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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv2506014273 #yiv2506014273templateBody .yiv2506014273mcnTextContent, #yiv2506014273 #yiv2506014273templateBody .yiv2506014273mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv2506014273 #yiv2506014273templateFooter .yiv2506014273mcnTextContent, #yiv2506014273 #yiv2506014273templateFooter .yiv2506014273mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } It is in this new post-modern, plugged-in environment we must consider and give context to the value of silence and to the virtues of stillness.
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The Sound of Silence: Valuing the Via Negativa
Column by Joran Slane Oppelt
December 27, 2018
“Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” – Simon and Garfunkel
SILENCE
Every second Tuesday, I host a “Silent Reading and Writing Party” at our meditation center in St. Petersburg, FL. We gather in the classroom, silence our phones, relinquish them into a wooden bowl, get comfortable on the floor, bolstering ourselves with pillows and cushions, and retreat into a good book.
We ceremoniously begin and end the sustained 90 minutes of silence with the sound of the gong that rests in the corner of the room. And, inevitably, the silence we enter is not-so-silent. There are sounds of traffic from outside, the occasional sounds of someone scribbling in their journal, the sounds of someone getting up and making themselves a cup of tea or coffee. Even the creaks, pops and groans of the human body seem loud and out of place in that hushed room.
At the end of each session we share a bit about what we’ve read (or written) and even those nervous first-timers (those who cling to and hesitate to give up their device or who go wide-eyed at the sound of the gong) share an appreciation for the chance to be in proximity to others without the obligation or expectation to speak.
The average American spends more than 11 hours per day staring at a screen — reading, watching, listening or interacting with media (or each other). That is most of our waking hours.
Worldwide, people send 23 billion text messages per day. That’s 16 million per minute.
It seems that we are communicating more, but that we are communicating more silently. A silent, permeating hum. And, any glance around the dining room of a local restaurant — once a table has exhausted all conversation and small talk and turned once again to their phones — will prove there is no longer such a thing as awkward silence.
LANGUAGE
In his book, The Four Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, Laurence Scott illustrates the sometimes confusing new language used to describe the sensory range of digital life.
“Consider, for instance,” he writes, “the photographic meaning of ‘digital noise’ as referring to a graininess or unwanted pixelation of the computerized image.“
There is also the concept of “muting“ an advertisement or text message conversation, rendering it invisible as opposed to inaudible. The official language in Twitter‘s 2014 announcement debuting its silencing feature read, “Muting a user on Twitter means their tweets and retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline.“ Imagine reading that statement in 1980 (or even in 1990).
Then there is the “chat.“ Whether with a family member, coworker, customer service representative or robot, “chatting“ is something we now do in a small square window on our mobile device or desktop. Of course, there are options for “Voice Chat,“ and as Scott writes, “This one-time redundancy, which prior to the digital age would have seemed as strange a term as, say, ‘Ear Listening,’ now offers a valid distinction. ‘Chat’ alone no longer implies vocals. Voice Chat thus efficiently suggests, in two words, how our assumptions about sound, and the ways we perceive it, are not what they used to be.”
THE VOID
It is in this new post-modern, plugged-in environment we must consider and give context to the value of silence and to the virtues of stillness.
The words “fasting“ and “cleanse“ — usually reserved for diet and nutrition — are now used in conjunction with media and personal screen time. And, the long-term effects on the body and mind of this new way of being — this digital everywhereness or embeddedness — are still unknown.
What is known is that deep in the heart of stillness and the silence of solitude, there is the opportunity for reflection, contemplation, creation and growth.
Seasonally (and spiritually) there is a benefit to entering the darkness or the void of Winter after having taken the inventory of the harvest and contemplating what to re-plant or re-seed.
The phrase “dark night of the soul“ (first coined by St. John of the Cross) has long been used to describe the suffering of those who are grieving or of those who have chosen to dance the tortured path that winds along the precipice of creation and transformation. But, we all experience our own dark night.
Episcopalian priest, Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox has argued that the Neo-Platonic three-fold path of purgation, illumination and union, used in much of Western philosophy and spirituality, is sorely antiquated. In books like Creation Spirituality and Original Blessing, he has proposed a new four-fold path — the via positiva, via negativa, via creativa and via transformativa — the ways of wonder, mystery, creativity and justice.
