Update from Pastor Nate - December 2021
“For You alone my soul in silence waits; my wholeness comes from You.”
Just before Advent began I made the somewhat slapdash choice to take a break from Facebook and Twitter for the Advent season in order to give my frazzled nerves a chance to reset and quiet down.
While I’m highly critical of the privatization and profit models of these platforms that have become cornerstones of public discourse, I also recognize the great gift that social media can provide in helping people stay connected across lines of time and distance. They’ve been incredible for me in helping me to find “my people,” fellow seekers on the way to Wisdom, folks engaged in the slow work of justice, people trying to make the world whole again.
But like all things, there is risk in excess; it doesn’t help that these sites are literally designed to give us a hit of dopamine, the chemical in our brains associated with pleasure, every time we see that someone has liked or commented on our posts. They keep us posting, keep us scrolling, and keep us engaging with each other—for better or for worse.
The algorithms that run these sites are meant to keep you engaged with the content you crave, whether that is photos of people’s holiday baked goods or conspiratorial claptrap. If you’re clicking, liking, sharing, and getting other people to do the same, the algorithm is happy (and the companies are making money off of your browsing habits).
(All this is well-documented in the incredible film, The Social Dilemma, which is available on most streaming platforms. I highly, highly recommend that everyone who chooses to engage with social media watch it.)
So, breaking the addictive rut into which the need for dopamine hits had gotten me into was one reason I decided to fast from Facebook and Twitter for Advent. (I’m still on Instagram, but that’s never been as much of an issue for me).
But there was another, more pertinent reason that I felt a leading to surrender social media for a season. I spent the entirety of Thanksgiving Day turning over in my mind a comment that someone had made on one of my posts, a comment that struck me as thoughtless, dismissive, and pedantic. The specifics don’t matter. What mattered was that a single comment had managed to wheedle its way into my brain, cause me to think uncharitable thoughts about the person who wrote it, and prevent me from being fully present with my husband and my daughter in the precious time that we had together.
Distracted, exasperated, and feeling petty… in other words, “thoughtless, dismissive, and pedantic.” Just like the comment that got me into a knot in the first place. That’s not the person I want to be. That’s not the father and husband I want to be. For all my talk of cultivating “gathered, centered presence” and “emotional resilience,” here I was, floundering because of a single comment, exposed in my own hypocrisy. After that, I knew it was time for something different; it was time to clear the gunk out of the field.
Hence the fast.
Most folks don’t really think of Advent as a season of fasting—“isn’t that what Lent is for?”—but, as the twilight purples and midnight blues of our liturgical palette suggest, these holy weeks are indeed a time for turning inward, for silence, for clearing the field.
Moreover, we often think of fasting simply as abstention from food or drink or sex or anything else pleasurable. But the Taoist tradition speaks highly of the practice of “fasting the mind,” namely, throttling the things we feed our mind and our thought life with in order to reconnect with the ground of our being. To fast the mind is to cultivate Silence. The point is not simply to quiet down so that we can hear God speaking in the silence; the Silence is the point.
“Silence is God’s first language,” as my teacher, Fr. Thomas Keating, was fond of saying.
The world’s great spiritual traditions, Christianity included, know that the sine qua non of transformation and wholeness is an intentional practice of Silence: a willingness to wait in the dark, beyond image, beyond thought, beyond algorithm, beyond “content” and scrolling and dopamine hits, for what will be born within us.
What riches, profundity, and resonance are we missing out on by contenting ourselves with a non-stop stream of stimulation? In Silence you discover as well that Silence has its own richness, its own brightness, its own fecundity. I simply refer you to the lyrics of Silent Night: “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright ‘round yon Virgin Mother and Child.”
Silence is medicine, and intentional silence has become as much a foundation of my daily life as much as the medicines I take every day to maintain my health. In those times when I’m feeling especially messy, petty, or extra, Silence is the bass note that keeps me in harmony.
But Silence is strong medicine, and not everyone who starts searching for Silence is ready to throw themselves into a twice-a-day meditation practice right out of the gate. For some of us it’s absolute torture to sit silently without any inputs or stimuli or distractions, even for five minutes.
That was certainly true for me at the beginning, too. But I found the practice of Silence to be like swimming in cold water: your entire body rebels against you at first, but as you move, as you breathe through the discomfort, you acclimate, and discover, after getting used to it, that the chill of the water is quite pleasant.
And suddenly, you find that the bracing chill of the water has made you awake, alert, and alive in a whole new way—an awareness you carry out of the lake and into your life.
I’ll eventually find my way back to social media; even now, I still pop on to Facebook once a day to check church-related postings. But I still feel the urge to go through all my notifications and comments; I feel the gnawing craving for engagement, for likes and shares, for dopamine hits. And I suspect I always will, a little bit; it’s called “being a human.”
My hope is that my time in swimming in the silence of this season will help bring deeper healing to those wounded and messy parts of my being, making room for something new to be born within me—something that I can only perceive and bring forth when my heart is still and my head is clear.
Deep peace to you and yours in the luminous darkness of this season.
- Pr. Nate
PS - If you’d like to join me for a little bit of Silence practice, I encourage you to join us on the 21st of December for our Winter Soul-stice gathering! Additionally, be on the lookout early next year; one of my hopes is to begin a weekly gathering for practicing Centering Prayer and deepening our practice with one another.