Into the Silent Land

I have been reading this book by Martin Laird for several days, meaning that I've read it through and now I'm reading around in it, a paragraph or two at a time. My former spiritual director recommended it, saying that someone else had told him that it's the best thing that's been written about prayer.

I'm not sure about that. I'm still partial to Anthony Bloom's Beginning to Pray and Henri Nouwen's The Only Necessary Thing. In fact, I like the latter so much that I've used it to teach a class on prayer at my home church, and another friend has just run with that idea and used it as the basis for an entire retreat day at hers.

But Laird does offer an amazing chapter on meeting your pain in the silence of God. He uses fear, physical pain, and compulsion to illustrate what he means, but his thoughts are applicable to any kind of affective torment -- mine being anger, sadness, and overwhelming and indefinable emotional pain. The point is to move from reactivity to witness, from endless inner commentary to direct gaze. As a person who moves constantly within the dimensions of story, I find it quite challenging to subtract narrative and imagery from my inner life. But perhaps that is exactly the invitation I need to heed right now.

The other night, having had something of a meltdown at school and witnessing the shock and dismay on the faces of others who perhaps have not come face-to-face with this depth of grief before (in part because I, myself, for instance, have kept most of it to myself), I looked up some material online. Mostly I just needed to be reminded that there is nothing unusual about my feelings. And, indeed, I read repeatedly that deep and pervasive grief last much longer than most people are aware that it does, especially in situations such as ours, where the multiplier of two of life's worst traumas is in effect.

That said, however, the groove worn by the endless replay of memories and of things that might have been different becomes unproductive at some point. The therapist I saw for some months at the beginning said that for a trauma like loss to suicide, you need to find "a good enough story," something close enough and accurate enough offer some peace. She's an excellent therapist, but I'm not sure that there is a good enough story. Perhaps what there is instead is the very thing which was the source of so much anguish for so long: the vast silence of God.

I just glanced at the book to see whether there were some words more precise than mine. And here they are:

"Now we can see how afflictive thoughts and feelings play a rather important role. They provide an invitation to be still and gaze into the vast silence they manifest. This is how Eckhart could say, 'what used to be a hindrance now helps you most.' Such is the simple sifting of silence."