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Fear And Silence

2/6/2016

3 Comments

 
FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Don Troyer
​
     Outer fears we’re all familiar with. What with global warming, mass shootings, terrorism, nuclear threats, and entrenched tribal hatreds, we are so inundated by the ubiquity of bad news that the risk is that these fears become banal, so anesthetized by repetition so that we are all at risk of apathy or manipulation by the latest political voice.
     But what about inner Fear, the ever-present fear of Silence? We all carry this Mother of all fears, the Void, with its dread consort Father Death behind the curtain.
     There are two basic responses to this Fear. The apophatic via negativa of turning into it, sitting with its gaping emptiness, in the Cloud of Unknowing, alongside Merton, T.S. Eliot, the Buddhists, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Or the kataphatic way of responding with word and image-making. This way recognizes the ultimate value of our calling to make words, music and images to incarnate our experience. The Word becomes flesh and lives among us.
     While these are often seen as opposites they, I believe, are intimately related hidden partners. The pleroma and the animating symbol are a pair! Helen Luke, Thomas Merton and Carl Jung, each in their own distinctive ways repeatedly entered (or dropped into, or found themselves overtaken by) the Silence to listen and attend. Out of this emerged their writings, be it essays, journals, autobiography or The Red Book, and their generative relationships.
     Without the integrity of silence, words become noise. Pan intrudes. Without the issue of the word, silence can evade the human necessity of incarnation and can remain in suspended gestation.
     So Fear and Silence: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. They keep us listening to hear and dare to be The Word.                                                        1/10/2016  DT
3 Comments
marilyn ashbaugh
2/13/2016 10:54:13 am

"Without the integrity of silence, words become noise. Pan intrudes. Without the issue of the word, silence can evade the human necessity of incarnation and can remain in suspended gestation." Don Troyer. This quotation succinctly states the dance of inner life. Rich food for the journey, thank you Don.
Your writing on the Void reminds me of a teaching on the Heart Sutra, given by The Dalai Lama during one of his many visits to Bloomington, Indiana. He feared many Westerners could not participate in the spiritual practice of emptiness. Why? Because he felt our egos were too weak. We had no roots, no community, and therefore no sense of our identity. It was surprising to hear him say this. The paradox of needing a strong ego to surrender to emptiness. He did give the group a spiritual practice on emptiness. I did the practice and each time I was filled with, in my vernacular, grace. Such a relief, a joy really, to be empty. Empty yet full. As you say, they go together.

Reply
Nina Lanctot
2/21/2016 03:20:11 pm

Very helpful. Thanks, Don -- and Joan.

This was posted in the Wisdom School page today and also resonated deeply:

"What I want, my God, is that by a reversal of forces which you alone can bring about, my terror in the face of nameless changes destined to renew my being may be turned into an overflowing joy at being transformed into you." –Teilhard de Chardin, The Mass on the World

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Ellen Delgado link
7/7/2022 08:08:17 pm

Thank you for beinng you

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    ...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world  that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives.  -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

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