What Kind of Spirit is in Your Heart?

What Kind of Spirit is In Your Heart

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.

On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, ‘No; he is to be called John.’ They said to her, ‘None of your relatives has this name.’ Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’ And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. All who heard them pondered them and said, ‘What then will this child become?’ For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.

            I drove from Northern New York to Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh to the middle of Kentucky.  My plan was to stay for four days at the Abbe Gethsemane.  I say plan because I didn't know how I would do with the silence. Gethsemane is a Benedictine monastery where they practice silence.  Friends were making wagers as to how I long I would last.  "They will kick you out before a day is done," said a dear friend.  "There is no way you are going to keep your mouth shut," said another.  Great friends.

            I was nervous.  I love solitude, enjoy living inside my head, but pastoral ministry involves a lot of talking. It was odd considering what not talking would feel like.  It didn't take long to get an answer. Silence was like swimming late at night in the summer when water feels like silk.  I loved it.

            The Benedictines do talk.  But when they do, for the most part, its chanting the psalms.  That was an amazing part of being in the monastery.  To imagine what would happen to you, who you would be, if the only time you spoke was to sing ancient Hebrew poetry.  It's easy to reject such an image. Only chanting the psalms five times a day might make you a bit kooky in the head.  But I don't think so.  The sense I got was the opposite. It empties you of all the kooky thoughts in your head.

            Spending my day in silence, not speaking, offered a surprising gift.  I could hear my heart; I could follow my thoughts very slowly; I could sense the choices I was making.  And the food was tastier.  Eating in silence, I paid attention to the food I was eating.  Silence really was golden.

            Quakers have a similar confidence in silence.  Most Quaker worship doesn't have a proscribed sermon or a text.  People in worship wait in silence for the spirit to move them.  Yet, where I encountered Quaker silence was in a practice called a clearness committee.

            Kathy and I spent a week in New Mexico at Ghost Ranch and when I wasn't staring at the land scape of Georgia O’Keeffe, we were being trained in the tradition of clearness.  Clearness is when you sit down with two or three people and for an hour, you alone talk.  No one interrupts you; no one adds to what you are saying, no one speaks at all.  You talk for an hour without stopping. 

            After this time is up, you are asked clarifying questions for 30 minutes.  The people who listened to you cannot offer advice or make recommendations or offer a word of consolation or support.  They can't criticize you or argue with you.  The practice, discipline really, is that you only ask questions to listen more to the person who spoke.  So, you don't say, "wow, I had the same thing happen to me when I lost my father."  But you can say, "when you spoke of the loss of your father you seemed angry.  Is that what you were feeling?"

            After these thirty minutes, the person seeking clarity speaks for another 45 minutes.  What happens in that last 45 minutes is quite amazing.  First, let me say, I was deeply skeptical about an hour of talking non-stop, and then 45 more minutes.  We Presbyterians like to be clear, for sure, but clear and brief.  I asked Kathy what she thought of a sermon I gave a long time ago, before I learned the importance of brevity.  She said, I liked the first 17 minutes, but after that you were no longer presbyterian, so I stopped listening.  The first part was good though.

            I come by my skepticism with help.  At the end of more than two hours of listening, I was not skeptical.  I was amazed.  Each time I engaged in a clearness committee, it was shocking to see the clarity happen before your eyes.  People who had struggled with a wound or a loss or a question for years, even decades, would say things like, "there it is; that is what I could never name; that is what's happening to me."  Many people said, "now I know what to do."

            Like the monastery, what I came to see was how infrequent or how rare are the moments where people have enough silence or attention to listen to their heart.  You would think such silence, or such clarity would not be rare.  But if you look at your life and your day the chances are good you fill the silence, you don't dwell in it.  Chances are good, you only speak for less than 10 minutes at a go.  If you do speak more, you either worry you have said too much, or people stop listening to you.  I asked a therapist once how many hours she can listen in a day.  She said, about seven.  I asked her how many hours of therapy she offers in a day.  She said, eight.

            We just don't spend enough time, intentionally that is, listening to our heart.  This was clear to me in Spain when I was walking the Camino.  A could days of walking alone and it was clear to me how long it had been since I just listened to my own heart.  Spent time with memories buried deep and out of sight.  Walking from village to village in northern Spain I was actually walking through my heart, what Theresa of Avila calls the "interior castles."  It was amazing to recover lost treasures.

