Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity

One Leaf: An End of Year Blessing

(Below is a piece of mine which originally appeared on the enfleshed website. For more Moments for Common Nourishment from enfleshed, go here.)

Here we are, beloveds. We’re making it through the final month of 2020. The year of  chaos and discourse that left us wounded, grieving, lost, amiss. The year when time went too fast and too slow all at once. The year of deeper collective awakening to the injustices around and within us.  

But, we made it.  

We’re making it.  

Together.  

While on a walk around the park today, I stopped to pause and gaze at a leaf. One leaf. A singular friend hanging on, despite the arrival of winter, despite the pain  of 2020, despite it all. This leaf reminded me that mourning, grieving, and letting go is difficult for all of us—the trees, too. But this leaf also reminded me that sometimes our staying and our hanging on is an act of courage, an assertion in remaining, an allegiance to steadiness amid the turmoil.  

In 1967-68, an artist and nun named Corita Kent made a list of 10 rules for her art department. The list opened with “Rule 1: Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.” And by our very remaining, I wonder if that’s precisely what we’re doing. Our very staying to see 2020 through and withstand its tumultuous weather is an act of courageous trust.  

I celebrate your resilience.  

I bow to your persistence.  

I honor your strength.  

Wherever you are at the end of this year, maybe you need to stay, maybe you need to let go, but I urge you to carry forth the resilience you have proven. I ask that you remember the grief you have waded and the awakenings you have come to know.  

We are undoubtedly bound together by all that has transpired this year. Our connectedness has revealed itself in new and astonishing ways. I now know all the more deeply that my actions are bound up in our communal well-being. I now understand all the more clearly that your woundedness is carried in my tears, and mine in yours. 

And, this leaf. This singular commonality of holding on in the midst of letting go presents differently in each of us. But at the same time, it also binds us together in that place of hidden unity, mysterious rootedness, ineffable silence.  

We not only belong to each other, but in the deepest place, in the crux of the imago dei, we are each other.  

As we go into 2021,  

I carry you, I bow to you, I honor you.

Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, Heart, Intention, listening, social jusutice, solitude, Uncategorized

Things are Different: Grieve, Slow Down, Pay Attention, Stay Tender.

Things are Different: Grieve

Our lives will be forever changed. The grief and loss we now face will forever change us. They already have changed us. They will continue to change us. As long as I keep letting it in, grief is tenderizing me in ways my body had yet to feel. Loss is softening me to myself and others like never before. There is an opening, a deepening, a widening which can only take place in the searing furnace of grief, of loss, of uncertainty.

What would happen if I gave grief and loss more control amid a time of no control? What would happen if I let go to sink into the grief and anguish this moment beckons me to?

“In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us”
––Mary Oliver, Ocean in Red Bird

Here we are. 

Things are Different: Slow Down

Our slowing down depends on each other, and, the thing is, it always has. Nature cannot heal, you cannot heal, I cannot heal, until we slow down and begin to listen to ourselves and each other. This collective slow-down has really pointed me to the crux of the situation at hand: we belong to each other. My moral and ethical responsibility to my fellow human is about the collective us. My staying home is for me, for you, and for the collective body. And yet, my responsibility to me, to you, to us, was there all along. Sometimes slowing down is an uncovering. Sometimes slowing down is a return. Poet Wendell Berry captured the irony of this moment nicely in his 1980 poem titled Stay Home (an excerpt):

“I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.”

What would happen if I slowed down enough to embrace the stirrings within my own body. To feel my agonies and my longings. What would happen if I slowed down enough to remember my self-belonging, my belonging relationally, my belonging to the collective us?

Here we are. 

Things are Different: Pay Attention

Slowing down naturally leads me to paying more attention. My senses become more attuned, aware, and clear. And as I deepen my own connectivity to myself, it is inevitable that I touch an even deeper rootedness to all humans. “Attention,” Simone Weil writes, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity…. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

This collective slow-down tells us a lot about our systems — our countless systems which uphold injustices and oppression: the innumerable ways we are seeing the imbalance of Black deaths to COVID, the perpetual racism towards Chinese-Americans, the news segments of privileged white men with no symptoms and even tigers having easier access to testing than someone gasping for air, the continually dismissed clarity from the chronically ill and dissabled communities whose work has been speaking wisdom for time immemorial, the vulnerability of a number of groups including the homeless and incarcerated populations.

