that even after death she
will ever keep me safe,
wrapped securely in her watchful, constant love."

- Giordano Bruno


image © David Bergen Studio

Song of the Wave

Song of the Wave

The strong shore is my beloved

and I am his sweetheart.

We are at last united by love, 

and then the moon draws me from him.

I go to him in haste and depart

reluctantly, with many

little farewells.

I steal swiftly from behind the

blue horizon to cast the silver of

my foam upon the gold of his sand, 

and we blend in melted brilliance.

I quench his thirst and submerge his heart; 

he softens my voice and subdues my temper.

At dawn I whisper the rules of love to him,

and he embraces me longingly.

At eventide I sing to him the song of hope, 

and then print smooth kisses upon his face;

I am swift and fearful, but he

is quiet, patient, and thoughtful. 

His broad bosom soothes my restlessness.

As the tide comes we caress each other,

and when it withdraws, 

I drop to his feet in prayer.

Many times have I danced around mermaids

as they rose from the depths and rested

upon my crest to watch the stars.

Many times have I heard lovers lost

in the vastness, and I echoed their sighs.

Many times have I teased the great rocks

and fondled them with a smile, but never

have I received laughter from them.

Many times have I lifted drowning souls

And carried them tenderly to my beloved shore.

He gives them strength as in turn he takes mine.

Many times have I stolen gems from the

depths and presented them to my beloved shore.

He takes them in silence, but still I give,

for he welcomes me ever again.

In the heaviness of night, when all

creatures seek the ghost of slumber, 

I sit up, singing at one time

and sighing at another. 

I am awake always.

Alas! Sleeplessness has weakened me!

But I am a lover, and the truth of love is strong.

I may be weary, but I shall never die.

Khalil Gibran

Echoes of Reality

'Narcissistic' is one of those myth-derived adjectives which has passed into our language. But who was Narcissus? We meet Narcissus in the myths of Ancient Greece, a handsome and vain youth whose self-absorption prevented him from truly loving anyone but himself. Alas for the beautiful nymph Echo, as the myth relates:

Echo had her own character fault: she was always chattering. Hera, the consort of haughty Zeus, tired of Echo's busy tongue, cursed the incessantly-chattering young girl: from that time on, her first and only words were to be the last words somebody else had spoken. People began to shun Echo, for no one likes to be parroted. They treated her unkindly and her friends did not want to be with her any longer. Lonely and bewildered, Echo fled into the forests. 


But then Narcissus appeared on the scene while out on a hunting party with his friends. As soon as Echo saw him, she lost her lonely heart and began to follow him. 

With the unfortunate Echo in mind Sappho, the 7th-century BCE Greek poet from Lesbos, writes:

Foolish child
why do you try
to touch a heart of stone?

Narcissus did indeed have a heart of stone, breaking many hearts of young women and men. Worshipped like a god for his looks, he only took, but never gave. Echo was just one of his many victims. When at last she plucked up enough courage to approach the handsome youth, Narcissus shunned her, angrily telling her to get out of his sight with as much revulsion as if she had been a venomous snake. Deeply hurt, Echo sought shelter far away from people, and found a remote cave in the high mountains where she gradually pined away until her voice was all that remained.  


Nemesis, the goddess of vengeful fate, took mercy upon the girl and decided in turn to punish Narcissus for his grotesque insensitivity and scornful manner. She knew that when he stared into the water of a brook pond, he would see only his own reflection. 

And so it was that he fell madly in love with himself. Countless times he tried to kiss himself, countless times he plunged his arms despairingly into the water seeking to embrace his own mirrored reflection. Then one day he found a deep pool, nearby the cave where Echo's voice still lived,  and stared into its silent depths in heartbreaking yearning for his beloved in the water.

"Why do you keep so utterly beyond reach, my love? Come, my beloved!"
And the voice of Echo repeated: "my beloved... my beloved."

