Meditation - Hear our Silence

JOHN SKINNER explains how some people's journey to enlightenment began in the Sixties, and why his own began far more recently - and took him to 10 miles this side of Brighton beach...

What were they like, the Sixties? A question my children have sometimes asked me, wistfully, as if they had missed some Golden Age of joy, enlightenment and freedom.

Well, in many ways they did miss out. I think the Sixties get a bad press: all sex and rock and roll. How we love to wrap things up in a simple phrase that so easily gets repeated as if it said all.

True, as Philip Larkin famously puts it: "Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three . . . "

But sexual liberation was part of a far greater expansion and exploration into what it is to be
fully human. And rock and roll and drugs and Carnaby Street, and all that went with it, were only outward expressions of an excitement towards this total voyage of discovery.

I say total, because alongside the external, bodily liberation, there flowed a deeper quest, a search for Soul. What had begun as a trickle of travellers to the East, notably India, soon turned into a recognisable exodus - when the Beatles turned up on the doorstep of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, they were not trail-blazers (as the press thought), but merely joining the tail-end of a long queue stretching back a decade or more.

So what took young people into India on what the Oldies dismissed as 'the Hippy Trail'? They found the West spiritually bankrupt, they knew their own thirst for inner-meaning, and word spread that in India they might have some answers.

How many found what they truly sought, only they may say. In reply to my children's question: no, I never got as far as India, I was too busy with your mother rearing you! But now you are off our hands and I am able to move around a bit more, yes I did go on a soul-seeking pilgrimage only the other year. I blush to tell you-and my present readers-that I only got as far as 10 miles this side of Brighton beach.

And who did I find there? A remarkably over-looked gang of hermit monks called Carthusians. Their tradition of silence and solitude dates right back to the 11th Century when a guy called Bruno pulled out of public life (he had been Chancellor of Rheims, Europe's leading university of the day) and with six friends retreated to a mountainside above Grenoble.

What was he after? Exactly the same as the Beatles and all those young people who had flooded into India before them: so what is this soul stuff all about?

Bruno - and the Buddha before him and the Maharishis of our time - needed to get to grips with something real. And this reality lay not outside, in activity or even in learning, but deep within. And to seek it out, Bruno found that you need to be alone. So he began to recognise the immense value of simple silence.

We would say that he found meditation or, as I name it, the Prayer of Silence.

So when I made my short pilgrimage to the Carthusians in a Sussex backwood, I became reconnected to an ancient tradition of silent prayer, planted in the West, over 900 years ago.
No need to look any further, no risk of Delhi tummies, there it was. What I had been looking for all those years.

I spent just two weeks with the Carthusians. I kept their silence, I lived their daily routine, getting up at midnight for two hours chanting in their church at the centre of the monastery; I ate their vegetarian food (one main meal a day) and worked with them in the garden and in the kitchen.

I met Cyril, the Prior and Novice Master, a man my own age, who has been a monk for over 40 years. We became firm friends and we would talk from time to time. I once asked him outright: tell me about prayer. Here was an expert, I thought, I've got him to myself. Now I'll get some answers. He's bound to spill the beans.

All Cyril had to say was: "Prayer is a way of life." I was so put down. Is that all he can tell me-after 40 years? It was only when I took time to listen, I realised he had said it all. Then I came away and wrote a book for HarperCollins - Hear our Silence I called it, picking up a phrase from their ancient Constitutions:

"Let no one take it upon himself to preach for if men hear not our silence they will never listen to our words."

Job over, I'll get on with other things, I told myself. Not so. These Carthusians had got under my skin - their silence wouldn't keep quiet! My wife and I began to pray together - half an hour of silence every morning before we began our day. A friend heard and she came along too. Soon others joined in and I began to realise that lots of people were like ourselves, looking for meaning on the inside. Seeking their Soul and their real Self.

I went back and found Cyril. "I'm going to steal some of your silence: people need it outside too."

"Use our name," was all he had to say.

My wife and I have devised a very simple model of silence. We sit in a circle facing inwards, a candle lit for focus. We start with some chant (conveniently my Carthusian friends have recorded a CD of their Midnight Office); then a short reading as a bridge from our world of words and noise into the silence; then each is left to their own devices, free to explore this great inner world which is uniquely ours. My prayer is not your prayer; your silence is different each time you attend to it. A new beginning, an unrepeatable journey of discovery. A yielding to the mystery of the Other, attending in wonder at the gift of Life.

As the half hour ends, we stand and hold hands in our circle. We have been alone in our soul-seeking and having been in touch with our self, we emerge and express the fact that we have done this seeking together, as a group: "No man is an island."

Three years on, we have given some 50 workshops, either for a day or across a weekend. Ten or perhaps 15 people come together for Hear our Silence, the half-hour soul seeking which is followed by group work when we begin to share this inner experience together. At the end of the day, we are all quite tired; but we realise that we have had a further glimpse into the limitless unknown expanse of our inner-Self.

Recently I have taken Silence into prison. Every other Monday, I go across to Channings Wood, our local C Category prison the other side of Newton Abbot. There I meet a group of 15 men for two hours: we pray our Silence, hold hands and cross over into our 'Talking Circle'. Here we share what it is to be silent; what it means to be a prisoner, how we might move forward from where we are. And all the while we use the silence which we have explored together, as a group.

There is immense hope, there is pain too, but we move forward together, confident somehow that our silence holds the answer to all our uncertainty. For if we find our true self in the silence, the outside world seems possible once more.

As one prisoner said: "I don't know what I am doing here, exactly, but I do know when I go back to the wing, I shall be feeling much better."

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty three...And that's not all, Mr Larkin!

John Skinner and his wife offer regular workshops on the Prayer of Silence.



For further details please write: Hear our Silence, 19 Church Hill, Honiton EX14 2DB.
email: wordman@cwcom.net web:www.hos.cwc.net