Am I paying attention?

It is safe to say that among other things, there is a “racial pandemic within the viral pandemic,” which is continuing to make the truth all the more clear, if I let it. If I am willing to pay attention. If I am willing to slow-down and heed the truth of innate belonging. A belonging which demands I see and yield to my connectivity to my fellow human––each and every one of of the collective body. “Sometimes,” writes Ibram X. Kendi in the Atlantic, “racial data tell us something we don’t know. Other times we need racial data to confirm something we already seem to know.”

In 1963 James Baldwin wrote, “I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the time burden is a reality and arrive where reality is. Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.”

What does paying attention look like in this time of slowing down? What would happen if I did not forget what this moment in time is doing to the collective us, to the whole body of humanity?

“Neighborliness,” writes Howard Thurman in 1949, “is nonspatial; it is qualitative.”

Things are Different: Stay Soft, Be Tender, Let Yourself Rest (and eat chocolate)

Last week I opened the notes on my phone and wrote to myself: “Suddenly you have all this time and you’re not doing a damn thing? Good, you’re doing this right.”

If I have only learned one thing so far in this time of sheltering in place and slowing down, it is this: Stay soft, be tender, and let yourself rest.

That is enough. You are enough. However you’re doing this, you’re doing it right. You’re doing a good job.

Things are different: Grieve. Slow down. Pay Attention. Stay Tender. Repeat. 

(Oh. And, don’t forget to eat a little chocolate. In a recent piece on tips to cope with acedia––“the feeling of being totally bored and totally restless,” author Kathleen Norris shared, “I provide myself with enough chocolate to keep going.” Amen.)

Here we are. Welcome to the collective slow-down. 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, death, Heart, Intention, listening, Writing

Be The Hope, Now

Islamophobia is not just a problem for Muslims, it is a problem for all of us.

It is not the “job” of the marginalized, persecuted, or attacked group to solve the problem. To ask the even more deeply grieving “what do you need,” or “what can I do,” puts even more agony upon them. This is my problem, this is our problem, this is not the problem of my Muslim brothers and sisters.

An injustice that happens outside one’s country and one’s space of worship does not diminish the injustice. Instead, it is an opportunity to say more, to do more, to decrease hate and eliminate discrimination. A blind eye does nothing. A turned cheek only hides from the truth of hatred embedded in one’s own life. Speaking up against one injustice is not speaking up against all injustices. When we see wrong, we must say so. When we see pain, we must be present. When we see wounds, we must learn how to move the wounded towards healing.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail (16 April 1963), he unequivocally points to the error of the “white moderate,” amid injustices writing,

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection… I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress… I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom… I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action… Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions…”

The timetable for another person’s freedom is always now.

The season for justice is always now.

There is no preparation needed for more love, more truth, more justice… It must be now lest we fail to see the humanity of our fellow human, the desperation of our beloved earth… There is no middle ground.

The only question is, “What is my ‘now’?” What is the urgency of this present moment that beckons me to speak, move, change, go, grow. It won’t be convenient, it won’t feel comfortable, it will make me tired and weary—but it is right. It is truth. It is love. It is justice. And it must be listened to.

There is no middle ground.

“If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” (MLK, Jr.)

 

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(St. John of the Cross)

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, Uncategorized

Loving to Love

Today I set out walking to walk. Visiting a new city fills me with childlike wonder and awe—each nook a new treasure to behold, every turn an adventure. I’m in Toronto, Canada just two days after a terrible tragedy that took the lives of ten fellow humans. And while wandering in the wet morning, the rain poured down like holy water attempting to wash away the pain so many are feeling. As my eyes looked up on Bloor street I couldn’t help but be captivated by a local bookstore begging for my attention, despite the 100s of books resting unread on my bookshelf at home.

