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Study to Be Quiet
 

I need to be silent
for a while,
worlds are forming
in my heart.

-Meister Eckhart

“Contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems, our advertising culture, and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit.” So said Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, at a synod of bishops in Rome in October 2012. No doubt Williams would have been surprised, as I was, to see an article in the Wall Street Journal, the de facto house organ of the American financial system, containing this admonition on contemplation from St. Paul: “Study to be quiet.” These are also the final words of Izaak Walton’s classic work on fishing, The Compleat Angler, which was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal on the 360th anniversary of its publication. Walton, a retired ironmonger, was a pious soul who offered practical tips on fishing while extolling its spiritual benefits, principally as an aid to cultivating quietness. The calfskin-bound volume, illustrated with woodcuts of fish, went through five editions in Walton’s lifetime. Its subtitle, in keeping with the author’s own disposition, was "The Contemplative Man's Recreation."

“God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” Walton averred, noting that “anglers and meek quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those restless thoughts, which corrode the sweets of life…” As to whether action or contemplation offered the surer path to human happiness, Walton argued that “both these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling.” Having said that, he made clear that he regarded sitting by the water’s edge with his long rod of spliced ash and hazlewood to be “the quietest and fittest place for contemplation.” He quoted an unnamed “Spanish genius” who said that "rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.” Furthermore, Walton maintained, we mortals are happiest when we come closest to imitating God, and God is happiest in contemplating “his own infiniteness, eternity, power, and goodness, and the like.” He noted that four of Christ’s 12 apostles were fishermen, including all three of those he chose as witnesses to his Transfiguration. According to Walton, the Lord “found that the hearts of such men, by nature, were fitted for contemplation and quietness; men of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits, as indeed most anglers are.” Much the same was true of the prophets: “…when God intended to reveal any future events or high notions to his prophets, he then carried them either to the deserts, or the sea-shore, that having so separated them from amidst the press of people and business, and the cares of the world, he might settle their mind in a quiet repose, and there make them fit for revelation.”

One might well argue that Walton’s sentiments are of limited relevance to most readers of the Wall Street Journal. After all, what did Walton really know about the press of people and business and the cares of the world, living as he did in pre-industrial England, when a leisurely walk of a few miles would bring you from the heart of London to the fields and streams of Tottenham Hill? Yet, notwithstanding his placid nature, so evident in his writings, Walton was no stranger to upheaval. He lived through the English Civil War, one of the most turbulent periods in that nation’s history – and he was no mere bystander. As a royalist and friend of many leading Anglican clerics, his position became tenuous after Puritan forces deposed the English monarch. His decision to retire from business to a more pastoral life away from London may well have been hastened by this turn of events.

Walton was hardly alone in extolling the virtues of contemplation, although he was one of the relatively few who regarded a fishing rod as an instrument for its realization. For Plato, contemplation was the soul’s pathway to the Good and to other divine Forms. Among neo-Platonists, contemplation was the method for achieving henosis, or union with the One. In Orthodox Christianity, one achieves theosis, or union with God, through contemplative prayer. In contrast with meditation, contemplation has no content apart from the simple awareness of God. Walton might well have appreciated this working definition from the Taoist Lao Tzu: “Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.”

I am not an angler and cannot attest to its efficacy as an aid to contemplation. But as a landscape photographer, I have had many an occasion to put on my Wellington boots and to go tramping in the woods and along streams at first light with my camera and tripod. The qualities that Walton demands of a fisherman would apply also to my calling: “He that hopes to be a good angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself…”

I can think of a recent occasion when I planted myself along the edge of the Mattabessett River near my home in Connecticut, waiting for the sun to rise high enough above the fringe of trees on the east to illuminate the opposite bank of the river so I could get a picture. It was early spring, and the foliage was still porous enough to allow the light to pass through the trees for some distance. The region had been ravaged by a hurricane the previous summer, and there were still toppled trees and fallen tree limbs strewn about. No breeze stirred, and there was a perfect symmetry of trees arching over the water and their reflections rising to meet them from the river below. Just then the trees mirrored in the water were stirred not by the wind but by a muskrat moving silently downstream. Oblivious of my presence, the muskrat circled about, diving occasionally, then headed back in the direction from which it came. By this time my thoughts had grown fitful and soon were swallowed up in the early-morning silence. It is as Meister Eckhart said: once you have descended deeply enough into this silence, you recognize that the worlds you embrace are worlds that have formed in your own heart.

1 Tessalonians 4:11

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