Commenting on the via negativa in Meditations with Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox writes, “As divine as all creation is, the human person must learn to let go of things in order to let things be things and in order that reverence might be learned. Things are not bad but the human propensity to cling to things is harmful and creates the dualisms that result in all sin. When we let go and let be we learn new levels of trust including trust in the dark and in our experiences of nothingness, both personal and political.“
Consciously and deliberately moving into stillness, darkness, silence and the void can be terrifying. We may find ourselves going wide-eyed at the sound of the gong — the signal for us to leap. We may freeze. We may stand on the edge of the precipice, leaning forward into the wind-whipped emptiness and find ourselves without the courage to simply fall forward.
Luckily for us, the decision to grieve or transform is rarely ours to make. It is made for us by God, the machinations of the cosmos, the wind that carries us over the edge, or by the gentle (or not-so-gentle) hand of another.
Fox reminds us, “There is no moving from superficiality to depth — and every spiritual journey is about moving from the surface to the depths — without entering the dark.“
“Daring the dark means entering nothingness and letting it be nothingness while it works its mystery on us. Daring the dark also means allowing pain to be pain and learning from it.“
In Creation Spirituality, Fox offers us this commandment — “Thou shalt dare the dark” — but he does so not without first instructing us through the via positiva.
It is by first passing through and celebrating our sense of awe, wonder, gratitude and joy that we are able to enter into darkness and the mystery of The Void. This is what carries us through the other side into a new season of creation and reinvention. This is the lantern that we bring with us into the cave, that burning ember — or promise of the birth of the Christ child within — that gives us hope.
FORWARD MOVEMENT
In his book, Religious Inquiry – Participation and Detachment, Holmes Rolston III writes, “Algebra is an activity that one cannot watch with any notion of what is going on unless he himself knows how to do it. All those parts which one cannot do, one cannot understand. Religion is like this. Unless one can do it, what he or she observes makes no sense.”
All the sacred language and meaning-making in the world is nonsense unless we can survive transformation at the deepest center of our being. If we don’t rise every morning and return to our advocacy and activism, if we don’t eventually reawaken from that dark night of the soul to experience more beauty, goodness and truth, then we are lost in The Void.
Our effort to survive will be predicated on our ability to bridge the gap between understanding and undergoing. Trusting that we are the process is the process. Knowing that the question is always part of the answer is wisdom.
As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.“
Going forward, we must not fear change. We must learn to love the unsettled and unfinished parts of ourselves.
We must brace ourselves for the sound of the gong and enter that silence bravely.
We must relinquish our smartphones to the wise, wooden bowl and find each other through the sharing of stories.
We must carry our coffee and tea, our culture and technology, with us into Winter, knowing that we will encounter someone along the way to share a cup and a conversation with that may be more wounded or angry than we are.
We must be comforted that we will be held through every transformation, every loss, every rotation of the Cosmic spiral by the steady, certain hand of faith. That this, too, shall pass.
We must always remember that we learn by doing — by picking up and putting down.
As we learn to test the waters, and push our chests out into the wind as we dive off the edge of doubt, we improve with every turn at rising again. We show future generations how easy it can be to grieve, to forgive, to reconcile and to rebuild. We show them how to relight and pick back up the torch of their sacred work — that crude hand-fashioned tool used to transport the divine spark which can illuminate the shadowy, darkened corners or burn the whole thing down.
A WINTER PRAYER
Spirit, grant me the strength
To rise and relight my torch
That I may build something new.
Grant me the insight
To understand and undergo
My transforming, ever-broadening, edges.
Grant me the peace
To love the unfinished parts within.
Grant me the wisdom that comes
With always becoming.
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
About the AuthorJoran Slane Oppelt Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister, life coach and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and founder of Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay committed to “transformative practice, community service and religious literacy.” Joran is the author of Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox), Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He serves as President of Interfaith Tampa Bay and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion.
He has presented at South by Southwest in Austin, TX; Building the New World Conference in Radford, VA; Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City; Embrace Festival in Portland, OR and Integral European Conference in Siófok, Hungary.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Heather
What is the relationship between Christianity and other religions?
A: By Bishop John Shelby Spong
Dear Pauline,
Every religious system the world over begins as a way of enabling people to enter the experience of transcendence and meaning. There is something about self-conscious human beings that forces us to seek to commune with the source of our life. That experience is so deep that I am not sure there is such a thing as a nonreligious human being. There are certainly human beings who reject a particular religious content but none that fail to raise the ultimate questions that create our various religious answers.
All of this is to say that the great religions of the world have codified that eternal quest into systems of thought that now dominate the various regions of the world. Christianity is today primarily the religion of the Western world and those areas that have been colonized by Western powers. Islam is the religion of the Middle East stretching into Africa in the West and Indonesia in the East. Hinduism and its child Buddhism dominate the religious landscape of the East.
