Rabbi Heschel emphasizes that the quest for significant being is the quest for meaningful being not merely “for theoretical knowledge about myself.” Silence gives us the space to listen to our lives deeply enough to become aware of meaningful existence. He states:
What I look for is not how to gain a firm hold on myself and on life, but primarily how to live a life that would serve and evoke an eternal Amen. It is not simply a search for certitude (though that is implied in it), but for personal relevance, for a degree of compatibility; not an anchor of being but a direction of being. (Heschel, Who Is Man?, 52-53)
Contemplative silence enables the seeker both to discover and accept a personal life trajectory as well as to realize that meaning is not something that exists “out there” but in fact is revealed within the particularity and preciousness of one’s lived being. This is why to evade the truth of one’s life, whether painful or promising, is to forfeit meaning. At the same time the silence reveals that the meaning is not my life. Instead it discloses that “the self is in need of a meaning which it cannot furnish itself.” (Ibid., 56) ♦
Source: Daniel J. Miller, Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy, © 2007, p. 501.
Reflection:
One of the reasons people avoid silence and stillness is because of the unconscious anxiety that if they are still long enough, if they are silent long enough to listen deeply to their own life, that they will be confronted with truths about themselves that they cannot bear to face. But without the silence that leads to healthy and holy self-reflection, meaning that cannot be furnished by the self eludes us. To quote the psychologist James Hollis, “when we live without meaning, we suffer the greatest illness of all.”
Sometimes it is the discomfort brought about by sitting still in the silence that is the necessary impetus for changing our lives so that we live into the fullness of our being that God intends for us and that evokes an “eternal Amen.”
Can you stay put in the silence long enough to hear the deep longing of your soul and to discover the resources to live your longing?