Much like my routine at any bookstore, I navigate the poetry, hunt for the Thomas Merton books, and explore the sections where my friends’ books might be. This time, a particular Merton book caught my eye: Road to Joy: The Letters of Thomas Merton To New and Old friends. With just having had the pleasure of dinner with Merton’s friend Jim Forest, the night before, I promptly picked the book up and hunted for Jim’s name in the index. Instead — homosexuality pg. 344 — stuck out as if it was written in bold red among the black and white I was holding. Homosexuality, I thought, but Merton never really wrote about that. Though I’d heard my friend, Dr. Christopher Pramuk discuss this in the past, I wasn’t prepared for the violent language I was about to encounter. I took a deep breath while considering what I might read on the page the reference linked to and was sure enough not shocked but painfully disappointed with the words that corresponded. Words that continue to deeply wound and haunt LGBTQ+ Christians everywhere. Among these words in a note titled “Letter to an Unknown Friend”:

“…In other words, the pitch is this. Homosexuality is not a more “unforgivable” sin than any other than the rules are the same. You do the best you can, you honestly try to fight it, be sorry, try to avoid occasions, all the usual things… Maybe psychiatric help would be of use.”

Though reading nothing surprising, my body tensed up and shuddered with the deep despair I once felt about my own personhood because of such lies being told to me that there was something innately wrong with me, there was something “sinful.” To compare homosexuality with sin is not unlike telling me being a woman in sinful. It is of one’s personhood. One’s very being. In the bowels of that bookstore, I took a moment to thank God I no longer have this way of thinking and resolved to buy the book so no one else would read these wounding words that, to me, are incredibly theologically unsound.

In this city of great acceptance, I was flanked on either side by rainbow flags at every turn. Despite that, this small moment stirred up years in which I sat in self-hatred because I was told a part of my precise personhood was a sin. Looking back, I can still easily weep for my younger self and those who might still be thinking like this, speaking like this or receiving such hateful words. Knowing how deeply that struck felt like a bolt energy to share my truth, my love, my personhood with those that think theirs is somehow damaged.

LGBTQ+ friends, listen to me: There is nothing wrong with you.

Parents, there is nothing wrong with your LGBTQ+ child.

Church, there is nothing wrong with your LGBTQ+ parishioners.

The damage we do when we insinuate one’s loving personhood is sinful or faulty is nothing short of hateful, dismissive, and ignorant thinking.

Last month I had the honor of co-hosting Fr. Jim Martin (most recently, author of Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity) on the Encountering Silence podcast. The work he’s doing is undeniably opening the minds and doors for many, many people. The conversations he’s having and the work he’s doing is changing many lives for the better. I sincerely believe that when it comes to inequality, the elevation of a group must be done so that they can be seen. And it is not until this seeing becomes a part of our lives on a regular basis—for all of our differences in love—that we can come to a place of seeing our common humanity and embrace a vision of unity. Without this sight how is it possible for us to come together in a loving way?

“Peacemaking begins with seeing, seeing what is really going on around us, seeing ourselves in relation to the world we are part of… What we see and what we fail to see defines who we are and how we live our lives…” Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear

Of course, I don’t agree entirely with Fr. Jim Martin on a number of things. But that didn’t prevent us from having a loving conversation, it didn’t stop us from both discussing the LGBTQ+ community in a way that elevates its ability to be seen and loved. And, although conversion begins with conversation––conversation with the intention of conversion is a limited space to come from. In a Message to Poets essay Merton said, “We believe that our future will be made by love and hope, not by violence or calculation…a hope that rests on calculation has lost its innocence.” With this in mind, I speak to my fellow human in a way that is true to love itself for that is all I can do, that is all I can bring. And for my fellow LGBTQ+ friends who may not be able to have such conversations because of the pain it brings—I will continue to speak. I will continue to have these hard conversations that point to the destruction and violence this kind of language creates, the ways in which we’re limiting the spirit’s flow within people because we name their personhood as sinful instead of seeing the beauty, joy, and spirit’s flow within their lives.

