CREATIVE BROODING John M, Buchanan
Acts 1:6-14 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 7, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

My attention was captivated by one of those brief, pointed news programs on
National Public Radio,, An interviewer was talking with people about energy conser-
vation and discovering, with monotonous regularity, that there has been no signifi-
cant alteration in the way the automobile, at least, is used, I was intrigued, in
particular, by the rationale of one woman respondent, who chose to drive to work
every day rather than riding the bus which stopped precisely at the door of her
apartment building and would deliver her precisely to the office where she worked,
less expensively than her current practice, "Why in the world," the interviewer
wanted to know, "was she continuing to drive her own car, alone, every day?" She
explained that she had several children and that getting them up, dressed, fed and
off to school before she departed was a very chaotic experience, Her job, she went
on, involved people all day long. It was demanding and hectic and very busy. When
she arrived home after work, emotionally and physically drained, she was confronted
with meal preparation, kitchen clean-up, homework supervision and then putting the
children down for the night. It was, by her reckoning, fifteen hours per day of life
at a dead run, every single minute absorbed in dealing with people. Her automobile,
she said, was her only escape, her only time to be alone. She liked to roll up the
windows, shut out the noise, drive to work in silence and think. She wasn't sure
about the implications for the energy crisis, but she was certain that without the
thirty minute period alone in the car she would be in a crisis. And for effect she
added that even if she lived beside her place of employment, she would still leave
early, drive around for thirty minutes before and after each working day.

The woman, I concluded, had a point, Coincidentally, I was listening to that
interview while driving to a Presbytery Council meeting in Midway, a small and remote
town some thirty miles south of here, an expedition I didn't need or like, That
particular day had begun, for me, on the run, On the way downtown I made a quick
stop at a drug store in the process of opening. The proprietor, a good friend,
observed that I had half-run into the store and was obviously impatient to keep
moving. With great wisdom he said, "You aren't on commission are you?" We both
laughed, As the day got tighter, and items on the list were transferred to the next
day's list, and as the time approached to drive south I was frustrated, harried and
almost angry. Then I heard the woman talk about the solitude of her automobile. I
turned the radio off, reduced speed to the legal limit and slowly began to enjoy
myself, When I arrived in Midway, a world away from Broad and Garfield, I walked
around a bit, and heard something I hadn't heard for a very long time - silence. It
is quiet in Midway, At four in the afternoon there is no sound at all. Now I love
life in the city, but I realized that day and night, city people live with a per-
sistent sound level: that, literally, from one year to the next, I don't listen to
the silence, I realized, also, that I was late for the meeting.

The American way of life, the way of life we love and enjoy and propel by our own
physical and emotional energies, is the complete antithesis of the meditative,
prayerful life of solitude, The life we live is, in many ways, a conspiracy against
silence, We value productivity, industry, activity. Idle hands are the devil's
workshop" children used to be warned, and American adults demonstrate that they
believe that homegrown proverb with deep conviction. We live on the run: we work
hard, we play hard and one of the abiding ironies about us is that we work hard at
playing hard so that the difference between the two becomes negligible. We are so
obsessed with busy activity that we have, in one generation, lost something very
precious from our life - the idea of Sabbath. It has disappeared, unmourned, from

the American psyche. We have applauded the demise of blue Laws and booked Sunday

~2~

as solidiy as any other day, and destroyed a wisdom as old as history itself; namely,
that one day out of seven, human beings need to cease and desist, The noise of
manufacturing is part of life: the traffic at Port Columbus continues seven days a
week, We have no control over those. But we are so enamored with noise that we
frantically fill up every silent space, Tests have demonstrated that an evening at
a rock concert amounts medically to an "insult to the ear": muzak accompanies our
shopping, driving, grieving and our waiting to see the dentist. Several centuries
ago the philosopher Pascal said something I think should be emblazoned across the

top of every television set, He said, "All the evils of Life have fallen upon us
because men will not sit alone quietly in a room."

