[8/1995] Reflections on ‘engaged silence’ as a way to describe a ‘non-religious’ approach to spirituality and ethics:
Why ‘silence’? Because of the quietness and the limited energy true of wilderness existence (a metaphor that focuses on surviving, conserving, listening, observing, testing, . . .). Because sheer presence and action have a message. Because my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) had died.
Silence is inseparable from the ‘wilderness’/‘outer line’ life toward which the ‘religious’ sphere is hollow and has learned to avoid. The language eventually/gradually emerging out of the silence for me is radically different from my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language). The price would simply have been too great to learn to live with the emptiness within the ‘religious’ sphere. Silence now results whenever I am within the ‘religious’ sphere in that ‘non-religious’ language is not understood within the ‘religious’ sphere. Is there no audience for writing about this new language?
Why ‘engaged’? I had to go on living/choosing even as my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) was dying. What held were the ideas/language of integrity, gratitude, vulnerability. This tension – ‘engaged silence’ -- was compounded by my role (gradually developing 1979-87, rapidly developing 1987 forward) as an observer/speaker/interpreter within the medical education and practice spheres. As my first wife’s incapacity became total and her death neared, my range of social motion and life shrank to very little more than that one relationship. What if I had not been in so constant a position to state/test what I thought as my teaching position – i.e., graduate professor with seminars in the history of theology, spirituality classics, philosophy of religion, ethics, human suffering, . . . -- permitted?
Why ‘silence’? Because of the quietness and the limited energy true of wilderness existence (a metaphor that focuses on surviving, conserving, listening, observing, testing, . . .). Because sheer presence and action have a message. Because my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) had died.
Silence is inseparable from the ‘wilderness’/‘outer line’ life toward which the ‘religious’ sphere is hollow and has learned to avoid. The language eventually/gradually emerging out of the silence for me is radically different from my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language). The price would simply have been too great to learn to live with the emptiness within the ‘religious’ sphere. Silence now results whenever I am within the ‘religious’ sphere in that ‘non-religious’ language is not understood within the ‘religious’ sphere. Is there no audience for writing about this new language?
Why ‘engaged’? I had to go on living/choosing even as my inherited language (especially ‘religious’ language) was dying. What held were the ideas/language of integrity, gratitude, vulnerability. This tension – ‘engaged silence’ -- was compounded by my role (gradually developing 1979-87, rapidly developing 1987 forward) as an observer/speaker/interpreter within the medical education and practice spheres. As my first wife’s incapacity became total and her death neared, my range of social motion and life shrank to very little more than that one relationship. What if I had not been in so constant a position to state/test what I thought as my teaching position – i.e., graduate professor with seminars in the history of theology, spirituality classics, philosophy of religion, ethics, human suffering, . . . -- permitted?
