The Silent Centre

The Centre - for me, as a Christian - is silent, not because nothing is there but because what is there is beyond words. It is still, not because nothing is there but because what is there doesn't need to move.

The ancient psalmist speaks of the search for the still and silent centre:

I have stilled and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with its mother,
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

My small personal experience of weaned children doesn't suggest that they are a very good metaphor for silence and stillness. However, what the psalmist was presumably trying to convey is the trustfulness of a child walking - toddling - alongside its mother. The more so as he begins the psalm (number 131) by saying:

My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty.
I do not concern myself with great matters
Or with things too wonderful for me.

And he ends it:

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.

This is my centre of silence and stillness, and the only way I know to achieve it; humble trust in God. I don't say I achieve it often or easily. But I know it as a possibility.

Some of the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand (how long, I wonder, before "indigenous" follows its synonym "native" into political incorrectness?) began a movement for a degree of self-government last century in what is still known as the King Country, and is still the headquarters of a Maori monarch. The marae, or meeting place, where he or she is based is called "Turangawaewae": The Place to Stand.

We each need a centre, a place to stand. Archimedes, it is said, claimed that given a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the earth. But the twentieth century is markedly lacking in centres and places to stand (while having a plethora of levers).

"Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold" said W.B. Yeats, in his famous poem. One of the proclamations of postmodernism is that there is no centre any more. A shared religion is no longer a centre in the West, has been less and less since the Reformation, though shared values persisted well into the twentieth century. Now even they, built on a foundation which has been comprehensively removed, no longer remain. For better or for worse - and probably for both, in different ways - our society is now pluralistic, made up of many overlapping groups with no one universal in common.

We are left to find our own centre, and many proclaim, therefore, that each person's centre is "right for them" and "true for them", rejecting claims to universal truth or rightness. I disagree, believing that a centre which is only "true for me" isn't true for anyone.

Back to main Index page

Back to Index of Digressions

Mail me - but don't spam me.

I love . Do you? Click here.

You are visitor number to this page since 4 May 1998.