Redeeming Time
The Treasure of the Silent Land
I am 55 years-old, chronologically speaking. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how old my soul is. I’ve always felt older than my age. For a time, I thought that was a consequence of life circumstances forcing me to grow-up faster than the calendar would allow. Now, I’m not so sure. I suspect I was born this way.
I wonder, too, if being an introvert has something to do with my experience of the discrepancy between Chronos and Psyche. Time is experienced differently in the inner world and that is where I am most at home. I’m comfortable with the conversation that is always going on there, but which I only overhear in moments of solitude.
Some seem to find this interior conversation frightening; or, perhaps, simply boring. I don’t know, as I can’t overhear their internal dialogue. What I do know is that when I allow myself to listen in on it, after a while my attention slips below the conversation to a deeper level of listening to the prayer that God is always praying in me. Resting in that prayer, I experience a deeply restorative rest and a profound sense of belonging. This is the timeless, silent land.
As I get older, I find myself less patient with the felt discrepancy between time and the timeless. I find myself living more and more on the border between them, and the heart can remain divided only so long. So much of our lives diverts us from the silent land. We are pulled into other people’s conversations and projects. We feel the burden of responsibility that time places on us. These responsibilities are considerable and often necessary. But unless we are very careful and intentional, we lose touch with the prayer that God is always praying within us. Our responsibilities can become barriers that separate us from our true identity and purpose.
Octavio Paz expresses this with great poignancy in a poem from his collection, Eagle or Sun?:
With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters each year, I carve a road out of the rock. For millennia my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and the open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work: I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors, removing the obstacles I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.
The problem is that we don’t have time for the timeless! At least, we think we do not. It has taken me many years and repeated mistakes to recognize that time spent in the silent land is never wasted. Grounded in the prayer God is whispering, I am able to express so much more than I know, love so much more than I feel. There are deeper currents running through us of which our rational ego is simply the surface. Too often, I have blocked those currents in the sediment of busyness and distraction.
Then, the dam breaks and – ah! – the waters carry me back home, to the silent land. I am restored to myself. My responsibilities remain, but they appear lighter, suffused with potential and purpose. The truth is, we have all the time we need.
I used to have to fight my way into the silent land. Now, I slip back and forth across the border with greater ease and fluency. There will come a day when the balance will tip, and my soul will no longer feel so estranged from time. Time and timelessness will befriend one another.
One of the great gifts of aging is the freedom to mine the riches of the timeless, silent land and to contribute wisdom’s treasure to the incessant conversation in the world of time. This treasure can only be found in the silent land, the imaginal realm:
The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken the imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it. But so often, we allow the image that other people have of us to stop us from entering our lives and we become literally what they want. I think in old age you are beyond that! You have wild permission! Old people could become very subversive and very fascinating if they actually claimed the possibilities that they had and if they talked out a bit more, said what they feel and didn’t stand back and let the so-called young people, the yuppies and the entrepreneurs, run the whole show. Old people have far more fascinating things to say than an awful lot of what passes for wisdom in contemporary culture. It would be lovely to hear them speak.1
Of course, chronological age doesn’t make us wise. Only immersion in the silent land can liberate us from our bondage to cant and initiate us into wisdom. But if we are willing to go there, chronological age can bring a certain freedom for the soul to speak its truth. The question today is: Is anyone listening?
In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter. The value of the silent land is intrinsic, not transactional. There is something inherently transfiguring about its inhabitants. Those who journey there cannot remain the same, and neither can the world to which they return. Immersion in the silent land changes the conversation. When we realize this, immersion there no longer seems like such a waste of time. It is the timeless that redeems time.
John O’Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom For A Modern World (New York, Convergent Books, 2015), p. 161.