A Reflection Written on the Eve of my Baptism (26 March 2005)
It's just after seven in the morning. No one else is awake here. I've a cup of tea and the sound of pounding rain outside to keep me company. I am very conscious right now of how alone we all are in the world.
In the midst of my cognitive dissonance the other day, I kept coming back to one phrase over and over in my wandering mind. That day, I named a post for it, but in my typical randomness did not explain it.
We live, each of us, in our own silent worlds.
To put it another way, nobody can get into your skull but you. The silence I mean is our interior silence.
Silence is necessary for contemplation, for the interior life. Silence and stillness evoke holiness. It's not that we can block out the noise of the world, or even that we don't need it or want it in our lives. Humans remain tribal animals. In one sense, we are at our best and most effective when we act in groups. And parties by ourselves are rarely very satisfying.
Sometimes we must dwell in ourselves, in our own silent world, just to keep our minds and our souls operating correctly. Serenity within (a nearly impossible goal, I find) promotes serenity in the world. Imagine a world where everyone could dwell in silence from time to time. Imagine a world where everyone took the time to quiet their seething brains and just... be for a while.
As the great sage Amenemope said more than 3000 years ago, "Fill yourself with silence; you will find life and your body shall flourish upon the earth." You will find life. Too often we think of life as movement. I am a human being, not a human is, after all. We live our lives like rushing waters seeking the sea.
Sometimes, we need to meander into an eddy.
It's a delicious irony to me that my sponsor for RCIA is named Eddie Carpenter. Work it out. That God, He's a tricky one.
In just over twelve hours I shall be baptised into a new community. There will be hundreds, perhaps a thousand, people there. Some are core members of the parish community; I know many of them already. Some are more distant members, the Catholics that only attend church at Easter and Christmas. Some aren't members at all; they're friends and relatives of those undergoing baptism or confirmation into the Church, or they're the curious or the hungry.
All of them are welcome. In twelve hours.
Between then and now, the world goes one. I've got to do some laundry, maybe vacuum. At 10:30 or so we're going to the church to practice and make sure everyone has their cues right.
There is another community here, of course. Friends are coming over in the evening to attend my baptism. Kevin flew in from California, God bless him. Janet's driving in. Brother Theo's coming (hopefully bringing my daughter Victoria with him). And Francine and her daughter Michaela will attend as well.
For those keeping track, that's a Christian, a Shaman, an Agnostic, a Pagan, a (Catholic) Christian, and a Jew.
They are, each of them, on their own road, their own interior road. In a sense, it's the same road. There is only one road, after all, but each traveller is veiled from the other by their own silence.
How can one describe the road? I've tried. You can't. The road that can be described is not the eternal road.
That God, He's a tricky one.
Like Pilate, we are each of us looking for Truth. God is veiled from us, but the veil, I think, is the one we put over our own eyes.
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