Cultivating Silence
From the September Perspective,
the newsletter of the Church of Our Saviour:
“Let anyone with ears listen!”
By my count, Jesus says this at least seven times in the canonical gospels, beseeching his disciples and the crowds following him to be quiet and open to God’s wisdom speaking through parable: through the stories and radical metaphors of the Gospel, through the silent listening that hears God’s voice.
Frequently, Jesus is also going up the mountain 
to pray by himself. It’s easy for us to imagine in the rich language and dense prose of our tradition that he is going up to talk to, or at least talk with God. But I have a hunch Jesus left the crowds, went up the mountain, and entered a deep and profound silence much of the time. To be filled, as he was, with the Spirit and healing power of the Divine, Christ needed to empty himself of the chatter of a day-to-day, the clamor of the peoples’ desires, the drive of the world’s agendas.
Our world, if anything, is much more noisy than Jesus’ was. And we, living in the high-powered context of Mill Valley, are often caught up in the frenetic chatter of asserting ourselves in our work and at home; the internal chatter of our minds turning over plans, anxieties, and disappointments. The hard question for us remains, Is anyone truly listening?
In a sermon a few weeks ago, some of you will remember my mentioning that Hiroko blessed me with a great gift when she took me to a Zen sitting at Green Gulch farms this summer. I was awe-struck by the practice of sitting and walking in silence with some thirty other people for over two hours. What I encountered was the transformative power and abundant peace of silence in community.
Silence is a discipline desperately needing renewal in our parish life and the wider culture. Without it, we cannot deeply listen to one another. Without it, we often miss the voice of God speaking in our midst as well as in our fragile hearts.
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