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Opinion Articles
*Hello Silence ... My Old Friend
By Sr Carmel Moore RSJ
Sr Carmel Moore RSJ offers a variety of meditation opportunities through the Living Waters Meditation Centre at The Junction.
A woman who lives in Alice Springs was feeling the heavy burden of an abusive relationship. When the suffering was too much she would go to Simpson's Gap, a deep chasm with a pool of still water. Here she inevitably found healing. ‘It wouldn't happen in the sun,' she said, ‘but when I came into the shade peace would take hold of me. It always happened. After a while I would be balanced enough to return.' Our human hearts need such moments. We may gaze at a lake and find a harbour for our spirit to come to stillness after a storm. We may walk in the bush and come to a valley – after the physical exertion we rest in an abyss of silence.
In the city too there is a place to escape stress and noise. It is found in ‘the sound of silence'. Words inevitably reach saturation point and silence follows, carrying her own treasures of awareness.
As sun and moon have their cycles and give way to each other, our lives have cycles of word and silence, thought and reflection, work and leisure, toil and stillness. That is the way it is meant to be.
Nevertheless, too many of us know frantic, unrelieved activity. On the roads stress leads to rage. On the footpaths, walkers are connected to radios, CDs and ipods. Our shopping centres pump out music, so that when we escape to the car and the background sound fades we switch on the radio, lessening our friendship with silence.
In order to regain the balance it is good to dip into the deeper silence of meditation through the way of the mantra. Though initially our active minds may find silence strange, to meditate, to contemplate, is an ability with which we are born. It restores the balance of our lives and brings harmony.
The attraction of the journey inward is that it is infinite. Every time we enter the ‘cave of our heart' we light a candle to dispel darkness and see further. We discover that our answers are within us – strength, wisdom, creativity, calmness, healing, happiness. All of these gifts of God, who lives within us, are found in silence.
Many people build this cycle into their lives. For a while the imagination (St Teresa calls it the ‘fool of the house') may romp wildly and uncontrollably, but when we pay no attention to it, we learn to remain in deep peace at the core of our being.
This is the ancient and enduring tradition of Christian Meditation, where one discovers the mystery of love at the centre of every soul. Meditation means ‘standing at the centre.'
If you feel the need to restore the balance and revisit your old friend silence, seek out a meditation group and begin again this wonderful inner journey.
My friend in Alice Springs found answers to change her life. She found, as T.S. Eliot said, that ‘in the silence of the heart God speaks.'
*This article
was published in The Newcastle Herald, 20th June 2005
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