There is a penalty in admiration when we only seek how it serves us. As much as I admire Thomas Merton and Fr. Jim Martin, I cannot agree with them on everything and certainly have never claimed to. Though people change and thoughts evolve in their own ways in accordance with their own personhood—who am I to say that a given stance is more evolved, lest for the these kinds of stances that directly point to lack of equal humanity, as the aforementioned rhetoric suggests. Merton’s untimely death (1968) will leave any of his current thought on this as a mystery. But, I must interject my own assumption based on the fact that most of Merton’s life was based upon love.

In 1966, Thomas Merton wrote young peace activist Jim Forest a letter that has since become referenced as the Letter to a Young Activist. In it, Merton addresses Jim’s frustrations with his work in the peace movement during the Vietnam war. Jim was working tirelessly at the Catholic Worker house after having left the Navy. He co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship in 1964, and served countless conscientious objectors during the Vietnam war era. Both Forest and Merton were doing unequivocally important work, despite just how different the work was. These words that he wrote to Jim wouldn’t have been written without Jim’s initial letter of frustration and agony. In fact, many of Jim’s letters allowed Merton’s own thoughts on things like war and pacifism to change, grow, expand, and evolve (see The Root of War is Fear).

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

It is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything. 

Everything.

Whether or not one chooses to see the LGBTQ+ community does not eliminate its existence. But it is not until we truly open our eyes to one another that we can begin to stop diminishing one’s personhood as sinful. And the LGBTQ+ community will go on loving. After all, it is the centerpiece to our personhood. It must become the centerpiece to everyone’s personhood. And it’s a beautiful centerpiece to sit at the table of. To have a conversation around. To create a personal relationship over.

It is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Everything.

I could have let these few words I read today ruin my day. I could have chalked them up to Thomas Merton not being admirable. I could have minimized his words as a sign of the times. But that’s not what any of this was about. I set out walking to walk. And, I believe that when we set out loving to love, miracles can happen. We can begin to see one another. Truly see.

Toronto is assuredly not the same after this terrible tragedy. Beyond the rain, there is a dreariness that sits over the city as people discuss just what happened and how it could possibly happen here. But people are going on talking, they are going on being kind, saying sorry, greeting and smiling at one another. This city is truly a space of personal relationship.

And, now, as I sit across the table from my new dear friend Jim Forest, I realize the deep legacy of his life pouring forth in personal relationship and loving to love. Many know Jim by way of his friends including but not limited to Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Dan Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, and so on. But having spent a few days with Jim, it’s hard to not count yourself among the list—his deep humility and sincere way of being has already taught me so much about listening, truly seeing, and deeply caring for my fellow human. Tomorrow, Jim will speak at a conference in Toronto titled Voices For Peace.

Between Toronto and Jim, I think I’m finally starting to truly grasp what Thomas Merton meant when he said to Jim in that 1966 letter: It is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, death, dying, Uncategorized

Notes on Silence… is here!

IMG_4104.jpgMany of you know I’ve been working on co-authoring a book with Patrick Shen. We lovingly titled the work Notes on Silence based on our extensive deep-dive into studying silence over the last four years. It includes nearly 300 pages of original essays, images, quotes, notes, and transcripts from the silence experts featured in the documentary film, In Pursuit of Silence (including but not limited to Pico Iyer (author of The Art of Stillness), Maggie Ross (author of Silence: A Users Guide 1 & 2), Julian Treasure (CEO, The Sound Agency), Helen Lees (Author of Silence in Schools), and many more. Patrick and I discuss encounters with silence in spaces like Thomas Merton’s hermitage and an anechoic chamber in Minnesota (Orfield Labs, named the quietest place on earth by Guinness Book of World Records), we expand on the dualistic nature of silence and sound, we examine religions and spiritual notations of silence, and offer numerous personal notes on our individual observations of and moments with silence.

