Be Quiet, Like the Tree
A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
“Silence is the language of the age to come.”
– St. Isaac the Syrian
Here’s something I have to confess: I am all out of words. As I write, my husband is imminently dying, and I have been sitting a long vigil of confused and motionless hours.
The only way I have to explain how this feels for me, and the possible way out of it, is by analogy. When I was in my twenties, I worked for a period with a somewhat eccentric theology professor named Vincent Rossi. As is characteristic of many of us in the Vita Poetica community, he had spent decades weighing the diversities of spiritual experience. In his lifetime (he was the age then that I am now), he had gone from a pre-Conciliar Italian Catholic childhood in Iron Mountain, Michigan; to the San Francisco counterculture; to be the leader of a new religious movement in the Seventies; and to become a metaphysically minded and rather conservative Eastern Orthodox Christian.
One time when I was particularly distraught about something (romance/anxiety/grief?), he shushed me rather ungraciously and insisted that, instead, I contemplate the tree we were standing next to. I must contemplate its roots, the way that its branches reached out to the sun, the solidity of its standing. “Be quiet, and be like the tree,” he said.
Well, in this spring season, it is not just the tree that can speak its sermon to us. All of nature, in fact, seems to proclaim the panentheistic reality of the divine. And it seems to do that without words – or rather, words seem a secondary blossoming of the root message. And it was “Papa Rossi” who also shared with me the saying of St. Isaac the Syrian, “Silence is the language of the age to come.”
In silence we stand ready, waiting to receive. And it is we who then find languages that can express these transcendent realities to those standing in this anteroom of that other world – and thus drawing them also into silence.
That’s an attitude reflected in a number of works in this issue of Vita Poetica Journal – and especially starkly in Christine Hiester’s reflection on her “Found Poetry as Spiritual Practice” workshops:
Keep the words that make you feel something . . . Move them around and let them interact with one another. If you’re quiet enough, you might even notice them whispering, conversing with the Spirit to reveal what your heart most needs to hear.
As well as how that silent, waiting expectation can reveal realities that are entirely unexpected:“The hour or two we spend sifting through words is a holy practice, one that allows the Spirit to speak in and to the deepest parts of us.”
That attitude of silent expectation stretches across our rich selection of poetry, as well, refracted in different ways. Take this reflection from the protagonist in “Moving Day” by Brian G. Phipps: after departing her house, she is able to receive it in its totality:
And her mind at the midpoint empties all its rooms.
Squares of sunlight occupy the stairs.
The light of evening (maybe morning) finds
the picture window. Swells, dwells, comes to pass.
Comprehends the glass.
We’re especially pleased to mark National Poetry Month with three reviews of outstanding new poetry collections. We also want to welcome Pico Iyer to Vita Poetica. Pico is one of our most accomplished writers, with a deservedly international reputation, and we are delighted to receive this writing meditation from him. “For me the beauty of my writing meditation,” he says, “is that it allows me every morning to stroll into an invisible cabin in the woods and just sit still.”
And the silent things even talk, when we allow ourselves to listen. Consider the messages spoken by nature in Joshua Cohen’s “The Spatter of Waterfalls.” Or in Andreas Fleps’ “The Temple,” in which the boundaries between the Christ’s Divinity, the anthropomorphized Temple of Jerusalem, and the sinews and boundaries of humanity and divinity are multivalent, and porous.
All of it only requires us to hush. And watch with contemplation.
