Dear Friends ~ Each spring the seeds stir and push up tender shoots through the warming soil; buds swell, lining the tree limbs like tiny jewels. All around there are signs that the Earth is renewing herself, that the Holy relationship of loving reciprocity endures. This is more than reassuring, because by now we must see that we are witnessing the unraveling of the sustaining systems of a myriad of worlds and realms. How shall we make sense of this? Old stories may help. When the Old Woman in the Cave returned to weaving the garment of the world after stirring the stew that sustained the seeds of spring, she found that her painstaking work had come apart and lay in a mess on the cave's floor. She sat within the womb of that holy cave and beheld the utterly tangled strands in deep Silence. For how long the story doesn't say. Only then, out of deep Silence and contemplation, did her hands begin to find the threads in the chaos to weave the unknown world to come. In these uneasy times, when all that we have known and love is fraying, we are invited into that cave and into that moment of Silence, that broad edge of hearts cracked open, that long in-breath. Indeed, as friends and practitioners of Silence, it may be precisely what we are given to do in this time. ~ Lindsay
At the heart of ministry is the Silence... Contemplating words or images or imaginings is at least one step removed from the direct experience of God. For as Alan Watts liked to say, "If you find a thousand names for God you will not have God, you will only have a list of names." To contemplate God rather than images about God one can only go humbly, empty of thought and self, into the presence of God -- into the Silence. It is out of the Silence that we love, act, speak if we do so with true spiritual integrity.