Voices from the Silence

Voices From The

Silence

by

Stanford J. Searl, Jr., Ph.D.

© 2005 Stanford J. Searl, Jr., Ph.D.. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/30/05

ISBN: 1-4259-0225-1 (e)

ISBN: 1-4259-0224-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4259-0225-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Voices

Introductory Reflections

Inspiration and the Breath

God and Quaker Voices

Centered Reflection

Aspects of Pilgrimage

Centered Reflection

Even Jesus

Trusting in God

Visions of Transparency

A Quaker Men’s Weekend at Woodbrooke

Listening to Quaker Voices

The Ego and Its Voices

Swimming Underwater with the Quakers

Getting Started in the Silence

Farming in Vermont: Shouting and the Problems of Silence

Unheard Voices

Silence and How One Mind Worked

Silent Worship and Community

Levels of the Spiritual Water

Theology and Experience

The Researcher and His Methods

The Questions

The Results

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Voices

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.

And the silence at Meeting for worship, that scheduled, perfunctory, regular hour is not really the type of silence we’re talking about. We’re talking about it as, in a sense, an outward sign of what should be a silence that it is in our lives, daily."

With hope and faith, many Friends sought precisely that other voice or perspective of yourself to emerge from within the silence of worshipping with others. As it happened, this particular Friend had internalized the Bible in a distinctive Quaker manner and knew, inwardly and personally, the language and expressions of that particular source. Hence, the text, Be still and know that I am God had become part and parcel of this Friend’s experiential understanding of Quaker theory. The essential idea had a remarkable power and simplicity: One comes to a knowledge of the divine, of the Spirit, of God, through the quiet, the stillness, the silence; and, in the midst of such stillness, attending to the divine, listening as if one’s life depended upon it, one might hear another voice emerge out of this process of inward attention.

Reflecting upon this potential for a spiritually informed, emergent voice, the researcher felt drawn to his connection with music, to the sort of deep listening which might allow the inner, spiritual singing to be in tune, again allowing an emergent voice to sound. According to nearly all of his choral conductors, from Arthur Poister at Syracuse University to Neville Mariner as his director of a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, singing in tune meant paying attention in certain ways, matters of both vocal production and one’s frame of mind or even attitude. As a singer, one thought higher, opened one’s mouth, differently, presented an expectant, hopeful posture, with support from the diaphragm, somehow, in an integrated manner (combining the body, feeling, and mind) and assuming that one could and would sing in tune, with the most pleasing intonation, using bel canto vowels as one’s voice vibrated in tune. So too in this spiritual quest for the somewhat obvious, yet even elusive and mysterious meanings of Quaker worship under the rule and discipline of silent waiting, the practitioners needed to learn to be in tune, to be devoted to a centered listening to the Spirit in such ways as to catch the harmonies, the unified, yet complex drift of the present moment, whole, still and complete and to allow a certain profound stillness to inform one’s being.

Yet, looking back, reflecting, becoming open to the inward journey, the possibility of voices from other depths than the Quaker center occurred to him. What if, then, in the posture of some devotee of inward, spiritual listening, seeking, open, tender, becoming what one Quaker called transparent to the Spirit, he heard other, even demonic voices? He might hear, for example, other versions of the inward voice, those more self-destructive voices, pushed out of some depth of experience and vision, just as inward and authentic, certainly compelling voices of the soul but markers of its anguish and despair? After all, reflecting about this journey, the deeply intense spiritual pilgrimage, those other voices, the ones that he had heard at times in the middle of the night usually, they offered a sort of compelling authority also, didn’t they, pulsating out messages of worthlessness and guilt?