Little by little, like water over a stone, love wore him away until Echo's voice repeated his last sigh: "Love..." and at last, he died. 

Waterhouse

Falling in love with an image of oneself, or one's god(dess) often turns out to be a disastrous projection, for the reality is often quite different from the image of it. The reality is the initiation; the image, at best, is only the yearning for it. Narcissus literally drowned in his own image, driven by the desperate yearning to be united with it. For vain Narcissus, it was too late for him to understand that we mirror ourselves best, not in our own image, but in that of another.

Poet Song

Deep down inside of me

forces are rising up,

but like the waves 

high and sighing in the distance,

always they must surrender to the strand.

I laugh at my creations through a veil of tears

and feel in my beginning that I have yet to begin -

each time my thinking dives away,

stays with itself, alone -

as vowed to silence.

Inside me poems lie on undiscovered shores

waiting for my silent landfall

waiting for my crossing of those inner oceans

filled with shoals and sirens' calls

for I am heavy with more than I give birth to,

my heart knows songs that I will never sing.

I am music of which I do not know the chords,

I am a pause repeatedly disturbing itself.

I am more than I am.

I cannot release myself.

A paradise lost lies inside me.

"Poet, do you keep on weighing sounds,

intangible as mirrors without smile or line?

Contemplate no more,

be warrior instead.

Rise up and stop this singing,

for the Spirit needs the silent ones.

Would She not otherwise have led the song?"

Vintage Photograph by Clarence Hudson White

Perfectly Imperfect

Perfectly imperfect


No sound at all
it is darker here
and chill is holding me in its grasp
almost never to let go of me.

Where am I?
And where is that place
where I once was
somewhere between then and now?
How will I know?

I am frightened
I did not know that I could feel this way,
but when I see now
how my wings are broken... 

Was I not perfect then
in my eternal longing
to become
what I perhaps can never be?

Utter loneliness is overtaking me
still no sound is heard
only my heart beating.

I feel my spirit leaving me
that immaculate reflection of you,
while whispering my sacred vow.

My form is dissolving
in this dark sanctuary around me,
but then I can hear your voice - at last...


"Even angels have to run their course,
for sacredness is in your wings
but your essential flight
is the solitary one."

Keeper

Broad and immaculate

I rest here

with my whole body,

my woman's body

moulded from labour pains,

warm primal clay,

a keeper kiln-fired

in the furnace of my existence.

Behind closed eyes

I see them come and go again

the women, the children,

and the lost

those who would nestle

between my breasts,

drown themselves in my flesh,

or shed their tears

in the bowl of my lap.

Men, boys, young gods

small of hip

or rough-hewn as I am

though hewn from granite

all the same.

Where is the one

who is without sorrow?

 This is why I console all those

who seek my consolation.

Kahlil Gibran on Talking

Kahlil Gibran ~ Self-portret

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;

And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.

The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.

And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.

In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place, let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.

Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;

For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered

When the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

Unicorn

Unicorn

I am my secret self
I am the secret wood
I am the seen and the unseen things
the heard and the never heard.

If you wish to conquer me
(and I know you do)
four trials you must go through:
the quest, the chase, the capture,
and the taming too.

You, my questing knight
with your helmet and lance
glorious deeds will not win me
you have not a chance.

You, my eager hunter
following my trail
your arrows will fall from the air
you will not prevail.

I am a legend
I am a fable
I am your unrequited longing
for the sweet impossible.

For no impossibility
is sweeter than mine
excepting but one
that is the sweet divine.

Only pure love will win me
for only pure love is in me.

Dear lady, most chaste of womankind
I lay my tamed head upon your seated skirt
with all the love within me.

Tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn, 15th century, Musée du Moyen-Age, Cluny, Paris, 

Dear Child

Dear Child

Even before you
Could behold the light of Earth
Your mother and you were one
Invisible and inseparable
Enfolded in the Infinite


Breathless
She awaited the tender weavings
Of the threads of life
Till once in the light of day
Your soul awakened, and one became two


Patiently
Time, like a spider, weaves
Its web of silver pathways
Upon which we are borne along
Alone, and yet together


The light of love
Weaves inner threads
That bind us on the journey
Becoming, one by one
In the Infinite, once more... ONE

*

For Marthe
our newly born granddaughter
in gratitude

Art by Iris Sullivan

"The Piece of Heaven Outside My Window"

I have hesitated a long time before deciding to write about the woman who has been an inspiration to me for over three decades: a woman who found God by looking deep into herself. This statement could so easily sound like an evangelical calling, but such an association could not be further from the essence of the person to whom I am referring. For whatever she might have discovered, it was not religion in the context that most of us would recognise it. For her, religion merely meant one's own personal relationship with God, and seeing that God in everyone. The woman was Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who, in the heart of the Holocaust, manifested a world of beauty and reverence. 


'Become who you are', was the lesson received by Etty Hillesum from her spiritual teacher, the palmist Julius Spier. And during the extreme conditions of the Second World War, that is what she strived to do. She remained true to herself, and through her example she has become a guiding light for many to this day. Her diary and letters bear witness to her spiritual awakening. She gradually learned to recognise a certainty in herself, a specific something that could never be taken away from her, a something that in a way made her invulnerable. In that part of her soul she recognised God.

The writing of her diary had a meditative effect upon her spirit. She ventured ever deeper into herself, eventually to discover God in the depths of her soul: "..and here is perhaps the most perfect expression of my life's feeling: I rest in myself. And that 'myself', that deepest and richest part of me in which I rest, I call 'God'."

On the day that Julius Spier died, on the very day that the Gestapo would come to take him away, Etty wrote: "You have allowed me to speak the name of God. You have been the intermediary between God and myself, and now you, my teacher, are gone, and with you my direct path to God. It is good that this happens, that is what I feel."


Etty believed that many people do not handle suffering in the way in which they perhaps need to. "People draw back from feeling suffering, and therefore become further entangled in fear and self-pity: suffering is not beneath human dignity. One can suffer either with or without dignity. What I mean is: most Westerners don't understand the art of suffering, and in its place put a thousand fears. This is no longer living, what most people do: fear, resignation, bitterness, hate, despair. My God, it is all so easily understood. But when this life is taken from them, then not so much is taken away from them? One accepts death as a part of life, including the worst form of death. And do we not live a whole life each day, and does it really make a difference if we live one day shorter or longer? I am with the hungry, with the mistreated, with the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmin and with the piece of heaven outside my window. There is a place for everything in life. For a belief in God and for a terrible destruction."

Westerbork

The further the diary progresses, the more Etty's life is coloured by the resolution to place herself in the service of others. During the course of the diary she prepares herself more and more to go to the Westerbork concentration camp when her summons arrives, rather than choosing to go into hiding. In the first instance she did not seek to evade what she considered to be her fate and the collective fate of her people;  secondly she wanted to go with the others to be a support for them. The last words in her diary underscore this: "One would wish to be a bandage on many wounds." 


Etty Hillesum wrote her diary during a time of a great explosion of hatred and aggression, and in just such a time, as her only weapon, she chose love: "All catastrophes emanate from ourselves. In our inner selves we must free ourselves from everything, from every immutable possibility. From every cliché, from every tie that binds, we must have the courage to let everything go, every norm and every foothold. We must dare to make the great spring into the cosmos, dare to risk, and then, then, is life so endlessly rich and overflowing, even in its deepest suffering."


Survivors from the Westerbork camp confirm that for many in those dark days Etty was both a support and a mental shield, a shining example through the light of her personality.

On 7 September 1943 Etty Hillesum, together with her entire family, was set upon a train to Poland. A Red Cross notice reported that she had died on 30 November of that same year in Auschwitz, age 29.

You are welcome to read my second post about Etty Hillesum's life and insights here:
God will Nevertheless be Safe with Us