Good day, good people,
*Next Contemplative Eucharist is Sunday, February 16th
Good day, good people,
Many of the world's Wisdom traditions affirm that a practice of silence is essential for living as Whole, integrated humans. Yet, silence carries as many associations as there are people, shaping our relationship with it in profoundly personal ways.
For some, silence is a much-needed respite from the relentless noise of the world, bringing a deep sense of relief. For others, even the mention of silence evokes the pain of having been unjustly silenced. Some seek silence as a way to quiet the mind and listen beyond its surface. Others find it daunting, as it exposes the inner voices of doubt and criticism. For some, silence holds little significance, while for others, it is simply neutral.
Whatever our experience, we each navigate silence in our own way—sometimes approaching it, sometimes avoiding it. We often think of silence as something we create by setting aside time or space for quiet, placing ourselves in environments with minimal sound. It is commonly seen as a means to an end: a space for thinking, reflecting, listening to inner wisdom or the Divine, or simply being. These are all meaningful pursuits. But is this what the ancient traditions truly emphasize when they speak of silence as vital?
Thomas Keating, as illuminated by Cynthia Bourgeault in her recent writings and teachings, offers a deeper perspective. He describes silence not as a mere absence of sound but as a palpable presence—an enfolding, permeating relational field with substantiality, weight, and force. Silence is something we can lean into, and it responds in kind. It is boundless, spacious, and, in itself, an encounter with the Beloved. Keating speaks of silence as an objective aspect of divine disposition—God’s unseen, mysterious nature revealed to us as infinite potential, a vibrancy we can touch and embody in our daily lives.
As we journey through these last weeks of Epiphanytide—a season that points to the truth of God's often unseen, mysterious nature incarnate within our own lives—perhaps we can open ourselves to encountering silence in the way Keating and others, like Robert Sardello, have described it: not as emptiness, but as fullness. Not as mere quiet, but as presence.
In the tide of Epiphany Light, Love, and Wholeness,
Heather
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, January 27th
Reading: “The Self [Real I] is beyond, yet innate, in all form – timeless, without beginning or End, changeless, permanent, and immortal. Out of it arises awareness, consciousness, and an infinite condition of ‘at homeness.’ It is the ultimate subjectivity from which everyone’s sense of I arises. The Infinite Reality does not even know itself as ‘I’ but as the very substrate of the capacity for such a statement. [Behind Real I lies God.] It is invisible and all present. In ordinary terms, it is more like a quality that is devoid of any innate content but is capable of any content. It is the quality that makes experiencing or witnessing possible. The source of the Self is the reality of Divinity. Although it is the source of existence, it is not subject to it nor is such a term applicable.” –– David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., I: Reality & Subjectivity
Chant: There is nothing but God, there is only God, there is no one but God, there is only God, There is nothing but You, there is only You, there is no one but You, there is only You (by The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West)
Tuesday, January 28th
Reading: “…we can begin to do our small part to replenish those dangerously depleted reservoirs of the human spirit: to share joy, song, a meal together, even the eucharist, and to touch base once again with the common sap that flows through our human kind. We can also begin to defuse the egregore [of fear] by no longer allowing ourselves to be personally or collectively intimidated by it. By essentially saying, ‘If it comes, bring it on. I am willing to carry a piece of it…on behalf of the whole.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Chant: Whether I live, whether I die, I am the Lord’s, I am the Lord’s (by Alana Levandoski)
Wednesday, January 29th
Reading: “When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.” ― Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel
Chant: my center is in you God, my center is in you (by Heather Ruce)
Thursday, January 30th
Reading: “At first when you begin a practice of meditation, it feels like a place you go to. You may think of it as “my inner sanctuary” or “my place apart with God.” But as the practice becomes more and more established in you so that this inner sanctuary begins to flow out into your life, it becomes more and more a place you come from. It is a bedrock of spiritual intelligence, a sense of connectedness known from so deeply within you that nothing can shake it. This is the ground of what tradition calls theological hope, “the hope that can never be taken away,” because you simply know your abiding union in this place of interconnection; you know that nothing can possibly fall out of God, and that, as St. Paul so profoundly expressed it, “Whether I live or die, I am the Lord’s.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
Chant: Whether I live, whether I die, I am the Lord’s, I am the Lord’s (by Alana Levandoski)
Friday, January 31st
Reading: “[Thomas Keating] increasingly stripped the sacred word of any affective content whatsoever and repositioned it as simply "a placeholder for your intention" He insisted on the prompt letting go of all thoughts, regardless of content, and reminded practitioners that what is at stake in this practice is not the content of the message but the configuration of one's attention. In other words, he steadily fine-tuned the practice in the direction of cultivating objectless awareness, the ability to hold awareness beyond the usual subject-object polarity of the mind.
“He never explicitly acknowledged this until the very end. It was always veiled in the language of "consenting to the presence and action of God"—in other words, as an attitude of inner receptivity and self-surrender. But from the standpoint of what's actually going on in the brain, letting go of a thought means momentarily breaking the automatic flow of attention from subject to object, which is in fact the driveshaft of dualistic thinking and of the self-structure such thinking generates. Under the rubric of "consent," Thomas was introducing practitioners to a whole new configuration of consciousness—one in which the habitual flow of attention from subject to object is temporarily halted, and there is a momentary taste of an entirely different quality of awareness. The Tibetan Buddhists call it rigpa, objectless awareness. By whatever name, it means that there is full, conscious awareness but no specific object of attention to affix it to or self-reflection to mediate it. It is simple, direct, bare perceptivity.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Mystic
Chant: only the Divine matters, and because the Divine matters, Everything, matters (words of Thomas Keating put to chant by Susan Latimer)
Saturday, February 1st
Reading: “Somewhere in those depths of silence I came upon my first experiences of God as a loving presence that was always near, and prayer as a simple trust in that presence.” ― Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
Chant: Listen, listen wait in silence listening; for the one from whom all mercy flows (by The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West)
Sunday, February 2nd
Reading: “Perhaps we could say that contemplation occurs when interior silence morphs into Presence” — Thomas Keating
Chant: abide in me, as I abide in you, we are one, we are one
Comments