THE BOOK IS HERE and we’ll be shipping out our first run of only 200 books this Wednesday, April 18th, 2018. Patrick and I will be signing all of the first edition copies which you can order here. If you’d like to learn more about the book, you can listen to our recent interview on the Encountering Silence Podcast.
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Incredibly grateful for this generous endorsement from author Carl McColman:

“Notes on Silence is a treasure. Cassidy Hall and Patrick Shen bring a poet’s heart and an artist’s eye to the ineffable, wondrous mystery of silence, and in doing so they have created a book that invites you by multiple passageways to the hidden place where mysticism, beauty and emptiness dance. Their reflections, combined with striking photography and interviews with over a dozen silence lovers, make for a thoughtful celebration of its essential subject. It’s more than just a companion volume to their vitally important documentary In Pursuit of Silence — it’s a luminous work in its own right.”

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(A brief side note about the significance of the cover: The top and bottom images featured are photos by Patrick and I from The Redwoods Monastery and a forest in Taiwan. It wasn’t until later that we realized this wasa lovely representation of the book’s contents: East and West… The vastness of expressions and ideas gathering together in the peaceful images of trees… The inexpressible vastness and beauty of silence.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, death, friend, Heart, reminders, Writing

Encounters with Silence – Thomas Merton’s Hermitage

*This essay will be featured in the upcoming book, Notes on Silence.  Order at www.notesonsilence.com 

“Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and also disappear. In this hour I shall cease to ask them, and silence shall be my answer.” Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (p. 361)

In May 2016 I was lucky enough to join a group on a brief excursion to Thomas Merton’s former hermitage. In this small cabin set apart from the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton lived out the final four years of his life and monastic vows from 1964 until his untimely death in 1968. The hermitage may have only been a brief chapter in his life given his entrance into the monastery in 1941, but it’s been known to be the birthplace of some of his most transformative and inspiring writings, particularly those writings pertaining to contemplation, social justice, peace, and his vision of unity.

Since I’d been a Merton fan for years prior to this visit, I’d fantasized about the day I might be able to wander upon this particular cabin door. I always imagined Merton would’ve had mixed feelings about these pilgrimages. The precise place he sought for solitude and space was now being trampled on by onlookers and admirers on a regular basis. Though it had been nearly 50 years since Merton had last been within these walls, embarking on this private space seemed like walking in on someone in the middle of their work. It felt like an interruption. It felt as if I was peering into something.

Something of the mystery. Something of the unknown. Something fossilized in the silence.

Alas, I also knew that it was just a space, just a place, and its sacredness and mystical  tenor came from the spaciousness and intention Merton held within it–an inner stance which we’re all capable of, yet few come to know.

With 20 or so of us trekking up to the hermitage, I worked hard to contain my child-like excitement. Grinning along the way, I took note of the distance from the monastery, envisioned the walks Merton may have taken, and considered the steps that led him home. Our group gathered inside and out to hear stories from our guide, a current monk, and poet, who happened to know Merton from their time together at the monastery. Our thoughtful discussion considered the work and writing he created within the hermitage and the inspiration it had in our own lives. 

When it was time to go, the group began to quickly evaporate into the landscape back towards the Abbey. I sensed an opportunity to spend some time in the back rooms, and wandered into the quietude. After a few minutes had passed, I looked to the window to see the last of the group disappearing in the distance and realized I was entirely alone. Giggling with delight, I felt the hermitage sinking into the hush of emptiness, the tiny cabin seemed to be transforming into a stagnant memory of everything it once held. I sat in the silence.

Somehow, this time alone felt less invasive. I no longer felt like I was intruding but instead felt as if I was communing with something beyond the time and space. I entered each of the rooms in their silence— the chapel, the kitchen, the bedroom— and I spent another hour in the living room by the fireplace, desk, and bookshelves.

In the end, there was no mountaintop experience. It was an inspiring space, no doubt, but it was still just a space. It was only what we brought with us as individuals that made the place spectacular. I surfaced from this hermitage experience pondering the implications of seeking mysticism in such a place. While on this particular day it was more about reverence of space, I couldn’t completely eliminate the hope of getting in touch with that mystical encounter of which we are all so desperate for. And, perhaps I did get in touch with it. Perhaps I didn’t. Undoubtedly, I’ll never know. For the mystical encounter is always as undefinable as it is undeniable. The mystical encounter is always as elusive as it is palpable.

As much as I know that even discussing the idea of attainment only pushes me further from it, I can’t help but consider what it means. To go seeking for something which cannot be sought. To go on looking for something which cannot be found. To attempt to do something which cannot be done.

The only proper response I have to the beauty of such a silent space is… I’ll never know.

“…In this hour I shall cease to ask them, and silence shall be my answer.”

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Thomas Merton’s Hermitage, photo by Cassidy Hall

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, pilgrim, podcast, solitude, Writing

The Uncertainty of Silence

(This will be among the many essays featured in the forthcoming book Notes on Silence that I’m co-authoring with Patrick Shen which can be purchased here.)

“…I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone…” Rainer Maria Rilke

I was around 8 years old when I began to have reoccurring dreams about death. With a rush of adrenaline, shocked and relieved to be alive, I’d wake up only remembering I was dead and floating in a white sky-scape of silence. I was alone, lost, and stagnant in limitless space and eternal time. This dream doesn’t sound grim to me anymore, but at 8 this nothingness had me sprinting to my parent’s bed. These dreams created in me a reverence for mystery and a deep longing to know the unknowable, to hold the ungraspable, and to forever chase what can never be met. 

We live in a world that loves to know. We like to intellectualize things, name people, describe experiences, and we covet our ability to share tangible evidence of these ungraspable things. Metaphors, on the other hand, hold meaning for the nameless. Metaphors help us to make sense of the unknowable things. We spend our lives clothing the many mysteries we encounter with metaphors which may not otherwise have any meaning. 

Defining is an interesting tool. It can be both harmful and helpful. We often use names to remain in control. We control our environment by regulating it, containing it, qualifying it. Most often names are used to define in order to make the definer feel more comfortable. Having a sense of knowing or grasping more creates comfort, and comfort makes us feel in control. Yet, I can’t help but contend that a controlled experience always takes us away from a mystical encounter. Holding creates an impossibility of beholding. And as a monk once told me, “Naming the nameless can leave all unrecognizable.”

Naming an encounter by way of our senses implies an unattainable certitude when really the elusive nature of mystery befalls all of our understanding. Silence is unnameable. To say something is or isn’t, to say something has a name or doesn’t, implies a dualistic nature. And in our desperate nature to cling, we are left time and time again barefaced before the mystery silence is. Only when we rid ourselves of this dualistic nature, we begin to see mystery for what it sincerely is. We begin to touch the bottomless depths of something hosting imponderable facets. 

 While working on In Pursuit of Silence, the topic of silence as a spiritual or religious practice came up on a regular basis. Silence is not necessarily spiritual or religious, and yet for some it may be entirely spiritual or religious. Silence is not a stranger to being likened to God in some fashion, yet similarly silence’s markings have been precisely that not of God, at least by concept. Silence holds the tension of absence and presence. Silence lives and breathes in the paradox of mysteries. Silence is infinite in its magnitude while remaining invariably naught. Silence is fully here and fully there, as much as it is nowhere and everywhere. But to create silence into being solely dualistic is to strip silence of its infinite possibility.  

Maggie Ross has named silence as salvation. Others, like Saint John of the Cross, have marred it with a place of darkness and despair. And yet, these implications don’t diminish the capacity of the thinker to associate such an absence, or presence, with silence as it relates to God or otherwise. And, this is the beauty of silence: it finds its way of understanding into each individual mind. 

“One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife…So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.” Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger 

For me, silence has been a place where I find the divine and I find myself. While my wariness of silence has been potent since my first meeting, I realize this is because of the depths of the unknown to which She has taken me. 

Silence is where I meet myself and my fellow human. 

Silence is where I see my darkest corners and my hidden faults. 

Silence is where I meet God. 

Silence is where I can grow and evolve. 

Silence is where I bathe in wonder.

Silence is where I listen. 