Even so, the point of listening together in the Quaker Meeting for Worship implied something about shucking off those real voices of despair and doubt or at the least, quieting them, allowing them to just rest in the silence as one Quaker woman had said. Together, then, with other people as fellow participants in the worship process, allowing the Spirit of communal worship to occur, to give over oneself to the Spirit, to wait upon the Spirit together as many Quakers had said, then this might be a way to take his fears and doubts – through prayer – and give such doubts over to the present moment of the corporate worship. But, of course, whether or not another voice emerged, a voice tempered by and connected to the Spirit and under its influence, the main business of worship remained the same: One waited, expectantly, became what many Friends described as open to the Spirit, so that this different voice, a new identity, could enter, probably more in the form of a gift, what some Christians would call grace. This mid-western Quaker expressed this different way of knowing from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the use of biblical texts and phrases as ways to center himself to a more intuitive, inward method of simply what he referred to as getting quiet. But the main point of all this talk about being open to God and listening to the Spirit spoke to the inward yet group drama that occurred within the Quaker Worship Meeting. Friends offered themselves to be penetrated by, connected to, as it were, the Spirit, the Divine Presence, one’s notion of God, taken over by or infused with another, different voice. That’s the main point, maybe the only point.

Of course, not all Quakers who talked with the researcher about their spiritual practices had the assurance, inner confidence and clear articulation about both text and process as the Friend just mentioned, who had been steeped in the Bible and its language. Rather, it can be a difficult, complex and somewhat delicate struggle for many Friends, seasoned, experienced or not, to describe their inner, spiritual experiences in ways that communicated how they felt, what really happened and what process provided the energy and meaning for them.

Not very far into the process, the researcher started to realize that the research itself had a sort of two-fold meaning for him: First, talking with the participants, traveling around to northeast United States Quakers and then to British Quakers later, he felt drawn to the poetic expression, to indirection and mystery, to the hidden yet simple meanings he had heard about from within the silence from other Quakers; and second, the research journey had turned personal, difficult, anguished at times, as the pilgrim lost his way. In this manner, the research process itself became purgative, a cleansing process, sometimes mostly of loss and loneliness, and at other times full of unanticipated joy and thanksgiving – but too much of the time both sorrow and joy at once. Like life.

He had started out this pilgrimage, this ironic sort of ministry, from a location firmly, deeply set in the eastern part of the United States, in fact almost as far east, geographically, as one could go without being in the Atlantic Ocean. He had lived in a deep, tidal swirl of family, place, depth, connected to a family farm with origins in the 17th century, people who had journeyed (in their own pilgrimages) to the eastern part of Long Island in the 1640’s. Hence, he possessed a deep affinity and connection to English history and family identity, wrapped up into the English Civil War and what Christopher Hill had called ‘the world turned upside down’ in a book by that same name. For this family who had accepted him because he had married into it, the Puritan revolution mattered, at least for his father-in-law, in the sense that the adopted family traced their origins to a sort of strict congregationalism, a complex mixture of local church rule, austere belief in the reality of sin and a fierce determination to maintain the purity and integrity of community, church and family. Moreover, beneath these high ideas and beliefs, there was the land itself, the farming, the seasonable rhythms and the pull of property, ownership, money, stewardship.

After all, the land mattered, and the too personal direction of the research sounded within him, a sort of calling about place, location and position. Yet, now, living in the midst of the typically smoggy sun of the great Los Angeles basin, a disconnected pilgrim of the Spirit, the researcher remembered the intense sense of place with feelings of joy and sorrow.

In the Spring, it smelt yeasty, walking east between the row of apricot trees in bloom, the delicate white flowers possessed an aromatic, subtle scent. Standing in the rutted lane which cut through this part of the orchard of Wickham’s Fruit Farm, looking up between the apricot blossoms, he noticed the farmland, woods, creek and tidal wetlands in the distance. Just beyond the apricot blooms to the right, the newly plowed field showed standing water near the line of oak trees beyond. Up ahead, just this side of the fresh-water pond behind the dike, geese honked and paddled around in the low-lying parts of the field next to the small pond. His late father-in-law had had an impressive collection of Indian arrowheads, pushed up over the years from the plowing and planting in these former native American broad fields, precisely the same fields used by the Corchaug Indians to grow corn and beans.

According to some local historians, this piece of Cutchogue, Long Island had been a so-called principle place where the Corchaug people had kept open or broad fields and cultivated squash, corn, beans, probably using fish and shellfish from the adjacent saltwater creek as fertilizer. Now, all that remained of these particular native people were remnants from the past culture in the form of arrowhead chips and tool fragments plowed up from time to time by the local farmers, including his former father-in-law and other family members. If the land could cry out and speak, wouldn’t part of that speaking be a form of weeping in the midst of such fecundity, remembering the eradication of an entire people?

