When I looked in on your words this morning I was greeted by something approaching Great Silence!
It was so like my experience
It was so like my experience
Sherry, you speak of therapeutic words. I have lived so far from the world of therapies and cures that I had not thought of it that way. You are right. The Conversation we have shared here has been therapeutic to me.
I have gone round and round trying to put into words my experience of the Innermost Life, and again and again you have all somehow understood me. You have often explained me to myself! In a hundred different ways you have said, "We love you and care about what happens in your life." Thank you for saying those simple words Sherry. Thank you all.
I have gone round and round trying to put into words my experience of the Innermost Life, and again and again you have all somehow understood me. You have often explained me to myself! In a hundred different ways you have said, "We love you and care about what happens in your life." Thank you for saying those simple words Sherry. Thank you all.
Still there is the silence. I have always found silence a companionable presence. I have many times rested on her breast. She has many times restored me. Silence at Innermost House echoes from the walls. It is in the bowl of tea we share, in the looks we exchange, in the common air we breathe. It is a shared silence.
It was a need of silence that first took us to Innermost House. We needed silence to feel the failure of our search for Place, and to search out its meaning. It is for that reason I suppose that when we first moved to the land we were looking for a cave. A cave would have been nothingbut silent emptiness.
Innermost House was in many ways a kind of cave. But out of that inner emptiness arose a question. And out of that question arose the Conversation that grew to fill out our empty space with food and drink and fire and books. Innermost House came to enclose, as some of you described it recently, the whole of a mystic life.
I passed a long while in silence after Innermost House. It was the silence that restored me. But it was your words that healed me. How generous you have been with your words.
I think of those days now as I look forward to the realization of your plans and dreams. I know how impossible it all is, and how necessary. The world, for such people as we are, is uninhabitable without our innermost place, whatever it is, wherever we may find it.
For some I think it may prove to be a wholly inward place, though of that I have little experience. For others it will be a room or a corner of a room, as it has been for us many times. For others still it will be a spare house, hardly furnished but for the things of prayer. Even in the littleness of my own life, there have been so many possibilities.
Some I think are born for silence. Others for words. I was born for the Conversation between the two. But here even our silences we must somehow communicate with words. We have only our words.
Let us meet next time and begin to make our way with words into experiencing life at Innermost House. It is autumn, the innering time. I have longed to prepare a simple meal again in that little black cast iron pot, set over coals in the hearth at Innermost House.
Let’s prepare a first Thanksgiving meal together. In my heart I am so grateful.