The Belgian spiritual writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, comes by her
wisdom honestly. She didn't learn what she shares from a book
or even primarily from the good example of others. She learned
what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being
hit at the tender age of nineteen with a terminal disease that
promised not just an early death but also a complete breakdown
and humiliation of her body enroute to that death.
Her attempt to cope with her situation drove her in many
directions, initially to anger and hopelessness, but eventually into
the deep well of silence, that desert that lurks so threateningly
inisde each of us. Away from all the noises of the world, in the
silence of her own soul, inside the chaos of her raging, restless
insides she found the wisdom and strength not just to cope with
her illness but to also find a deeper meaning and joy in her life.
There are, as John Updike poetically puts it, secrets that are hidden
from health, though, as Vandekerckhove makes evident, they can
be uncovered in silence. However, uncovering the secrets that
silence has to teach us is not easy. Silence, until properly befriended,
is scary and the process of befriending it is the soul's equivalent of
crossing a hot desert. Our insides don't easily become calm,
restlessness doesn't easily turn into solitude, and the temptation to
turn to the outside world for consolation doesn't easily give way
to the idea of quiet. But there's a peace and a meaning that can
only be found inside the desert of our own chaotic and raging
insides. The deep wells of consolation lie at the end of an inner
journey through heat, thirst, and dead-ends that must be pushed
through with dogged fidelity.
Here's how Vandekerckhove describes one aspect of the journey:
'Inner noise can be quite exhausting. That's probably why so many
flee to the seduction of exterior background noises. But if you want
to grow spiritually, you have to stay inside the room of your
spiritual raging and persevere. You have to continue to sit silently
and honestly until the raging quiets down and your heart gradually
becomes quieted. Silence forces us to take stock of our actual
manner of being human. And then we hit a wall, a dead point.
No matter what we do, no matter what we try, something in us
continues to feel lost and estranged, despite the myriad ways of
society to meet our human needs. Silence confronts us with
an unbearable bottomlessness, and there appears no way out.
We have no choice but to align ourselves with the depth in us.
There's a profound truth: Silence confronts us with an unbearable
bottomlessness and we have not choice but to align ourselves with
the depth inside us. Sadly, for most of us, we will learn this only
by bitter conscription when we have to actually face our own
death. .....before this surrender is made, our lives will always
remain somewhat unstable and confusing and there will always
be dark, inner corners of the soul that scare us.
But a journey into silence can take us beyond our dark fears and
shine healing light into our darkest corners. But as
Vandekerckhove and other spiritual writers point out, that peace
is usually found only after we have reached an impasse, a
'dead point' where the only thing we can do is to "pierce the
negative.'
In her book, The Taste of Silence, Vandekerckhove recounts how
an idealistic friend of hers shared his dream of going off by himself
into some desert to explore spirituality. Her prompt reaction was not
much to his liking: 'A person is ready to go to any kind of desert.
He's willing to sit anywhere, as long as it's not his own desert.'
How true. We forever hanker after idealized deserts and avoid our
own.
The spiritual journey, the pilgrimage, the Camino we most need to
make doesn't require an airline ticket.... The most spiritually
rewarding trip we can make is an inner pilgrimage, into the desert
of our own silence.
As human beings we are constitutively social. ...but there's a certain
deep inner work that can only be done alone, in silence, away from
the noise of the world.
~
Photo - via No Mind's Land