I often consider those reoccurring dreams first leading me to a lifelong love affair with the forever unrevealed. I consider the terrified 8 year old worrying her way through life, reaching for something always withheld. To be honest, not much has changed. My worry is now anxiety. My reaching is now a longing. Only now, I sit drenched in wonder as I tirelessly stretch out my arms towards the unknown. Now, I smile in awe as I untiringly attempt to package the mystery in language. 

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Here ends the book, but not the searching. The end of Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain”

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, goodbye, Intention, listening, monastery, pilgrim, reminders, solitude

When Letting Go Is Holding On

“My dishonesty with myself and others hinders the honesty of all humanity, hinders the progress of all people.” Journal entry on 2/12/12

In 2012 I made the decision to let go of some certainty in my life for the sake of exploring something unknown. I quit my job. I quit my salary-paying, insurance-giving job full of security and certainty so I could travel to the seventeen Cistercian monasteries of the United States. As someone who isn’t Catholic, this was a surprise to everyone I knew. I would say that this decision surprised me too, but as I went on doing what I was supposed to do each day, I only felt myself dying a million deaths. It doesn’t surprise me I took on such a drastic measure to keep on living.

So much of my life at the time was wrapped up in what other people thought of me and meeting the expectations meant sticking to the script. Quitting a secure job with a salary and benefits wasn’t just an unwelcome improvisation—it was dangerous one. And thrill seeking was absolutely not a part of those predictable characters’ make up.

Yes, I was open about my sexuality, but only quietly, only where I felt safe. Sure, I was open about my spirituality, but only to the degree that it blended in a room. Yes, I loved my job and the amazing people who crossed my path while working it, but it became mostly an uncomplicated way to pay the bills.

I thought I was “doing all the right things”, but as I did them, I couldn’t shake the nagging; the blatant certainty that there was more to this life and that it wasn’t reserved for the few, and that it might even extend to me. Fitting everywhere but belonging nowhere—it was no longer enough, and something inside me sensed my restlessness could only be calmed by letting go.

Quitting my job to pursue that which was pulling me from the center of my heart made me feel exhilarated in a way that I hadn’t experienced since the beginning of these piling expectations. The monasteries, their silence, their mystery, their unique provision of solitude felt like they could be an exception to the lack of belonging I sensed at every turn. As I gave more and more thought to this longing within me, the unknown abundance of mystery that was before me, a unique way of exploring my interior spaciousness, I knew I had to go.

And when I stepped inside these sacred places, overcome with a sense of belonging, I knew instantly I had not made a mistake. It was in these moments away that the focus sharpened and I could sense my place in the world more clearly. It was a space where the noise of any perceived audience’s approval or disapproval literally and metaphorically cleared from my life and I could hear the voice of my heart instead.

So, I poked my head into seventeen spaces bathed in prayer and talked with monks and nuns about silence, solitude and contemplative life. I didn’t realize until the pilgrimage began that part of this expression of my true-self was bound up in my existential and spiritual curiosity that had been a part of my meandering thoughts since childhood. We further explored topics related to social justice, the true-self, acedia, mental health, and community. My joy and curiosity could not be contained.

This strange pilgrimage was spurred on and then validated by Thomas Merton’s words in New Seeds of Contemplation, “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves… They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. …They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else’s experiences or write somebody else’s poems.”

This idea of spending my life on the things that aren’t of me is something I have had to navigate in my own way. It’s a lesson that is never over once it is over. It certainly isn’t easy for me to be true to myself. I have to learn and then relearn nearly every single day.

I know, for example, that in my writing life there are many topics I’ve avoided for reasons I’d rather not admit. Reasons that ultimately declare the comfort of others and myself as more important than the truth and freedom of all humanity. Reasons that shun my inner spirit and remove dignity from my identity. I learned long ago on my pilgrimage that the danger in not being my true-self had a ripple-effect that was larger than just me. My self-expression, being true to who I was, affected other’s ability to do the same.  After all, we belong to each other. I knew then it was time for a change. It was time to let go of the world’s agenda for my life. And, it’s just as true now as it was then.