Reflecting about the devastation of native peoples and the extermination of cultures in the name of civilization and progress, the researcher dreamed a little, contemplating the crimes, the usually nameless stains on the very earth itself, and remembered an occasion about the inward reality of cultural crime. As usual in this spiritually informed pilgrimage, the underlying message manifested itself indirectly out of the imagination, here through the images of a gathering of crows.

It was as if he had dreamed about the crows and that the birds then appeared as from another dimension, another period of history, associated with a terrible massacre from 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota. The researcher and teacher had come to this city in Minnesota as part of his work as a Professor at Union Institute and University’s Graduate College, a self-directed, learner centered and interdisciplinary doctoral program. As it happened, the regional library and its memorial for thirty-eight Dakota Sioux, who were hanged on December 26, 1862, stood across the street from his hotel. The researcher had wandered through the library itself and then stood, for a time, thinking about the memorial for the Sioux. Later, as he left the hotel and drove across the river, he noticed a small flock of crows that had gathered on the other side. The birds, or their images or associations, spoke to him somehow, offering messages that appeared to be embedded in a poem, written in December of 1997, nearly one-hundred thirty-five years to the day after the hanging.

As I stood in the middle

Of the Regional Library

In Mankato Minnesota

Thinking about books and knowledge

And the hidden treasure of my education,

I trembled,

Pulsating with a different knowledge

As if I lay in the midst of a low-lying cloud

Walking through the library and into the

Scaffolding

Where

Thirty-eight Dakota Sioux

Chanted,

Singing their deaths

By hanging on December 26, 1862

Within a few yards of where I stood in the library.

Later,

The earth

Spoke to me through a fluttering of black crows

That seemed to squat together

On the other side of the bridge

From the 1862 killing ground

And the crows filled the air around my red rental car

As they pulsated through me, heavy with the cloudy, gray sky.

Even now,

Back in Boston

I hear the crows

Ringing changes in my mind

As more and more crows gather inside my body,

Filling me up with their insistent cries.

And yet, even in the midst of such a history, feeling some of the terrible pulsation’s of earlier people, the land appeared to be so beautiful as he walked up through one of the main parts of the farm. It always felt good no matter what time of year but the Spring played out with such fecundity. Ahead and to the right, the nearly imperceptible dikes formed a tangled ring of poison ivy, wild cherry trees among vines and bushes, all seeming to shoot up at once; and behind the wildly overgrown hedgerow, he caught glimpses of Wickham’s Creek, really a broad, extremely shallow tidal inlet from the greater Bay, opened up to a boating harbor at its mouth, with the shimmering waters of Cutchogue Harbor and the Great Peconic Bay beyond.

Somewhat further on, he walked next to the line of large, gnarled Cortland apple trees, with the blossoms formed but not quite out yet even though the buds appeared to swell and increase. Behind him now, more to the south, he heard the fierce call of an osprey as it hunted at the edge of the dikes, soaring, calling, insistent, caught in the updraft of the southerly wind. Soon, then, he reached the enormous buttonwood tree, with the rich stand of rhubarb just to its north. Breaking off a number of stalks and tossing away the leaves, he remembered his grandmother and the lady with the dirty feet near the airport south of Rutland, Vermont. A huge woman with massive, continuously swollen ankles and feet, who probably couldn’t ever wear shoes, this so-called ‘lady-with-the-dirty-feet’ always had greeted his grandmother with affection; the woman, barely able to stoop over, grasped a huge machete and hacked at the rhubarb, much to the delight of his grandmother. Back on the Long Island farm, gathering the rhubarb stalks into his arms, calling for the dog, he headed back home, anticipating the aroma and deep reddish color of stewed rhubarb, already savoring the taste of its sour delicacy, connected with his grandmother again and that huge lady with the dirty feet in Vermont.

Within the same historical period, basically the decade of