By Rev. Dr. Karen Petersen Finch

I am looking out at the pool in my residential community. Due to the coronavirus, what is normally a busy, noisy hub of commotion in summertime is now empty and inviting, with light rippling across the pale blue surface. Imagining silence as a “pool” in this positive way changes my perspective. I am normally afraid of silence: pure, vast, unrelenting silence like one “hears” in a film when a character is floating away in a space suit, disconnected, lost in space. Lost in silence. I fear silence as a brand of loneliness that is forced on me, like a lockdown with no foreseeable ending.

But the silence of prayer is not like the empty silence of space. I have a lot of control in prayer because it is a pool with varying depths. When I am in the shallow end of prayer, so to speak, I hear children playing outside; I hear the washing machine going; I hear rain against the window. These sounds keep me in the present moment where God is. They remind me how blessed I am to share my life with other people, to have order and cleanliness, to be safe. The shallow end of prayer is the semi-silence of gratitude.

Then there is the deep end of prayer. There is no shame in being afraid of it. Don’t our caregivers tell us that we need more skill before we can go to that end of the pool? It is hard to pray deeply. There is nothing superficial in that pool of silence to hold me up. I must stop thinking, stop fixing, stop trying. No thinking or fixing or trying? What will be left of me then? It will be my death. “I have sunk into the miry depths, where there is no footing; I have drifted into deep waters, where the flood engulfs me” (Ps 69:2).

When I was a child, on vacation with my parents, my father would wake me before dawn to join him in a “polar bear swim.” Wrapped in coats and carrying towels we would make our way to the edge of the lake, where the water was dark and foreboding, offering absolutely no concession to the human desire for warmth and comfort. We had to fight that desire and choose the sting of cold that forced all breath from our bodies. First the sting, then the numbness — and then, peace and camaraderie and wellbeing. How hard it was to get into that water, and then how hard to get out! 

This is my experience of the deep end of prayer. On the other side of fear, there is an amazing surprise: the deep end of prayer is not silent at all. I begin to hear a voice that I am always wishing to hear. It is the voice of the real me, the one who has died to herself and is hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3). Or perhaps it is the Holy Spirit. The voice is wise. It says, “You are not alone. You are clean. You are safe. There is nothing to fix. There is no need to try. You may float. You may splash around. You are loved.”

Someday, I will no longer be afraid of silence. For now, it is enough that God is willing to meet me in the shallow end or the deep end of my prayer life. Everything I could ever need is waiting for me in God. “He lifted me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay; He set my feet upon a rock, and made my footsteps firm” (Ps 40:2). 

Questions for Application

• Am I afraid of silence?  Why or why not?
• Can I remember a time when I truly stopped fixing, or trying, and experienced God in the deep end of prayer?  What steps or techniques helped me to let go in this way?
• What is “the real me,” and/or the Holy Spirit, wanting to say to me now?

Photo courtesy Megan Finch original artwork 

Suggested listening : Lead Kindly Light - arranged by Lex de Azevedo. Jeannine Goeckeritz, flute, Tamara Oswald, harp, and Daron Bradford, clarinet.  (Lead Kindly Light was written by St. John Henry Newman in 1833 as a poem entitled: The Pillar of The Cloud.) 

Rev. Dr. Karen Petersen Finch is an ecumenist in the Reformed tradition who specializes in dialogue with Roman Catholic theology. She is Associate Professor of Theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A., and Assistant Director of the George Whitworth Honors Program. She is also a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), and a Fellow of the Lonergan Institute at Boston College.  Inspired by Bernard Lonergan’s theological method, Karen creates local dialogues between Roman Catholic parishes and Presbyterian churches, then speaks and writes about the dialogues to spur development of new models for local ecumenism.  She is currently working on a book entitled "Local Christian Unity: A Primer for Neighborhood Dialogue," to be published in 2021. In 2018, Karen resided at The Lay Centre for a sabbatical period.