Alone or Lonely

 Last week, a friend sent me a link to an article about Rosalind Cartwright, one of the modern explorers of the psychology of dreaming and the link between REM sleep and dreams.  She may be best known for her testifying as an expert for the defense in a trial of someone who murdered his wife in what he claimed happened while he was in a dream state.  The article was engaging for a number of reasons but I was particularly taken with the details of the first sleep lab which Cartwright established.  She converted an existing room into a sleep lab making it completely sound proof and found that subjects who lived in an urban setting were unable to achieve REM sleep because of the lack of the ambient noise they were used to.  Cartwright addressed this by piping in street noise. 

This, I believe, points out the increasing level of background noise which is pervasive in our culture.  There is often noise or, if I am more generous, sound which fills our waking and at least part of our sleeping hours.  I remember when Lorna and I moved to the small town where we now reside and were shocked by the sound of silence – to borrow from Simon and Garfunkel – as we had previously lived in an urban setting close to railroad tracks and a fire station and a busy street.  We grew accustomed to the sound of silence fairly quickly and certainly enjoy the general quiet of our little town.

 If the surroundings we find ourselves in does not provide a comforting level of ambient noise, people will often fill that empty space with noise to fill the sound of silence which makes us uncomfortable.  We cover up the state of loneliness with background noise of the TV or music.  That way we will not have to acknowledge or even recognize that we are lonely.  Mother Mary Clare SLG, addressed this in her book, Encountering the Depths:

Never before in history has there been a time when people have found it so difficult to be alone and so easy to be lonely.  Yet being alone does not constitute being lonely.  To be lonely is to be deprived of a sense of belonging and of being wanted…When people are lonely, they often try to drown their fear and sense of separation by making or listening to a lot of noise.

Joan Chittister in her book, The Rule of Benedict, also notes the need for people to fill the silence in our lives:

We live with noise pollution now and find silence a great burden, a frightening possibility.  Muzak fills our elevators and earbuds wire us to MP3 files and TV blare from every room in the house morning till night…Yet until we are able to have a least a little silence every day, both outside and in, both inside and out, we have no hope of coming to know either God or ourselves very well.

 

Chittister tells us that silence has an important place in our lives:

Silence has two functions.  The first effect of extreme silence is to develop a sense of interior peace.  The second value of silence is that it provides the stillness that enables the ear of the heart to hear the God who is, “not in the whirlwind.” 

I noted last week that Centering Prayer is a way which allows room for God’s presence to come to the fore.  However, it is a challenge to empty our minds and make room for the awareness of God’s presence in our lives.  In one way it is the simplest way of praying – just empty your mind of everything.  But in another it is the most difficult as the “monkey brain” want desperately to fill that challenging emptiness with unsought thoughts.   However, it is one way in which we can enable the ear of the heart to hear God. 

I will close with another statement from Mother Mary Clare which, I believe sums up why Christians and all people should have intentional silence in their lives:

Christians are people engaged on a search, not only a search for God, thought it is always that, but a quest which brings us to a place where we are exposed to a deep heart-searching, a listening awareness of the needs of the people around us.  In aloneness we learn to share in the emptiness and lostness of modern society.

 May you be blessed with aloneness on your journey.