There are clearly many divisions inside each of these religious traditions. There are also minority religious movements like Jews and Jains that are scattered throughout the regions of the world and that live under the domination of one of the majority traditions.
Conflict arises in the world of religion when any system decides that it has captured the Ultimate Truth of God and therefore all other systems are defective or subject to conversion. I honor the pathway that Christianity has offered me since it enables me to walk into the wonder of God. This does not mean, however, that I am, somehow, incapable of also honoring the pathway that others walk. If we believe that God is one then all pathways to God are in the last analysis, journeys toward the same goal. I intend to live within my faith traditions as deeply as I can. That does not mean that I will ever allow my devotion to the God I meet in Christ to be used to denigrate any religious system different from my own. I hope that religious maturity might soon lead us all in this direction.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally published October 8, 2003
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Study of New Testament Miracles, Part III
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on October 4, 2006
In the opening column in this series on miracles in the Bible, I noted two things. First, the accounts of miracles in the Bible are generally limited to three cycles of stories within the biblical narrative.
They are part of the Moses-Joshua cycle of stories, the Elijah-Elisha cycle of stories and the Jesus-Disciples of Jesus cycle of stories. There is an occasional supernatural tale in other parts of the Bible, but these are the only areas where they are concentrated. Second, miracles in the biblical story are not necessarily moral acts. The plagues inflicted on the Egyptians at the time of the Exodus, which included the divine killing of the first-born son in every Egyptian household, are hardly moral by any standard we would employ today. The narrative of Joshua asking God to stop the sun in the sky to allow him and his army more daylight hours to complete the slaughtering of his Amorite enemies is also a rather bizarre divine act.
In that analysis, we discovered that in the Moses-Joshua stories, the miracles recounted are almost exclusively nature miracles, by which I mean they are stories of the manipulation of natural forces to achieve a human goal. The plagues on Egypt involved turning the Nile River into blood, commanding hailstones and darkness to fall upon the nation, the affliction of the people with boils and the livestock with disease were all, the Bible says, miraculously sent to accomplish specific human purposes. The idea that anyone has the power to command what we regard as the natural forces of the universe to enter into his or her service is very strange indeed.
The miracles of Elijah and Elisha also tended to occur in the natural order.
These prophets were said to be able to manipulate the weather patterns to achieve their purposes and Elijah was deemed capable of calling down fire from heaven to burn up his enemies. However, the content of miracle accounts grow in the Elijah-Elisha cycle, for it is here that miraculous healings and even accounts of raising a dead person back to life enter the biblical tradition.
When we come to the gospels, we discover that Jesus was said to be capable of performing miracles in each of these three areas of life. Associated with him was a series of nature miracles: Jesus stilled the storm, walked on water, expanded the food supply and caused a fig tree to die by laying a curse on it, all of which involved manipulating the natural order. Yet the gospels also portray Jesus as a healer, enabling the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, the mute to sing and those who were “possessed by demons” to be cleansed or exorcised. Jesus was said to have had this healing power even though some of the first century diagnoses, like ‘demon possession,’ are today dismissed as pre-modern ignorance.
There are also three stories told in the gospels in which Jesus was said to have the power to raise the dead. They were the daughter of Jairus, whose story is told in Mark, Matthew and Luke; the raising of a widow’s son from death in the village of Nain, told only in Luke, and finally the story of the raising of Lazarus, told only in John’s gospel. The point I want to make in this brief analysis is that each type of miracle that is attributed to Jesus in the gospels also occurs in the earlier cycles of Moses-Joshua and Elijah-Elisha. So my first inquiry into understanding the miracle stories in the gospels leads me to ask whether the miracles attributed to past biblical heroes might have been used to help shape the miracle accounts told about Jesus. Pursuing this line of inquiry raises the possibility that these miracles stories might have been developed to serve the interpretative purpose of seeing Jesus as a new Moses or a new Elijah far more than they were the descriptions of actual events that literally happened in history.
This week I explore this possibility more deeply. Note first that Moses as the father of the law and Elijah as the father of the prophetic movement represent the twin towers of the Jewish religion. The religion called Judaism was said to “hang on the law and the prophets.”
Moses and Elijah also loom large in the background of the gospels. As I mentioned in the second column of this series, Moses’ name appears seventy-eight times in the New Testament and Elijah’s twenty-nine times. In the dramatic story that Christians call the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah were said to appear on that mountaintop with Jesus and to converse with him. When Peter responded to this vision with the suggestion that three tabernacles be built to mark this event, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus, he was raising Jesus to the highest status that a Jew could imagine by making Jesus equal to Moses and Elijah. The fact that in this story Peter was rebuked by a heavenly voice that elevated Jesus above both Moses and Elijah probably reflects the early struggle among the disciples of Jesus about who he was and how his life was to be understood.
