The Kingdom Is Within and Without

For those who are still asking.
And to those who have learned to be silent.
"The Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you."
When you come to know yourselves,
then you will be known.
— Gospel of Thomas, logion 3 (NHC II,2)
"May this book reach you in a moment."
where your heart is ready.
— resonance of The Awakening of Silence

There was a day when everything stopped—and it was on that day that everything began. It wasn't a day of external catastrophe, although there was that too. It wasn't a day of tragic news, although life had brought me several. It was an ordinary day, one of those days when the sun streams through the window as if it had never entered before, and the light has that dense, liquid quality that ancient painters called morning gold, and mystics called causeless grace, and Zen monks simply called now. It was a Saturday, perhaps it was Sunday, the name of the day doesn't matter: what matters is that inside me, a clock I had been running aimlessly for a long time stopped. And when that clock stopped, I heard for the first time a silence that had always been there, waiting for me, patient as a mother.

It wasn't fear, although there was fear. It wasn't emptiness, although there was emptiness. It was, above all, recognition—like returning to a house where one was born, after many years abroad, and discovering that everything is as one left it, and that it was one who had changed languages, and that one needed to relearn to breathe in the language of childhood. I sat in my usual chair, at my usual table, with my usual glass, and the world, that world that seemed familiar to me down to the smallest details of its frustrations, suddenly opened up like a slow flower. The walls were still walls. But they had a new thickness, as if each brick held its own memory, and I, for the first time in decades, had enough inner silence to hear it.

It was on that day that I understood, still without words, what I would try to say for years with clumsy words: that life, this life I have, is not the stage for a play I'm acting badly in. It is the very heart of a mystery that calls me to dwell within. That the emptiness I felt was not the absence of a distant God; it was the sign that an intimate God was opening up his space within me. That what he called boredom was merely the name he gave to silence when he lacked the courage to listen to it. And that everything—absolutely everything, the bread and the knife, the rain and the morning, the face of my beloved and the face of the passing stranger, the light that enters and the shadow that hides—was an invitation, a call, a prayer to be heard without anyone needing to recite it.

The ancients said that the Kingdom is both within and without. I didn't understand the phrase until that day. I always thought it was an elegant phrase, one of those quoted in carefully thought-out sermons, but belonging to a spiritual geography that was external to me. That Saturday, or perhaps it was Sunday, I realized it was a descriptive phrase, not rhetorical. That the Kingdom, that Kingdom the Gospels promised, the mystics sang of, and the philosophers questioned, was not a place. It was a way of being in places. That if I looked for it in the sky, the birds would arrive first; that if I looked for it in the sea, the fish would arrive first; but that if I stopped, simply stopped, it was here, inside the breathing chest and outside of it, in the cup of coffee cooling on the table, in the dust dancing in the sunbeam, in the distant voice of a child laughing in a courtyard I cannot see...