Encountering Silence

Stanford University professor Leah Weiss speaks about mindfulness in the workplace.

Author, retreat leader, and psychologist James Finley brings his experience as a student and spiritual directee of Thomas Merton to his work guiding others into the mysteries of Christ and of silence. He is the author of Merton's Palace of Nowhere, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God, and The Contemplative Heart. He has also created audio learning series, including Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere and Meister Eckhart's Living Wisdom.

"When we get involved in spirituality, we're drawn to it, we tend to have a lot of questions, and that's why we tend to read spiritual books or watch podcasts and well we should, and we should get spiritual guidance and so on. But then... we get a little deeper, here we realize that it's not so much that we're the ones asking the questions, but God's asking the questions, God's asking me a question... and I start to discover that not only do I not know the answer to God's question, I don't understand the question." — James Finley

Cassidy met Jim through the International Thomas Merton Society, and discovering that they are neighbors in California, they made arrangements last month to get together to record this conversation. As they explore silence together, Jim tells Cassidy stories from his six years living as a Trappist novice (don't miss the story of talking to Thomas Merton about the pigs!), and how his entry into the world of radical solitude and silence — under the guidance of one of the great spiritual writers of the past century — Finley learned to find his voice as a seeker of God, and eventually discovered his vocation even though it took him away from the cloister.

"We can't with integrity claim to be on a spiritual path and turn our back on the suffering of this world." — James Finley

He and Cassidy talk about the tragedy of how contemporary Christianity has abandoned its own mystical heritage, learning to discover the mystery of God beyond all "boxes" and definitions, the "infinity of the unexplainable," learning to love the world as part of the contemplative project, the importance of paradox and perplexity, how language ought to be "in the service of the unsayable," how the experience of trauma can impact our spiritual lives, and other topics along these lines.

“I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.” — Thomas Merton

Some of the resources and authors mentioned in this episode:

James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere

James Finley, The Contemplative Heart

James Finley, Christian Meditation

James Finley, Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere

James Finley, Meister Eckhart's Living Wisdom

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear

John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer

Carolyn Myss and James Finley, Transforming Trauma: Uncovering the Spiritual Dimension of Healing

Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny

Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works (Sermons)

Richard Rohr and James Finley, Intimacy: the Divine Ambush

Richard Rohr, James Finley, and Cynthia Bourgeault, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton

Visit Jim Finley's website at www.contemplativeway.org. His recommended reading list can be accessed here: "Reading List for Beginners"

“Lovers cannot force the oceanic oneness,

Cassidy Hall interviews author, retreat leader, and psychologist James Finley.

What happens when a friendly anthropologist conducts an ethnographic study of contemporary contemplative Christianity in America, looking at subjects both in monasteries and in secular life?

Paula Pryce does just this kind of work in her insightful book The Monk's Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity. Spending several years of research with teachers like Cynthia Bourgeault and Thomas Keating, along with monasteries like the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Massachusetts, Pryce offers a detailed exploration of how contemplative spirituality is making a profound transformation in our time. From previous days when such practice was almost exclusively found within cloistered walls, to the increasing (if still marginal) presence of contemplation  in churches, centering prayer groups, online forums, and educational offerings such as the Center for Action & Contemplation's Living School or Bourgeault's own Wisdom School, contemplative practice is a vibrant subculture within Christianity — and Pryce, to our knowledge, is the first ethnographer to write about contemplative Christianity in a scholarly, yet accessible, fashion.

I always meditated before I wrote... I go back in my mind, meditate, and then enter in through memory to those places where I was doing research, and that allowed me to give language to these non-verbal situations. — Paula Pryce

What emerges from her research is a recognition that contemplation (and, by implication, the practice of silence) invites the practitioner into a new way of knowing, that is marked by qualities such as embodiment, community, humility, and ritual.

