The Fullness of Silence

 

As I continue to “practice resurrection” in these 50 days of Easter I am guided by Sister Joan Chittister’s book The Monastic Mind: 50 simple practices for a contemplative and fulfilling life. 

I am also discovering new significance for incarnation as most of the tenets affect the body, like breathing, like kneeling….like being in silence and all the bodily emotions that illicits.

My body and I have a love/hate relationship. Yet as I age and as I creek and stiffen, I am more aware of what I am able to do and grateful for renewed focus.

I find myself developing a new relationship with breathing, not just because of that blasted, blessed, CPAP machine but because of its singular calming contemplative value in silence.

Silence for me has become the fertilizer for growth. As Chittister notes: “concentration on the empty counterclaims of life - its fruitless promises - and contemplation of the Word will, together, bring us to the stilled fullness of our selves.”

Everything sacred, hopeful, loving and eternal was in the empty tomb.

The stilled fullness of myself feels at once realizable and unattainable until I easter this stillness. Until I realize that it is a fullness in emptiness, a paradox like dying to realize life, which underlies all resurrection. 

And so in the silence as I focus on the breaths, of filling and emptying, of inspiration and expiration, I pause in the thin space of everything.