Sadly, Western Christianity has followed suit and rather enthusiastically re-
flected, instead of correcting, our culture on the subject, There is a rich tradi-
tion in Christianity of meditation, prayer and the disciplined cultivation of
private spirituality. But it isn't prominent, ox even existent in our religious
structures, It is ignored in popular theclogy. We have forgotten how to meditate,
we don't pray very much and the idea that religion requires some listening for God is
entirely alien to us, The Quakers held out for silence, but the overwhelming
majority of Protestants would regard a ten minute period in the middle of worship for
prayer and meditation as a gross waste of time and terribly uncomfortable, It is no
coincidence and certainly no mystery, therefore, that American Christianity is being
invaded from the East, Zen, Transcendental Meditation and other esoteric religious
movements are very hot items at the moment, A fad, to be sure, but also somewhere
in the phenomenon we ought to perceive a basic human need that our practice of
religion simply is not meeting.

Out text this morning is an unremarkable sequence that begins sometime after the
resurrection of Jesus Christ and before Pentecost, In fact, we are inclined to ploss
over "in between" material like this in order to focus on major events, Pentecost,
which the Church will celebrate next Sunday, is a major event, On that occasion the
disciples of Jesus became ambassadors for Christ, began to preach the Gospel openly,
and Christianity was born, It is, in all of history, one of the most creative
single days: nothing has ever been the same for humanity since Pentecost. It was
also a busy and noisy affair: there were great crowds: people were talking in
different languages: the disciples had to shout in order to be heard: observers
thought they were drunk and three thousand individuals were baptized, It was dynamic
and alive and exciting. But what I want to suggest this morning is that the event
called Pentecost, the very birth process of the Church, was dependent upon a period
of empty waiting, In the text the Friends of Jesus had returned from an experience
we call the Ascension. It was the last time they sensed the physical presence of
the risen Christ. They returned to the room where they had been hiding, They re-
turned and did nothing. They waited. ‘hey submitted to what I have termed Creative
Brooding, The result of that experience, I am suggesting, was Pentecost,

fam convinced that it is a matter of some importance to recover what we have
lost, and I invite you to think with me about the potentialities of silence,
solitude, aloneness: the creative potential of brooding,

The first dimension is personal, The avoidance of solitude makes us strangers ta
ourselves, We are so involved with communicating, relating, acting, doing, that we
lose touch with our own perzonhood, The immediate casualty is a terrible waste of
personal capacity for thinking, deciding, creating, that we have within
ourschives, Almost automatically we turn to others for advice or at least confirma-
tion that our own concepts and feelings are all right. In the process we are failing
to nurture and sharpen the resources we already have,

~3-

In Rollo May's book on creativity, The Courage to Create, the author discusses
the mysterious experience that we all have had on occasion, We struggle with a
problem over a Long period of time: the harder we work, the more illusive the reso-
lution seems, And then suddenly, while we are doing something else, out of the blue,
the answer comes. He writes: "If we are too rigid...we will never Let ourselves be
aware of the knowledge that exists on anether level withing us, But the insight
cannot be born until the conscious tension is relaxed," (p, 66).

I have always been delighted with Albert Einstein's confession that his best
ideas came to him while he was shaving, Iwas even happier to discover an addendum
to that vignette. One time Einstein asked a Princeton professor why it happened
that way, The professor answered, ".,.the mind needs the relaxation of ianer con-
trois..,to be freed in reverie or day dreaming - for the unaccustomed ideas to
emerge." (Ibid, p,67),

The New Testament is heipful here, Jesus is an eloquent model for the idea, His
life, apparently, was a rhythmic movement between involvement with people and
private retreat, The narrative of active teaching and healing is punctuated by
periods of solitude during which He went off by Himself, or up onto a mountain to
pray, The creativity of Jesus Himself, not to mention the strength and courage to
go on, depended on the periods of creative brooding,

Artists, authors ~ those who know and use their creative capacities more than
the rest of us, understand the necessity cf quiet meditation, One writer practiced
a routine of two hours at his desk, followed by two hours pitching quoits, And most
artistically inclined people testify that when it happens ~ when the idea, the con~
cept, the shape emerges from somewhere deep inside, released as it were from that
untapped reservoir of creativity, it is a religious experience, (Ibid, p.75).

