I found this informal survey being reported and the result seemed to me to be something really significant. Something that those of us interested in the future of Christian faith probably need to pay attention to.
We recently asked our Upworthy audience on Facebook, "What's something that you really enjoy that other people can't seem to understand?" and over 1,700 people weighed in. ... one answer dominated the list of responses. It came in various wordings, but by far the most common answer to the question was "silent solitude." Here are a few examples:
"Feeling perfectly content, when I’m all alone."
"Being home. Alone. In silence."
"That I enjoy being alone and my soul is at peace in the silence. I don't need to be around others to feel content, and it takes me days to recharge from being overstimulated after having an eventful day surrounded by others."
"Enjoying your own company. Being alone isn’t isolating oneself. It’s intentional peace and healthy… especially for deep feelers/thinkers."
I think this is significant because it sounds like it ought to be something that religious groups and organisations can offer, encourage and nurture. Yet I suspect that this is not how it's perceived. I suspect that Christians and our churches are perceived as rather talkative, noisy and not having much to offer the more contemplative or any real understanding of silence.
This despite a history replete with silent, hermit-inclined figures and much teaching about the use of silence and the ways of meditation and self-understanding. What we appear to have managed to project to the wider world is rather more 'busy' and social.
And it is fine to have that, but I can't help feeling that we could do with expressions of church that lead with the contemplative offer and give support to the intentionally solitary or the solitude and quietness that many people clearly crave.
There's a pitfall to this in terms of strategy. Of necessity a huge amount of what this would look like would not make it to the spreadsheets of church statisticians. It probably wouldn't show up directly in church attendance figures or similar measures of 'engagement' in church life. These might well be people, in the main, who would find many of the main services offered by churches to be too distracting and fast-paced, and find the sermons insufficiently reflective or supportive of meditative spirituality. They may well find the over-certain, and over-defined talkative kataphatic style of worship too hard to bear.
Maybe I'm projecting. But if I am, it's from a background of loving that noisy and social Christianity and now finding it doesn't nourish the deepest parts of my soul. I now find relative quiet and dwelling in the slow reflective sort of spiritual practice to be important. I suspect that this informal survey opens a window onto what we should be sharing from the churches in addition to the other offer.
I'd always felt some pull towards the more contemplative, even in my noisier days. And I do still find I can worship among the noisier and more content-driven. However, it seems like the balance has shifted. I do think we need both celebratory and quiet dimensions to our spiritual practice and we each need to find our own balance and be prepared for that balance to shift and its contents to change over time. There's a definite change in the relation to words in worship and reflection. At one point for me the language was important, it pointed me and helped me to home in on God (at least at its best). Now less so, and I'm more aware of how inadequate the words are; that they cannot contain God or the experience of God and God's world. Again, it's a shift of balance not a total dichotomy.
The other thing in that survey that I find interesting is the appearance of ordinary things (and the assumption that others will not understand the attraction). This is another element of contemplative spirituality:paying attention to 'little' and 'ordinary' things, discovering the joy or at least contentment in the mundane and appreciating it. Again, it's not unknown to Christian traditions, just not presented so much or signposted or even valued, it seems. But if we could simply help it to be known that there are Christ-following ways to integrate these appreciations of the ordinary into spiritual practice and awareness, we'd be a lot more use, I suspect.
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