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Friends United Meeting |
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October 2000
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Triviality
By Lance Wilcox
For most Quakers, silent worship is a time of calm, of spiritual refreshment. However, for not a few, it can also be a trial by fire, the fire being a poignant sense of humiliation. No less a blessing than the refreshment, such humiliation hardly feels like a blessing at the time.
George Fox used to tell his followers to rejoice when the Light accused and chastened them, bringing their sins before their eyes. The Light which accused them was the very Light of Christ given for their sanctification. Accusation and benediction were twin blessings, with no guarantee the combination would be pleasant. Although most Quakers have experienced this chastening, a more common revelation by the Light is less one's proclivity to evil than one's startling triviality.
The first minutes of a Quaker meeting, the time of "centering down," is often the most pleasant. In the stillness of the meeting, soothed by the familiar sights and sounds of the meeting room and surrounded by silent Friends, the mind unclenches its anxious grasp on its concerns, growing still and poised. You relax into the silence like an exhausted swimmer climbing onto a raft. The sense of release is exquisite.
But the mind, once quiet, rarely stays that way. After a short while, the mind finds a stray thread, picks it up, and starts playing with it. Like a small child, the mind starts talking to itself as it plays. If not silenced, its voice grows louder until it completely disrupts the calm you had achieved
It is then that, like a parent finally annoyed into attention, you turn to face whatever your mind has been so busily going on about. This is the moment of humiliation. Are you pondering the will of God? No. A terrible wrong you committed that you must set right? No. A redirection of your spiritual life? A shift in your pattern of charitable giving? Not exactly.
What you find is that you're trying to decide whether you need to wash your car or clean the gutters. You're trying to choose between two mutual funds for your IRA. You're contemplating the decline of baseball, the retro styling of the PT Cruiser, the direction of Mel Gibson's movie career.
You might wonder why, left to its own devices, your mind starts buzzing around these particular topics. But before you've phrased the question, the Light provides the answer: this is precisely what you've been busying your mind with all week. For six days and twenty-three hours, you've chosen to live in a world of TVs, IRAs, DHs, SUVs, PCs, CDs. Is it any wonder these are the toys the mind hauls out of its box to play with when you seek to reach The Silence?
A useful response to such nonsense is to try to slip out from under it and return to listening to the inner silence immediately. Sometimes, when not encouraged, the trivia fades away and leaves us alone. If some particular issue returns, regardless how small, perhaps we need to present it to God as an issue requiring His care; perhaps some focused, active prayer is in order. Once placed before God, perhaps we can free our minds of it and return to the silence, free of the voice of our "inner idiot." But sometimes the trivia continues to natter away like toddlers squabbling in the back seat and nothing can make it hush. It's embarrassing, humiliating, and, just possibly, of immense spiritual use. Humiliation may be what we need; the scalding by the Inner Light may show us the ladder upwards.
Augustine once defined sin as letting a lesser good interfere with a greater. The lesser goods are not to be rejected--a good is a good, and as such is grounded in the One Good Source--but to let lesser goods eclipse greater goods is sin. For every serious act of cruelty or dishonesty we may commit, we commit countless acts of "criminal triviality," of letting absurdly small goods subvert our attention from vastly greater ones.
Jesus knows this and takes pains to warn against it. He tells that dutiful, fussy, good woman, Martha, to put down her pots and pans and join Mary and Him in the living room. At first sight, Mary appears the irresponsible one, sitting around with Jesus while Martha slaves in the kitchen. But Jesus knows that Martha's well-meaning hospitality represents, in fact, a lesser good interfering with a greater: good manners interfering with communion with Christ.
In a similar vein, Jesus warns His followers against fretting over their long-term earthly welfare. We need not be so anxious to spin and harvest (or fund IRAs). God is with us as He is with the lilies and the birds. We risk securing our future at the expense of impoverishing it of meaning. Part of the value of simple living is that it allows one to deal effectively with small matters while granting them the smallest possible attention.
During the long middle passage of a Quaker meeting, the concerns of the week come back to haunt and in so doing fall under the critique of the Inner Light. We learn how cluttered and petty we have allowed our lives to become, how much debris we have thrown up between ourselves and the grander, freer life to which Christ calls us. Scalded under the realization of our lifeÕs freightage of the petty, we wonder (or should) what can we drop? What can we leave alone? And before next meeting, so we don't have to drag all this here with us again.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, we hear children talking and laughing and clumping down the stairs and through the door, and we realize that for the past few minutes we have been wholly and happily at rest in The Silence. Nor are we quite such fools as to believe this was entirely our doing. It was, we realize, a grace from Him who has spent forty minutes showing us how foolishly we have been living. George Fox would have us offer thanks for both favors: both the enveloping silence and the divine critique.
Copyright (c) 2000 Friends United Meeting
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