I'm always after trying to understand the beauty of humankind. We have lots of messages about how awful we are! And we can't ignore that and I wouldn't want to. But I honestly think we need to embrace how wonderful humans are. — Paula Pryce

In this conversation, Paula joins the Encountering Silence team to explore not only her own relationship with silence, but also how her research deepened her knowledge of contemplation as a transformational practice. She movingly speaks of her Anglo-Indian father as her silence hero, and draw connections between his lifelong meditation practice and his commitment to social action. She reflects on the paradox of writing about silence (expressing a non-verbal phenomena through the verbal medium of language), and on how ethnography, as a discipline, can help us to understand silence better.

One can use anything as a contemplative practice. That's the main point of this book: people are trying to train themselves in everyday life as contemplatives, in every action and every way of being. — Paula Pryce

Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode:

Paula S. Pryce, The Monk's Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity

Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna

Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

The Beatles, Abbey Road

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy

Joseph Cassant, L'Attente Dans Le Silence

Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: Translation with Commentary

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Hadewijch, The Complete Works

Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems

Episode 27: Silence, Bodily Knowing, and Ritual: A Conversation with Paula Pryce

Hosted by: Kevin Johnson

With: Cassidy Hall, Carl McColman

Guest: Paula Pryce

Date Recorded: May 29,

Anthropologist Paula Pryce describes her ethnographic research into the Christian contemplative community.

How does silence impact spirituality at the level of interfaith or interreligious engagement? Our guest today, Kenneth Leong, wrote a seminal book on Christian-Buddhist interspirituality, and so we were eager to have him join the Encountering Silence conversation to reflect on how silence takes us to a place beyond the limitations or separations of doctrine, dogma, or religious culture.

Kenneth S. Leong is the author of The Zen Teachings of Jesus and a German-language book of Zen Stories, 100 Zen-Geschichten für das neue Jahrtausend: Anleitung zum Glücklichsein. After working over twenty years in finance, he pursued a Master's Degree in Teaching and devoted twelve years to teaching in a variety of education settings, primarily teaching mathematics but also finance, philosophy, and Zen.

Mr. Leong has been a speaker and lecturer on Buddhism and spirituality since the mid-1990s, having taught in Manhattan's Chinatown, the New York Open Center, and other continuing education and adult learning venues. He is active on social media, moderating or contributing to groups devoted to topics such as Buddhism, Alan Watts, and Zen Christians.

Silence, to me, means right concentration. — Kenneth S. Leong

Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode:

Kenneth S. Leong, The Zen Teachings of Jesus

Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

Red Pine (tr.), The Heart Sutra

Red Pine (tr.), The Diamond Sutra

Red Pine (tr.), The Platform Sutra: The Zen Teaching of Hui-neng

Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

The Desert Mothers and Fathers, Early Christian Wisdom Sayings

Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer

The Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here

Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

J. Krishnamurti, Think on These Things

Henri Nouwen, Peacework: Prayer, Resistance, Community

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon

Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way

Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

St. Francis of Assisi, In His Own Words: The Essential Writings

Episode 27: Encountering Silence in Christianity and Zen: A Conversation with Kenneth S. Leong

Hosted by: Carl McColman

With: Kevin Johnson, Cassidy Hall

Guest: Kenneth S. Leong

Date Recorded: May 25, 2018

Kenneth Leong, reflects on how silence takes us beyond the limitations of doctrine, dogma, or religious culture.

How does the encounter with silence usher us into mystery? And how is our relationship with silence shaped by, or challenged by, the challenges and dynamics of social difference and privilege? What is the relationship between contemplation and community, and how is community actually essential to authentic contemplation? How are tears, and moaning, and dancing, and lament, essential to contemplation — especially among those persons and communities who experience oppression?

