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Prayers from nature week one:  God’s silent speech

Then the Lord said: Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will pass by.  There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing the rocks before the Lord – but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake – but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire – but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire, a sound of sheer silence. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.  A voice said to him, “Why are you here Elijah?” 
 1 Kings 11-19

     We are camping in Sayward along side White River.  I am standing in this beautiful shallow, wide, slow moving river throwing rocks for my dog to chase.  Amish loves to run through the water chasing not the rocks themselves but the splashes they make.  My part of the game is to pick up rocks and throw them as far as I can. Normally rocks are rocks, but here grounded smooth over the centuries from tumbling down the high mountains behind to the sea below, every rock has a story to tell;  each one reflecting the history of creation, from time before time; each molded and melted into crystals of granite, quartz, marble, jade, iron.  Alive with colour – greens, ochres, whites, blues, pinks, golds.  Each rock I hold in my hand is a painting, a poem, a prayer. 


Swirling galaxies, milky way
Ice and frozen butterfly wings,
Green dragons breathing green flames 
Ghost images in the ice
Dark seal stealing a fish 
Jelly fish long tentacles anchored around its stone

Sparking pink and blues, abstract art
parcels wrapped in ribbons
I marvel at the gift of the rocks, the river, the day - 
a prayer of gratitude fills my soul….


Then a poem by Mary Oliver comes to me:

Praying

It doesn’t have to be 
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.


A doorway.  Here in the gentle flow of the river, in the tiny silence of the rocks, I encounter a silence of the soul, a space for prayer, for gratitude.  When we listen—not with our ears but with our whole being— we give space for the voice of God. It is just as real as the sound of howling wind or the clap of thunder during a storm or the music of a river washing over rocks.

There is a certain kind of intimacy that is only possible in silence. What is incredible, then, in the scripture reading above, is not the natural phenomena that rocked that mountain Elijah stood upon (or the river I stood in) but that the Creator of those phenomena—no, more than this, the Creator of that very mountain Horeb, its foundations, the atoms and forces that bound them together into a monster of rock, the earth that was its foundation and the sky that stretched beyond, the river that ran past my legs—would step out behind/through the curtain of nature, so to speak, to be present to Elijah, to me, in the intimacy of a great silence. The silence was God speaking.

Silence is a sort of language all its own. It is something rather than a nothing.  This was the insight of writer Max Picard: “Silence contains everything within itself.  It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.” [The World of Silence] He goes on to say silence is essential to any normal, healthy conversation: When two people are conversing with one another, however, a third is always present: Silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening.
So it is, in a way, with God.  He does, after all, actually converse with Elijah.  In that moment in the river, I hear a similar question in the silence – why are you here?

The place for us to begin seems to be prayer.  Most obviously, it seems that an essential fertile soil for prayer is silence. Silence not only teaches us to be better listeners; it also makes us better speakers. As Picard wisely notes, words that are spoken out of the silence of the heart are more meaningful, rather than words that come from the “noise of other words.” Cultivating an interior silence thus seems to be an essential preparation for prayer.

Then there is the act of prayer itself. Sometimes we consider the silence that seeps into our prayers—as with our ordinary conversations—a deficiency of speech, a failure to find the right words, or, perhaps, a loss of stamina when it comes to completing a recited prayer. Perhaps instead we should welcome such moments. Rather than spaces in which the proverbial phone line to God has gone dead, they are precisely the opposite. The story of Elijah, and my experience in the river, teaches that it is in the silence that we enter the presence of God’s grace.

Where do you find the silence in the roar of life?  What is a doorway for you into gratitude, into prayer, into silence for another voice to speak?  Why are you here?