This month we welcome a number of Turkish women into this community of chosen silence and reflection. The invitation is online here, so that you can review the intent and, if you want, send it along to friends.
Each month we send a reminder and some kind of inspiration to open the way into the stillness that holds our lives. This poem was written by Thomas Merton, a 20th century writer, mystic and Trappist Monk. He spoke of the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private. "When society is made up of people who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.”
Our hope is that whatever time you spend in silence this Sunday (be it ten minutes, an hour, or the full day) that it connects you to the the silent and fiery Unknown. The world thanks you for this gift.
We will meet you in the folds of stillness,
Peri and Barbara
In Silence
Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?
Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.
O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.
“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a person be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can (s)he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”
~ Thomas Merton ~
The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton