All of us have times when self-castigating thoughts seem to hold sway in our lives. Perhaps we've said or done something of which we are not proud, or maybe our career plans are not working out the way we'd expected, and we are tempted to blame ourselves. During such times, I believe the thing to do is not simply to replace the "I'm bad" storyline with one that says "No, I'm good." Rather, this is the time to drop into SILENCE. We might say, in fact, that a perception of our basic goodness is rooted in the deep and loving silence out of which the goodness of ALL things is constantly emerging. In other words, our basic goodness, we could say, is simply a property of a DEEPER reality - that of the sacred Silence! It is only when we dissolve into the Ground of Being that we somehow - miraculously - reappear, washed and clean in our true and perfect identity. There is no way to explain how or why all things - including ourselves and our truest identity - appear out of this emptiness. In fact, that is actually the great mystery of life. It is like hiking into a canyon and hearing echoes begin to emerge out of nowhere, or watching the sun emerge from the mist!
Thomas Merton speaks of the value of this silence and of this emptiness in the following words:
"There must be a time of day when the person who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. There must be a time of day when the person who has to speak falls very silent. And her mind forms no more propositions, and she asks herself: 'Did they have a meaning?' There must be a time when . . . the person of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom . . . The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. But the silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone
. . . Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion . . . We live, then, as a seed planted in the ground. As Christ said, the seed in the ground must die. To be as a seed in the ground of one's very life is to dissolve in that ground in order to become fruitful. But this fruitfulness is beyond any planning and any understanding of man. To be 'fruitful' in this sense, one must forget every idea of fruitfulness or productivity, and merely BE . . . [Here one has] a faith in what one cannot possibly imagine for oneself . . . One has profound hope in the incomprehensible fruitfulness that emerges from this dissolution of our ego in the ground of our being . . . We accept our emptying because we realize that our very emptiness IS fulfillment and plenitude. In our emptiness the One Word is clearly spoken . . . It is peace in our own unfruitfulness which God Himself makes immensely fruitful without our being able to understand how it is done!"
This day, may each of us enter this silence, this emptiness, this inner ground of our being, this vast and loving sky, and then watch in amazement to see the fruit of basic goodness that magically and mysteriously emerges!
Photos: (Left) Sunrise Lodge in last light, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA; July 25, 2014; (Top Right) Sunset over the Pacific, Patrick's Point State Park, CA; July 31, 2014; (Bottom Right) Sunlight shining through the clouds on the Blackfeet Reservation, near Browning MT; July 19, 2014
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