“Trust is very much about going beyond the guarantees; engaging into the future that is beyond what is known and seen.” A Monk of Mepkin Abbey

When I arrived home after nearly a half year on the road, I had no extreme revelations or clear-cut certainties to reveal. I only emerged with a new sense of listening to the heart of who I am and an openness to the silences and the stillnesses that speak into that true identity. I began to let go of those preconceived notions the world had seared into me for years, I began to let myself unfold and go off script. 

“I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” Rainer Maria Rilke

All of life is loving as much as it is a constant letting go. Sometimes that letting go is an initial step away from the noisy world into finding out more of who we are. And, sometimes this requires a grieving. A grieving of a narrative we’ve clung to or been told, or grieving a sense of certainty or ownership. But we cannot begin to meet ourselves without this letting go. We cannot begin to reunite with the wholeness of who we are until we strip ourselves of assumptions, predictions, and expectations. We cannot hold on until we truly let go.

“There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.” Thomas Merton, “Christian Humanism” in Love and Living

Cassidy Hall is a writer, photographer, filmmaker with a MA in Professional Counseling. Cassidy’s writing is featured on The Huffington Post, Patheos and her website, www.cassidyhall.com. You can find her on twitter @cassidyhall | instagram @casshall | and Facebook cassidyhall77

Cassidy’s forthcoming book, “Notes On Silence,” co-authored with Director Patrick Shen can be pre-ordered here.

Originally posted on The Sick Pilgrim Blog.

 

 

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Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, Heart, listening, monastery, pilgrim, solitude, Uncategorized, Writing

“Cassidy Hall found silence in an Iowa monastery and brought her discoveries to a new documentary” Des Moines Register

“A cricket chirped in the monastery’s library. That and the swish of a turned page, Thomas Merton’s “New Seeds of Contemplation,” was about it for sound.

Cassidy Hall stopped on page 81. Merton did not write on the absence of sound on that page but the abyss of solitude in the soul: “You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”

Hall scrambled to write it down, as if it was a new line she had overlooked while reading the book three years ago when the direction of her life changed, when she took off around the country to seek silence in her soul. She would, in fact, travel great distances to learn how to be still.

Hall, 31, quit her job as a therapist in Ames not long after reading the book. She called the New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, where monks have lived in the Trappist monastery since 1849 in long periods of silence and contemplative prayer. She met Father Alberic Farbolin there and spent long periods talking with him about the infinite possibilities in stillness…”

Read the rest of The Des Moines Register feature article “Ames native goes on quest for silence” by Mike Kilen here.

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Photo by Rachel Mummey of The Des Moines Register

Cassidy Hall Art, busy, Creativity, Heart, Intention, listening, monastery, pilgrim, reminders, Uncategorized, Writing

Faith and Doubt in the Labyrinth

I am easily led to anxiety in unfamiliar situations. I don’t like to do things with other people, and though I recognize the necessity in community, I’d almost always prefer to go about my day on my own, for comfort’s sake. Like most of us, I like certainty. Like most of us, I realize life isn’t very certain.

While walking a labyrinth with a group of friends last week, I was brought to a place of holding this uncertainty in a new way. In our preparation to walk, we reminded one another that the walk is not a maze, and no matter how lost we may feel at any time, we aren’t lost at all — as long as we keep our eyes on the path under us. We read aloud, “there’s no wrong way to walk the labyrinth.”

My anxiety led me to jumping in the labyrinth as soon as I possibly could, keeping only a few things in mind from our previous discussion. I chose to walk in with my hands down, symbolically releasing all that was hindering and holding me back — the heaviness that has been insistently upon my mind and heart in recent times. And as I sauntered into the center I recalled the only other thing I retained from our discussion — that the 6th petal in the center represents the unknown, and I was darting for it because that’s all I did know.

“Fear of the unexplainable has not only impoverished our inner lives, but also diminished relations between people; these have been dragged, so to speak, from the river of infinite possibilities and stuck on the dry bank where nothing happens.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

…Read the rest of my guest post at The Sick Pilgrim Blog.