Voices From The Silence

Introductory Reflections

Entering into this story about a research project which became part spiritual journey, part personal pilgrimage, part purgative trip, he recalled some lines in a poem by Stanley Kunitz, from The Testing-Tree. In the opening poem, “Journal for My Daughter,” Kunitz wrote in a personal, autobiographical manner and pleaded for his daughter to listen to him and to realize that the poet/speaker wanted so much more out of life. He wanted more and more and more.

That’s really a mantra for this book about Quaker silent worship under the rule and discipline of the communal silence: He simply wanted more out of life, more intimacy, more touching, more spirituality, more of God, more as a Quaker, as a researcher, as a person, as a pilgrim. More.

Voices enter and resound, thumping to get out of his body: You are not good enough; forget yourself; be satisfied, realize how much people love you. Don’t you care about your family? Why do you have to ruin the people you love? It’s like a death, your leaving, such a waste, what a waste! Listening to  these inner voices, parts of himself, he investigated other voices also, listening to Quakers speak to him about their practices in the silence of Quaker worship; and he listened to other voices within himself, also, voices of celebration and renewal as well as of despair. In the midst of the research process, he heard all of the voices at once from time to time, his own doubts and fears, family voices, childhood voices, pleading, scolding, along with the emerging, newer voices of others, urging knowledge, cajoling, entering into his heart, and the creation of a cacophonous music in his imagination.

One Quaker, brought up in Kansas, nurtured in the bosom of Quaker schools, meetings, family, friends, elders, thought that the whole point of entering into the silence of Quaker worship was to “wait upon the Spirit.” And the point of waiting, of listening, of paying attention in the silence to versions of one’s imagination and creativity, all this could lead to one point: It became possible for a different, maybe purified, cleansed voice to emerge from the silent waiting; and this emergent voice might provide a really different version of oneself, a new identity, a distinctive way of knowing about oneself and the world, in a sense. Here’s how this Quaker put it in the conversation with the researcher.

“If the Quakers didn’t grow out of the passage of Scripture, that in the beginning was the Light and every man was endowed with this Light, John 1.9 or whatnot, the other passage of Scripture which surely would have been the Quaker Scripture would have been from the Psalm, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ And there is no way, frankly, that man can understand or come close to the realization of what he is except through silence.

I’m convinced of it. Now, that doesn’t mean it has to be the silence of doing nothing. But it is the silence that allows another voice, another perspective of yourself to emerge. It cannot come out of busyness. And when Jesus teaches us in the parable about that it is easier for a Camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, to me, he’s not confining it to the rich, period. He’s confining it to those people who are too rich or too busy in their physical living to come to any understanding or awareness that it not the essence of their lives. It is only through becoming ‘unbusy,’ and the silence is a way to address that.