            The most important part of our lesson this morning, the birth of the Baptist, is not about the child, nor is it mentioned in the story.  The story is that Elizabeth wanted to name her child John, but this was not a family name and people questioned her choice.  To verify the choice the people ask her husband Zechariah, who says, yes, his name will be John.  What is missing is that Zechariah was silent for nine months; he was mute the entire time Elizabeth was pregnant. Remember the angel made him mute.

            This story tends to prompt the usual collection of jokes and jabs about people we wish were silent, or a spouse who needs to be more like Zechariah.  That is fine.  We could all heed the advice of Shakespeare, lend all your ear, but few your tongue.  But nine months of not speaking is no joking matter, nor is it listening technique.  Knowing what a community looks like who practices silence, I am dumbfounded by the idea of not speaking a word for nine months. 

            After a few days and with speaking breaks, the world looks different.  After a few days of walking in silence, I looked at myself differently.  Like the clearness committees there is power to gain with focused, intentional pondering, consideration. 

            When someone asks me why I write books, the first answer I give is the rationale of Nietzsche.  He said, I write books so I don't have to think about something anymore.  And this is true.  An idea that runs around my brain for years, finds a nice quiet place to sit after I finish a long study.  Yet, the other reason why writing a book is a lovely experience, is to watch the evolution of a thought or a belief or experience.  If you do it right, you end up in a surprising place with something you never could have imagined in the beginning.

            When you do find the time, make the time, find yourself with nothing but time to listen to your heart, you will encounter memories both good and bad, you will uncover desires and attachments, people both alive and dead.  Yet, if you are lucky what you will see are the spirits within you.

            We all have spirits.  We can have a patient spirit or an anxious spirit; we can have a loving spirit, or we can have a vengeful one.  If we conjure to mind the "fruits of the spirit" as listed by Paul, you get a sense of good spirits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, forbearance. And if we consider the deadly sins, what we see is a list of bad spirits to have: lust, vanity, envy, greed, wrath, gluttony, and my favorite, sloth.  Each of these spirits can be in you. 

            And I can guarantee you, if you walk the Camino for a week, or spend four nights in a monastery, or if you find yourself in New Mexico listening like a Quaker, you will see and hear these spirits; they will appear like a visitor, a presence.  They will come to the fore.  When they do it can be disturbing, but mostly its revealing. You can see your life; you can see and hear what is in your heart. 

            Once they do appear, again, if you are lucky, you can measure them.  All spirits are different and all the spirits in us have different degrees, different weights as it were.  They are not all the same size.  Sometimes this is good.  You want a spirit of joy that is deep and wide and full; and you want a spirit of vengeance that is quite small, quite manageable.  You don't want a lot of wrath in you.  If you are lucky, you can find their measure.

            Many years ago, our son Josh came to me with a request. He said, "can I have your scrap wood?"  I responded as all disappointing fathers do, "what for?"  He said, "I want to build a tree house" and then he added "in the green belt." Behind our home in Washington was a band of tall fir trees, think sixty, seventy feet tall.  Beautiful trees.  The sort that would inspire any young person to build a tree house. 

            You can't use my scrap wood for that, I said.

            Josh was the sort of child that heard the word no as an invitation to debate. He launched into a series of claims about his ability and my lack of trust and how little he gets but here was just this bunch of old wood, and he was gaining speed when I said, "alright.  Fine.  You can use the scrap wood, but before you do you need to measure the distance between the trees and then measure the length of the scrap wood."

            He ran to the drawer; grabbed a tape measure; ran to the trees.  Then he ran back into the house and out to the garage.  After a few minutes of silence he stomped back inside and put the tape measure back with bang and a crash. What he discovered, of course, was that the trees looked a lot closer together than they were; they grew about fifteen feet from each other; and the scrap wood in the garage did not exceed eight feet and was mostly only a few feet in length.  None of the wood would span the gap.

            When I consider the nine months of silence where Zechariah was unable to speak, I believe he came away with a profound measure of himself, of life, of his child, of God.  He would have found the spirits in him and measured them.  He would have discovered how much love and joy and peace was in his heart; he would have found what he had enough of and what was lacking.  The chances are good, he found parts of his heart that could build good things; and he found parts of his heart that were more along the lines of scrap wood.  Just a bit to help, but not enough to make a good life.

            What spirit is in you?  What do you have enough of and what are you in desperate need of?  Are there spirits in you that need to become less and less?  Take time, find time, make time to discover: what spirits are in your heart?  Amen.