Circle Dance of Time, The

Preface

Preface “Death is long,” the ghost of Darius says, “and there is no music.”1 If there is life, on the other hand, and there is music at journey’s end, then the journey of life is a circle dance where “In my beginning is my end,” as T. S. Eliot says, and “In my end is my beginning.”2 I was originally going to call this book Faith Seeking Understanding, echoing Saint Anselm and Karl Barth, but as I got into it I changed the name to The Circle Dance of Time. Using the metaphor of the circle dance, I wanted to describe the great circle implied in the words of the old Bedouin to Lawrence of Arabia, “The love is from God and of God and towards God.”3 I found that circle also in the Gospel of John in the words “The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8), and in the words “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world; again, I leave the world and go to the Father” (John 16:28). In the Enneads of Plotinus the great circle is actually a dance, a choral dance he says, around the One.4 I thought myself of the circle dance, the folk dance where the women form an inner circle holding hands and moving clockwise and the men an outer circle moving counterclockwise , and when the music stops the person opposite you is your partner for the next dance. Circling implies a center, “the still point of the turning world,” and indeed “we all have within us a center of vii stillness surrounded by silence,”5 as Dag Hammarskjöld says in his little brochure for the Meditation Room at the UN. This center of stillness is the heart, I want to say, not just the seat of emotions but the place where thought and feeling meet and unite. So “the reasons of the heart” that Pascal speaks of would be the way things appear to us when we are in our center of stillness. We are not always there. When I am upset or afraid or depressed, “I am outside my heart, looking for the way back in.”6 When I am dwelling in my center of stillness surrounded by silence, on the other hand, then I can see things aright and make sound judgments and decisions. And the silence surrounding our center of stillness I take to be an encompassing presence. “Here is what faith is” (Voila que c’est la foi), Pascal says, “God sensible to the heart” (Dieu sensible au coeur).7 I suppose it is the presence of God that is sensible to the heart, the silence surrounding our center of stillness. That presence, that silence can kindle the heart, illumine the mind. How? The silence speaks when the heart speaks. So it is by waiting, waiting on the heart, waiting on the silence that we come to a kindling and an illumining. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” Malebranche says,8 and attention here takes the form of a listening silence . I think of a passage in Four Quartets where T. S. Eliot speaks of waiting, “I said to my soul, be still, and wait . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”9 If we wait in a listening silence, “the darkness shall be the light,” that is, the mind will be illumined , “and the stillness the dancing,” the heart will be kindled. Silence can be terrifying. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal says, “the infinite immensity of spaces I do not know and that do not know me.”10 The answer is in the Upanishads, God in the heart viii Preface and God in the universe are one and the same. The silence surrounding our center of stillness, according to this, and the eternal silence of these infinite spaces are one and the same. A listening silence can be our relation to the universe then, as well as to the heart. What is there to be heard in this listening silence? The music of the spheres? The speech of all things? Maybe we could say the silence speaks just as the silence does surrounding our center of stillness, and what the silence...