Mark Weiss wrote:
> Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be prescriptive, just puzzling
> over this. There's an alternate tradition of solitary silence,
> practiced by religious hermits and various Indian subcontinent holy
> men. It's also recorded in the bible--Elijah's forty days in the
> wilderness. In Tibetan Buddhist practice adepts sometimes pass three
> days in silence in total darkness--sensory deprivation as well as
> silence. American Indian vision quests also were both solitary and
> silent. So the question is--in what way, and for what reason, the
> communal or the solitary methods?
I have taken far too much time from what I should be doing. That said,
the last question defeats me. Except that maybe there is a time when
silence forcibly separates you from a group of people and you are thrown
back onto You and whatever you think you believe in? I believe Judy
also noted the Quaker "lonely crowd" form of silence. I have sat in a
meeting house with 20 other people and listened to my own heartbeat,
felt my own terrors, found my way to my own (for the moment) healing. I
am in a beehive where society stops for an hour, where we're all in our
separate cells of the hive, alone together.
It seems as though the tradition of solitary silence crosses cultural
boundaries--the Tibetan total darkness practice is frightening. It
reminds me of the dreadful punishment-imprisonment of John of the
Cross, whose own Carmelite order locked him in a dark underground cell
for nine months before he was able to escape. Out of that ordeal came
one of the great spiritual poems, "The Dark Night of the Soul," which
Juan de la Cruz allegedly composed in his head to save his
sanity--writing it down was a matter of transferring what was in his
mind to paper.
I wonder what stages any adept--Juan, the Tibetan Buddhist,
anyone--endures before he (or she?) comes to acceptance...which I am
starting to believe is the goal of any spiritually-based ordeal. "This
is where I am and now. My feet are here, so is my head. I am starting
to know what I must do...or I trust it will be shown to me when it must
be." I do not recall whether Elijah in his 40 days in the wilderness
was shown things or tempted; but the Gospels make it pretty clear that
Jesus, also (coincidentally), once he has been acknowledged by God to be
the Son, was transported to the desert for 40 days, and put to the test
by Satan or some other demonic force. He did not succumb but emerged
ready to "go on mission." I get the sense that like Abraham, ordered to
sacrifice his own son and then stopped at the last second, Jesus was
learning what he was made of. The test was for himself, not to prove
anything to his "higher power."
Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ"--with its grotesque
displays during Jesus' 40 days--remains my favorite in an otherwise
insufferable subgenre precisely because it deals with the idea of trial
and interior torment. This is the Jesus who would rather someone else
had the job. It is un-Orthodox book and film, and wholly moving.
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
"You have to be a speedy reader, cause there's
so, so much to read!" - Dr. Sousé
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