Silence - God's Language

“Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation”  Rumi

Though I can’t claim to know silence well, I do love what I’ve experienced in silence.  Still I had mixed feelings about going to Iona 'just to be in silence.'  So I was surprised to notice I felt a bit gypped when I discovered the retreat that was billed as a 9 day silent retreat would actually contain only 7 full days of silence.

I have a complicated relationship with words.  I love them.  I have some skill using them in speech and writing and I overuse them. Thereby robbing myself and others of soul nurturing silence

One reason I have come to love silence is because after a period of silence I am more likely to have the experience of ‘being spoken.’  While some of what my ego knows is useful, what my soul knows is essential.  This soul knowledge is more accessible during and after a period of intentional silence.  Words might come to me, maybe even through me, while writing, speaking or simply knowing.  What distinguishes them from my ordinary words is these words come to me without me ever having thought them.

Communion of Saints

Communion of Saints

The point at which one begins story is arbitrary, a bracket put around an experience to help understand and/or savor it.  I am choosing to begin this story by recollecting my dream in January 2009 featuring both Jesus and Sheela-na-gig.  I could have begun it with my son’s birth or with his death.  I could have begun it with an imaginary encounter with monks of the Ceile Day order whose footsteps I follow.

It is before 6 a.m. on April 27, 2014.  This day marks the 45^th anniversary of the birth of my first child, Arthur Donovan.  I stand on an ancient stone on the beach near the ferry dock on the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland awaiting the appearance of the sun so I might sing the words that have been sung here for centuries.  As the point of light appears on the horizon and begins to intensify, I start to chant and to bath myself in the first 9 rays of the sun.

The timing of my pilgrimage was dictated by the date of the silent retreat I am attending on this Isle so important in the spread of a unique form of Christianity in the Celtic lands.  Until a few weeks before my arrival I was unaware there was a Sheela-na-gig on the island.   It is on the exterior wall of the medieval nunnery ruins I walked through on my way to my hotel after disembarking from the ferry yesterday afternoon.  It was they who called me here, Jesus and Sheela-na-gig.  The dream foretold it, and set me on the path of inquiry that brought me here on this day.