Aware-ness

So let us have the courage to wait, for the Advent, to live!

A text by Father Abraham Fischer OSB from the Benedictine abbey of Königsmünster in Meschede, Germany.

Aware-ness – noun

The state of a person perceiving their surroundings with all their senses
The ability to perceive and process the environment with the mind and the senses
Conscious perception or knowledge

These definitions are the first ones to be found on the internet. However, when one consults the relevant internet encyclopaedia, a much more complex picture emerges. Here, awareness or consciousness as such can no longer be clearly defined, but it becomes eveident that philosophers, psychologists, historians, sociologists and other sciences understand and classify the term in very different ways. Perhaps this fact also helps us to understand that people seem to struggle with ‘conscious being’. Yet ‘conscious existence’ is one of the great human and modern goals in life.

Compared to our ancestors, our world has become complicated and immense. The growing body of scientific research has not led to an easier understanding of the world, but to a complexity that seems overwhelming. It is becoming increasingly difficult to perceive the world around us and within us and to derive simple rules for our actions from it. This fact has its consequences. Many people, for the sake of simplicity, ignore the whole or the fundamental and pursue only the small and manageable. This gives them, at least for the moment, a feeling of security for the next step in their everyday lives.

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Father Abraham Fischer OSB

Expert on monastic products, monastery, Benedictines, music and monastic culture.

The pause

190402 Wilder Wein Mit Zarten Kleinen Roten Knospen 1534

A photograph by Brother Felix Weckenmann, Beuron Monastery Gardens

Already some decades ago (1940), the famous American composer John Cage (1912-1992) caused confusion in the music scene with a special piece of music. The piece, 4 Minutes 33 Seconds, became a key work of New Music and still today inspires people to reflect and to be silent. In this piece, John Cage fully composes what music has always known in individual elements: the pause. Hence, the score of this piece of music only contains the Latin word ‘Tacet’ – he is silent. This is a challenge for the pianist and also the orchestra, but for the listener, too, because no notes are played in the piece. Some listeners came to the conclusion that it was silence itself that the composer wanted to express. Others believe that the ‘background noise’ of the audience actually is the music, i.e. the movements in the hall, the clearing of throats and other noises that radiate into the performance hall.

For John Cage, the idea for this piece of music roots in a special experience. He had visited a completely soundproof room that was designed so that the ceiling, walls and floor did not reflect any sound. When he entered this room, he expected to hear nothing at all. Nevertheless, he perceived two sounds, one high and one low. When he described this experience to a technician, the technician replied that the high tone was caused by the workings of the human nervous system and the low tone by the blood circulation.

In extreme silence, humans – ultimately and inevitably – still hear themselves.

The piece of music itself and the discussion about its contribution to music is still fruitful. People who hear this piece unprepared are completely confused. The music steps out of their action, their movement, their restlessness and, so to speak, returns to its essence – born from the centre of silence. It is about hearing between the lines, perceiving what is presumed, and ultimately about accepting and perceiving ourselves, our own being, our pure existence. From this realisation, we can deduce that we do not have to do anything for our existence, we do not have to justify ourselves, we simply are. Bearing this is by no means easy! All too quickly, we return to movement, justification or action. For life to succeed and to function, this is the right thing to do. At the same time, however, we need times of pause, times of nuances, spaces of silence.

The courage to be silent

Ein Bild mit Pater Abraham Fischer, Benediktinerabtei Königsmünster

A picture with Father Abraham Fischer, Benedictine Abbey of Königsmünster (Foto: Lutz Tölle Iserlohn)

But we are in Advent. For many, especially in this year of the pandemic, it is a fervent wish to experience this time ‘consciously’. John Cage’s piece of music takes us back to the essentials. It shows us, inimitably, with great depth and also with a chuckle, what we are. We must have the courage to leave a blank line, to pause. It is nothing else that the spiritual language describes as ‘silence’. In the Rule of St. Benedict, we find the same instruction in a drastic form: ‘Keep the uncertainty of death daily before your eyes.’ (RB 4, 47). The verse raises the question of priorities in the face of overwhelming possibilities and their fundamental finitude. No human being can cope with the imperative of ‘EVERYTHING!’. No one can do all the work, live out all the possibilities to the full. The frantic, climactic attempt alone can (and must) drive us to despair. Human beings will always have to make a choice. In this confusing game of the unreal (which is what the seemingly many possibilities are), it is essential to have criteria for making decisions. The general pause, just like the brief respite between two sections of a melody, is the hidden clue between the lines: if we dare to perceive and accept finitude, deep fulfilment manifests itself. If we elevate the pause to a principle and structured slowness to a guideline, then we do not lose, but gain. Like the spiral, however, we must overcome ourselves again and again to do so. A challenge. An imposition. A scandal that withstands all this-worldliness, not because it rejects it, but because it accepts it, masters it in its distinction, and then purposefully rushes towards the goal with the help of all worldly goods.

Advent is nothing else: we pause because we know that the pause, the silence, the halt does not mean hopeless finitude, but that ‘less’ uncloses quality of life. These are paradoxical wisdoms – truly. Religious people may have confidence that silence does not lead to ‘nothingness,’ but that out of silence someone comes to meet them. It is God who by coming is already there.

So let us have the courage to wait, for the Advent, to live!

God waits between the sounds of our song of life because he speaks to us unobtrusively between the lines – lovingly, quietly. If it is true that consciousness is the state in which a person recognises their surroundings and themselves with all their senses, then God is always in between – in the open questions, in the slowness, in the helplessness, in the weak and needy, in those who are searching, in every silence between two breaths – that means in every-thing. To recognise this would truly be Advent in the midst of the world and out of love for it.

Aware-ness

So let us have the courage to wait, for the Advent, to live!

Aware-ness – noun

Father Abraham Fischer OSB

The pause

In extreme silence, humans – ultimately and inevitably – still hear themselves.

The courage to be silent

So let us have the courage to wait, for the Advent, to live!

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