Thought
      Fluttering
among these words
                  They are
your footsteps in the next room
the birds that return
The nem tree that protects us
                        protects them
Its branches mute thunder
douse lightning
In its foliage the drought drinks water
They are
       this night
             (this music)
Watch it flow
         between your breasts
falling on your belly
                 white and black
nocturnal spring
                 jasmine and crow's wing
tabla and sitar
           No and Yes
together
     two syllables in love
If the world is real
                  the word is unreal
If it is real the word
                    the world
is the cleft the splendor the whirl
No
   the disappearances and the appearances
                                       Yes
the tree of names
              Real unreal
are words
       air they are nothing
Speech
    unreal
makes silence real

       Being still
is a strand of language
                    Silence
seal
   scintilla
            on the forehead
on the lips
          before it evaporates
Appearances and disappearances
Reality and its resurrections
Silence rests in speech

A church or for that matter any place of worship is supposed to engender a sense of sacredness and silence. But my observation (and very subjective one at that) of the church I have been frequenting is that it brings to me that sense of communion very infrequently. This usually falls in the periods of music and then sometimes in periods of group prayer. The rest of the time it is characterized by a busyness that I find to be antithetical to any kind of contemplative journey much less one towards the sacred.

As I have said these are very subjective personal experiences, colored by my personal beliefs and views. Perhaps the others who attend various services feel differently about them. I suspect this kind of disconnect I observe internally, perhaps has to do with the different aims with which I approach worship and how others approach worship especially in large group settings. I believe in the value of prayer in a group, in Sanskrit “Satsang”; association with the Divine that pervades all life, with and through one another. There is majesty in many voices joining together in prayer and since I believe in the value of prayer, which also has been found to be psychologically and physically effective, I would and have gladly joined in prayer in various settings. But then by natural association, for some reason only rarely is this sense of sacredness carried over in the aftermath.

What I have observed is that it’s very hard, if not impossible to extend and carry on this prayerful attitude into what devolves into a club with aims that in many cases are not congruent with the core purpose of being in a place of worship. While I don’t mean to devalue the value of any institution and community, because without those have their own key place in our lives, I do question the necessity of mixing both.

Usually the period aftermath the service is called fellowship. I perhaps understand and view fellowship very differently. So the questions I pose are what is fellowship, what is the aim of fellowship and what should be the subject of it? My observation of fellowship as I have seen it, it is largely social association and social talk. While sometime this talk does veer towards the issues of the religious institution i.e. church, most of it is outside that ken. Again while emphasizing the necessity of community or societies and the conversation that happens between people, I find this to be in opposition to my idea of sharing time together in a sacred way i.e. fellowship.

Perhaps it is this disconnectivity is what Reynolds Price experienced as well when he in his book, “Feasting the Heart” writes “my religious emotions have been seldom been fed by the churches or temples, the places where I’ve encountered a sense of power in the ground have mostly been secluded spots in fields or woods or secular rooms”. And personally my experience doesn’t differ very widely from Price’s observation. I have experienced more closely this power yesterday sitting next to a brook in a shady glade than today in a church. Wendell Berry similarly has said that to be in the greatest cathedral is to stand under a tall oak. And the best place to read the Bible is outside, because it’s a book of narrative centered about the outdoors.

If religious experience is meant to be an expansion of the self, I believe that kind of expansion can happen only in silence and solitude. How can an attitude of prayer be sustained when the talk turns to the latest vacation in some resort or that of some business matter? And can both of these be dual and complementary aims, if they are in such obvious opposition?

Then it means that I must withdraw from this “Church as the Sunday City Club” phenomenon and devise mechanisms, both ritual and place, for having a quite and sustained engagement with the driving and singular mystery of all life and all religion. Perhaps that overgrown grove of woods with the singing brook up the street and a book of contemplative poems every Sunday morning would do as I continue the search for a place where communal worship without the socializing is possible.

Another note at a time when the whole world is either making love, going to sleep or standing alone in a corner with invisible eyes, night of the city lights and night of the forests. I went into a forest today. It was once a park but it had fallen to disuse and nature has claimed it back. The victory of seeming disorder over order. There was a spring that began in that glade, in mud, moss and stone, water in another universal cycle. I jumped over fallen logs, pushing my face through cobwebs that became visible only after I stepped through them. A hushed darkness filled the day, the body returning to the womb, to union and dissolution.

I put my feet in the running water at the point where the spring tumbled over some rocks, shaped like an inverted jug with a broken spigot. Detritus, a broken plastic baseball bat, a can of shaving foam, some plastic wrappers. Somebody must have played by that spring sometime. Someone’s childhood ghosts lived there. A grass with a name I can’t now spell, was growing wild with small violet blooms. This is a garden grass, another sign of a time when that wood was tended to, kept civilized. This afternoon there were just the birds, now a pair of Carolina wrens, birds as big as my thumb and my fingers absorbing the coolness of the water.

I sit on a log, my legs swinging over the hollow in which the spring flows. Bands of sunlight reach the forest floor, a cathedral. I don’t pray, yet the disaffection of this life begins to recede like a wave. The forest becomes the silent presence I seek in another body of flesh and bone. I sit still; I fall into a meditation and become one with the world, blue cloud, clear water and dark green forest.

A car broke the silence after a long time, time which can only measured in how it affects the soul and not by any clockwork units. I stood up and went further, to another glade. This one is well kept with black pavement for a path. I stood at what we call the Red Bat Pond watching ripples. Some tree must have been dropping it’s kernels into the brown muddy water. On a rock on the other shore, was a bull frog in a patch of light, croaking. And from somewhere behind me in the woods came a response. Even if I did croak would listen and more so who would understand?

Night again, night of the street walkers, drug addicts, bums under interstate ramps, waiting for the day light to finally come