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The Beauty of Contemplation by Debra Classen
At the end of last summer our youngest child packed up and left for a nearby college...I watched her depart with all the mixed emotions of a mother. Without the pressing daily demands of life that I had kept pace to for decades, I seemed to lose my stride. I felt adrift...and unsure.
During the days, with my husband at work, the house was so quiet I could hear the cat padding across the wooden floors. I would sit at my art table with paint brushes and paint, and stare out the window doing nothing. The silence was startling. At night I would sleep fitfully, waking to unsettling dreams that I couldn't seem to remember. I would lay in the dark, listening to my husband's snoring, unable to return to sleep. Tired, but awake, I would go into my daughter's room with a book, but it was a book I did not read. For several weeks this uneasy pattern developed and I began to fear that I was becoming paralyzed, unable to move in any direction.
One night as I moved into my daughter's room, carrying my book into the dark, I opened the the curtains and lay down on her bed. The wind was blowing in the darkness and the branches outside the window were moving against the backdrop of street lights. A tiny sliver of moonlight illuminated a wide "U" in an expanse of blue-black velvet sky. Opposite the bed were white closet doors and etched along the doors I saw the stark outline of branches in graphite tones. In the dim night light the lines swayed and danced. I watched this dancing pattern and I began to cry. By early morning the light erased the patterns on the doors and I had finally fallen asleep...
Old fears and new ones; not getting a job, not being needed, getting old, the time with just my husband and myself, letting go, had all welled up in a wave of anxiety that had drowned my ability to be present to God's gift. I had wanted to immediately fill this silent space with busyness, importance, being needed. I wanted to fill the silence with noise.
Becoming attentive to God's presence in the midst of our fears is putting down the struggle to escape. When we are present to, pay attention to God, He transforms that moment into something of astounding beauty. Our blindness is healed and we see God's loving presence before us, even though He has never left us.
I began to listen carefully to hear God's whisperings in this silence. Now the silence echoed in my home. With a clarity I had not yet known, even within the silence of a monastic retreat, I made friends with this presence. Seeing this beauty, hearing its silence was an unexpected gift. I no longer needed to drive to a monastery to make friends with silence and solitude. This friend now abided in my home. I had treated silence as an unwelcome stranger, but that evening had opened me to her embrace. May you hear the intimate whisperings of God within your life.
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