Most people I meet in Africa can speak a minimum of three languages: usually their tribal language, the trade language, and English. They ask me how many I can speak, and I (shamefully) admit, "One." I then joke that if you speak three languages, you are tri-lingual; if you speak two languages, you are bi-lingual; and if you speak one language, you are American. What a luxury to travel around the world and, more often than not, find someone who can speak English. Even if English is not the official language in airports worldwide, the signs are in English. For most people in the world, that is a luxury they do not experience.
Thankfully, we don't need to learn another language to communicate with God. St. John of the Cross says, "Silence is God's first language." And we can all speak silence.
Or can we?
If you know other languages, your first language comes naturally, almost without thinking. It is comfortable and familiar. You often think in that language. You hardly struggle over words in that language. You usually don't even know that language's formal "rules" because you learned it as a child, simply by listening.
Yet too often, even in prayer, which is supposed to be a conversation or a dialogue, we fill up the space with words. When there is a pause or a silence in a group prayer, we often feel uncomfortable and seek to fill the gap.
How difficult it is to be silent! How often does God wish we would be quiet so that He could get a word edgewise?
The Quaker spiritual writer Richard Foster said that the tools of the devil are muchness, manyness, noise, crowds, and hurry. This is too true.
We live in a world of constant notifications that prevent us from being silent. There are many demands, which are difficult to tune out, even if our phones are off.
Some of us live in the past, others in the future, and not many in the present.
We "know" it in our heads, but we don't "know" it (i.e., do it) daily.
Father Thomas Keating talks about three levels of awareness, captured in this picture. We spend 95% of our time in "ordinary awareness" as we think and plan. But we have opportunities to spend time in "spiritual awareness," where we become aware of something bigger than ourselves, something that moves us, like a birth, a sunset, a rainbow, and participating in church communion. But we can go even further into a "divine awareness," where we become aware that God dwells within us, and we can have an intimate relationship with Him. We must "turn off" our ordinary awareness to reach spiritual or divine awareness. And that takes effort and practice.
During my recent silent retreat, I spent time with Ephesians 3:16-19, which says, "I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (emphasis added).
May God help us have the courage to turn off ordinary awareness and tap into our spiritual and divine awareness, a fantastic gift from the Father to His children!
