Greetings!
I usually greet the new year with some gusto-a strong sense of YES, a feeling of clarity about my commitments and what I want to create over the next 12 months. This year is different. I'm ensconced in some kind of fog, prone to silence, brooding over my country's brokenness, and unclear, really, about my task as a citizen and cultural creative.
In the past three days, I have encountered three examples of people who are my heroes being silenced. When I reached for a book by Anthony DeMello, SJ, who has taught me more than anyone I know about embodying and living my own spirituality, I found a little typed note in it from Cardinal Ratzinger (now known as Pope Benedict XVI) saying that DeMello's ideas were not sanctioned by the Church and ought not to be read at all.
Yesterday I finished a biography of Teilhard de Chardin, a brilliant paleontologist and mystic who was banished to China for years and forbidden to speak and write about his idea that all of creation is itself the very expression of the immanent Divine and is on an evolutionary trajectory toward cosmic consciousness and spiritual fulfillment. Just the sound of his name places me back in a pew in the Motherhouse chapel where I first got an inkling of my own participation in the divinization of matter. He awakened me to the greatest possibility of my life and yet none of his books were published until after his death, and then, not by the church that silenced him.
And today, in Sojourners magazine, I read of the sanctions against liberation theologian Jon Sobrino whose books the Vatican has branded as "erroneous or dangerous" because they promote Jesus as liberator of the oppressed and impoverished. The Vatican, understandably enough, has never been comfortable with class issues. Sobrino has seen his own heroes and colleagues martyred in the streets and churches of El Salvador, and yet he continues to do what he can, with the poor and for the poor.
I'm wondering how the rest of us, outside the confines and jurisdiction of the church, are being silenced, even unwittingly. I'm wondering if my own brooding silence is a response to the powerlessness, the rage, the dark and deep disappointment I feel every time I rub up against what's passing for news. That it even occurs to me seems like some grace, some dawning awakening that yes, it can happen even to me if I'm not on my guard, not diligent and dutiful about my creative potential. If I let this wave of discontent root in me, I will be silenced. But if I make something of it, respond to it in some creative fashion, I gain my power, my voice again.
Audre Lorde once wrote: We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. We fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live-and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which is also the source of our greatest strength.
These times are OUR times. Our visibility IS the source of our greatest strength. What we stand for, speak for, live for-this is the only legacy we will ever leave, the only thing, really, that gives our life meaning. To be silent now, to be invisible now, to cave in instead of calling out-that is to collude in this dark night, to turn our back to the veil that is waiting for us to lift it.
From every sacred text that was ever written in every tradition, we know that we are the light of the world, that with our thoughts and actions we create the world. Every story we tell, every poem we write, every song we sing, every picture we take can all be part of a grand and cohesive gesture to take back the light.
Forget about new years resolutions and getting thin and making more money. Just think about what you love, really love about being alive, about having a voice, having eyes and ears, and hands to touch what you love to touch-think about what lifts you up and makes you dance and causes tears of joy to roll down your cheeks, and commit yourself to that. Commit yourself to joy, and you will see that it brings you out, takes you to the doorstep of others, calls forth your words, your power, your wisdom. "The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation." And as Ramana Maharshi said, "Your own self-revelation is the greatest service you can render the world."
Or as my own hero Teilhard de Chardin put it:
"The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide-the day on which a first voice rang out crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth, "We are moving. We are going forward."
Go ahead, be a voice that awakens the drowsy slumberers. There's good news to announce.
And may your ride on this tremendous tide be full of joy and wild adventures in 2008.
Love, Jan
Click here to subscribe to Jan's Museletter
|
|