Now, most of us are not artists, authors or poets, in the classic sense, But
everyone of us must live life in a variety of roles, Everyone of us can Live super-
ficially or deeply: we can live on the basis of what others demand, or creatively,
out of the depths of the resources God has given. I am suggesting that time and
space for quiet creative brooding is necessary if we are to discover the resources
we already have: that solitude is the key to creative living,

The second dimension is relational, Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen writes, "Love
consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."
(Reaching Out, p.3L}, ET hate to keep picking on Eric Segal for "love means never
having to say you're sorry", but it occurred to me that Nouwen is far closer to
truth: that love means, sometimes, many times, not having to say anything. One of
the practical concerns that confronts every one of us at some time or another is
what to say to someone you care about when that person is in crisis, Every one of
ug knows the anxiety of going to a funeral home, trying to compose a speech in the
ear, and then face to face with the grieving person stumbling through a series of
inane remarks, or pulling out the old standards, And all the while, physical, silent
presence is really all that fs required, That person knows you care, An embrace,
without exegesis, will go further in communicating love and God's healing presence,
than the fanciest of speeches, Sometimes deep and profound joy requires only silent
sharing. In fact, sometimes talking is destructive, I found a perfectly
delightful and wry poem this week that was new to me, Two Lovers are together in a
wooded glen: the narrator describes the magic of the experience in lush and romantic
images - "The three that 1 loved, together grew One, in the hour of knowing, night
and the woods and you," But then the woman starts to talk -

» & +

"Suddenly

There was an uproar in my woods,,,
crashing and Laughing,..

+se4 Voice profaning the solitudes,

The speil was broken the key denied me,
And at length your flat, clear voice beside me
Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes,

You came and quazked beside me in the wood.,.
You said, ‘The view from here is very good!’
You said, ‘it's nice to be alone a bit!!

You said, ‘The sunset’s pretty, isn't it?!

By God? I wish - I wish that you were dead,"
(The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke ~ in Leslie
Weatherhead, The Significance of Silence, p, 24-5).

There is room for solitude, creative brooding, in authentic relationships,

fhe third dimension is spiritual, the one we have lost most completely. As
madel, Jasus demonstrated that an awareness of God, a relationship with God, requires
time and space for solitude, One of the most familiar Old Testament stories is
about Elijah che prophet, running from a furious Jezebel, hiding in a cave; storm and
earthauake descend and afterward, not in the wind and fire, but in the silence, God
speaks in the still, small voice of calm,

Simone Weil, French author, once wrote, "Waiting patiently in expectation is
the foundation of the spiritual life." (See Nouwen, op.cit. p.91), I know of no
author or theolopian who exhibits any kind cf spiritual sensitivity who does not
advise that an awareness of God depends entirely on a disciplined pattern of medita-
tion and listening, Henri Nouwen writes: '..,we need quiet time in the presence of
God, Although we want to make all our time, time for God, we will not succeed if
we do not reserve a minute, an hour, a morming, a day,,.or whatever period of time
for God and Him alone, (op.cit, p.97).

God comes in the silence, The human spirit is awakened to God when it reaches
into its own depths, Somewhere it is written that we are unable to spend more than
a few minutes in silence without thinking about God. I have found that to be true,
And I believe that this inexorable turning to God, in our solitude, is simply the
Way We perceive and experience His coming to us, God takes the initiative: in the
deepest, most profound sense, God is the active partner even when we are doing
the thinking, or speaking or praying.

But sometines in silence we confront what we perceive as the absence of God,
We have heard no special voice, no thundering revelation, we have had no emotional
upheaval, In silence we confront God's silence, May I suggest that this experiance,
too, is of God? That God is experienced even in our longing for Him, our awareness
of His silence and absence?

- 5 -

Jack Kerouac has a passage somewhere in one of his novels in which a character
is returning to San Francisco after a gloricus period alone in a mountain cabin,
As the man is leaving he feels the need to pray, Traditional prayer language isn't
adequate, He isn't comfortable with it. He kneels on one knee in silence and from
his heart comes an honest prayer, that most authentic human response to the awesome
presence of the Almighty in the quiet spaces of life, "I love you, God, God, I
have fallen in love with you,"

Our faith is that Jesus Christ calls us into active discipleship in the world,
Following Him is public, political, noisy and very worldly business, He also calis
us away Irom that on occasion, to be alone with ourselves and with God,..to a
quiet brooding that is always creative, a solitude in which God can find access to
our spirits, a pregnant silence which will call out of us, too, that honest, most
profound affirmation, "Oh God, I have fallen in love with you,”

Amen,

QO God of mystery; forgive us if we treat the ideas too casually, Give us
moments of silence: help us to hear Your voice, In the world about us, give us
faith to see Your activity, Your healing and sustaining love, And our Father,
out of occasional solitude, give us words and deeds to affirm our love for You.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,