“Silence has power, positively, it’s life-giving... and it also can be a hiding place for people of the dominant culture.” — Dr. Barbara A. Holmes

These are just a few of the questions we explore in today’s episode, a conversation with scholar and contemplative the Reverend Dr. Barbara A. Holmes. Dr. Holmes is the author of Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, and has emerged as a leading voice calling for affirming and celebrating contemplation as it emerges in the lives of all people, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or religious affiliation.

“The women in my family were the ones who really seeded contemplation into my very being. I watched them — I saw that mysticism didn’t have to be weird. It was very weird, but you could still make biscuits! You didn’t have to go berserk; you could do your normal life, be loving,  kind, help others, and still host these magical moments, wondrous moments, awe-inducing moments, and still do ordinary things like meet your kids at the stop on the school bus.” — Dr. Barbara A. Holmes

Her thoughtful and insightful reflection on silence and contemplation is grounded in her family of origin — coming from the Gullah people of the SC/GA low country — and her work which explores the intersection between spirituality, stillness, and social justice.

“Silence isn’t the word that I often use. Just simply because of the problem for people of color, and women, who have been silenced... I tend to use the language of stillness, of centering, and of embodied ineffability.” — Dr. Barbara A. Holmes

Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode:

Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable

Barbara A. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos

Barbara A. Holmes, Dreaming

Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Jane Elliott, A Collar in My Pocket: The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence

Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism

The Desert Mothers and Fathers, Early Christian Wisdom Sayings

Janet McKenzie, Holiness and the Feminine Spirit: The Art of Janet McKenzie

Matthew Fox, Creativity

Beyoncé, Dangerously in Love

Kendrick Lamar, Revolution Music

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme

Jimi Hendrix, The Best of Jimi Hendrix: Experience Hendrix

Taizé, Chants for Peace and Serenity

June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan

John Stewart Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

James A. Noel, “Being, Nothingness and the Signification of Silence in African-American Religious Consciousness” in Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World

Stacy M. Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society

Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective

Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics

Howard Thurman, Essential Writings

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement 

“The willingness to listen, on both sides, is the beginning of reconciliation.” — Dr. Barbara A. Holmes

Episode 26: Silence as Unspeakable Joy: A Conversation with Dr. Barbara A. Holmes

Hosted by: Cassidy Hall

With: Kevin Johnson,

A Conversation with Barbara A. Holmes, author of "Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church."

Hello friends!

Can you believe that the Encountering Silence Podcast released its first episode six months ago?!?

Yes — our "pilot episode" was released on December 6, 2017.

This week we're celebrating our six-month-anniversary with a brief conversation in which we reflect on some of the insights and surprises that the last six months have yielded for us.

Silence includes everyone, silence levels the ground and flattens our egos, to recall that we're all human and we all belong to one another. — Cassidy Hall

In the interest of full disclosure, let's say it right up front: this is our "pledge drive" episode. One of the things we've learned over the last few months is that we had seriously under-estimated how much time it takes to plan, record, edit, release, and promote a podcast.

We love doing this, and so we're not begrudging one second of our time. But since we are all self-employed, we also have to balance the joy we find in the podcast with the reality that we need to be earning a living.

Over a dozen listeners have made the commitment to support the podcast with a monthly pledge through Patreon. If you are one of those, please know how much we appreciate your support. Thank you!

If you haven't made a pledge, then we humbly but sincerely ask you to consider doing so now.  Even $1 a month makes a difference. Frankly, we would be more excited to have one hundred people pledge a dollar a month than to have one person pledge $100. Why? Because it shows us that people want to be part of the Encountering Silence Circle.

Please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/encounteringsilence

In this episode, we mention a wonderful book by Henri Nouwen called A Spirituality of Fundraising. We recommend it to anyone who is a fundraiser (or a donor!) as it beautifully expresses how giving money (and asking for support from current and future donors) can be an expression of community, of caring, and indeed of spirituality.

Episode 25: Six Months of Encountering Silence

Hosted by: Carl McColman

With: Cassidy Hall, Kevin Johnson

Date Recorded: May 21, 2018