It is clear from a study of the gospels that some stories that had been told about Moses and Elijah were retold about Jesus. In the minds of the first Christians a mutual dependency binding Moses and Elijah with Jesus is obvious. However, these stories are magnified to demonstrate Jesus’ superiority, which was the conclusion his followers had drawn. One thinks immediately of the story told only in Matthew’s gospel about a wicked king named Herod who sent his troops to Bethlehem with orders to kill all the Jewish male babies less than two years of age. His desire was to destroy God’s promised deliverer. When Moses was born another wicked king, that time named Pharaoh, also ordered all Jewish boy babies destroyed in a vain effort to remove God’s promised deliverer. Matthew had Mary, Joseph and Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape this purge. This also meant that just as God called Moses to come out of Egypt, so God could now call Jesus, the new
Moses, to come out of Egypt. Jesus’ baptism is filled with Moses images. Moses splits the ‘Red Sea’ to lead people to understand that God is working through him. Jesus, the new Moses, splits the heavens, which contain ‘the waters above the firmament’ (Gen. 1:6), which then flow down on him as the Holy Spirit so people can see that God dwells in him. In the wilderness Moses asks God to send heavenly bread, called manna, to the starving multitude. In the wilderness Jesus expands five loaves to feed a multitude. The stories are related. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses, on a new mountain, giving a new interpretation of the Torah.
Once again the evidence reveals that the story of Jesus has been shaped by the story of Moses.
Elijah is not as prominent as Moses in the New Testament, but he is still a figure in the background of the gospel tradition. In both Mark and Matthew, the Elijah role is delegated to John the Baptist. Luke, however, counters this by saying that John the Baptist is not the new Elijah, but only the one who comes in “the spirit of Elijah.” The reason for this becomes obvious when Luke reaches the climax of his story and begins to portray Jesus as the new Elijah by expanding the Elijah story from the Book of Kings. In Luke’s unique story of Jesus raising the only son of a widow from the dead, the echoes of Elijah raising a widow’s son from the dead are heard. However, the key place where this identification focuses is found in the comparison of the ascension of Elijah (II Kings 2) with the story told only in Luke of Jesus’ ascension (Acts 1,2). Luke is clearly building the Elijah story into his portrait of Jesus. In these two narratives both Elijah and Jesus ascend into heaven. The text about Elijah indicates that he needs a magical chariot, fiery horses and a God-sent whirlwind to accomplish this feat.
Jesus, the new and greater Elijah, is portrayed as ascending on his own power. Elijah pours out on his single disciple and successor, Elisha, a double portion of his enormous, but still human, spirit. Luke, however, portrays Jesus as pouring out the infinite power of God’s Holy Spirit on the whole gathered community of disciples in sufficient supply to last through all generations. Under the skill of Luke’s quill, the fire from Elijah’s horses and chariot becomes the tongues of fire that light on the disciples’ heads and Elijah’s propelling whirlwind becomes the “mighty rushing wind” of the Holy Spirit filling the whole room on the day of Pentecost.
There are other connections between Jesus and the Moses and Elijah cycles that space does not allow me to cover in this brief article.
Taken together, however, they form the basis for the suggestion that long before the gospels were written, both Moses and Elijah had become models through which Jesus’ followers understood him and by which they processed the Jesus experience. In this way, Moses and Elijah stories were in fact wrapped around Jesus, becoming the source of at least some of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels.
I conclude this column by examining just one. Moses demonstrated God’s power over water in the Red Sea narrative. After Moses died, this power was celebrated in the writings of the prophets and in the psalms until it became a regular part of the Jewish understanding of God found in their liturgies. These liturgies proclaimed that God could make a divine path in the ‘deep,’ that God’s footprints could be seen upon the water. When the disciples of Jesus began to say that they had met the presence of the holy God in Jesus, they simply attributed those ancient God concepts to Jesus as the only way that human language could be stretched sufficiently to capture the meaning of their experience. Like God, Jesus could still the storm. Like God, Jesus could walk upon water. These were not observed miracles being described by eyewitnesses; these were interpretative words describing the God presence they believed they had met in Jesus.
As we begin to see these connections, a new way to look at the miracle stories emerges. The nature miracles are not supernatural acts so much as they are interpretative signs. They are Moses and Elijah stories magnified. We thus misread the gospels by literalizing them. There is far more data to be considered, but this is a start. We destabilize the literal view to capture the experience that literalism can never capture. This study will continue.
~ John Shelby Spong
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