Sousousiance
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- Aug 16
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 18
There’s a difference between keeping quiet and being quiet. This reflection explores what butterflies, Benedictine monks, and a week of silence taught me about going deeper.
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Sousousiance
“Sousousiance” is a made-up, onomatopoeic word that has been used to describe the sound of thousands of butterflies when they’re in the act of flying. It’s been over thirty-five years. I still haven’t forgotten that sound. I reckon I never will.
My friend, Gary Braun, and I were attending a campus ministry conference in Santa Cruz, California. On a break day, we decided to take our rental car to nearby Natural Bridges State Park. We wanted to get a load of the eucalyptus forest and the millions of monarch butterflies that enjoy the nectar from those trees, or rather, the blooms of those trees, way up in the canopy of that forest. Apparently, they only open in the winter, which coincided with the time of year that Gary and I were there. Fattened up from that nectar, and rested up from their stay, eventually, they would launch themselves for the next leg of their migration journey…just like their forebears have done for thousands of years.
If you were standing next to Gary and me, the first thing you’d notice was the menthol aroma wafting out of those giant trees with leaves that looked like sage leaves. The trunks were like arboreal towers that terminated way up high in the canopy. They filtered sunlight like the stained glass in a cathedral. It was this aesthetic feature that lent the forest a kind of solemnity. But unlike a cathedral, it wasn’t that you had to keep quiet. You just wanted to keep quiet. You wanted to be quiet, like somehow you knew, instinctively, that words would have gotten in the way.
At first, I was like a stargazer, whose eyes aren’t yet accustomed to the dark. Right off, I spied only a few buoyant flappers. Then, eventually, it occurred to me that those dark clumps up in the trees weren’t leaves at all. And then, all at once, galaxies of Lepidoptera popped out at me. Here were thousands, maybe millions of diaphanous works of art. Were they roosting? Sleeping? Mating? All of the above? I didn’t know. And that’s when I heard it. A whispering waterfall. It was the sound of thousands of butterfly wings flapping. If I lived in Biblical times, I would have hidden my face in my cloak like Elijah of old. This truly was…Holy Ground.
Sousousiance Revisited
Many of you might remember that I recently got away for a week-long silent retreat. It concluded yesterday afternoon. During that whole week, the only talking to be done was my once-every-twenty-four-hour conference with my spiritual director. It was just me and about fifty or so Benedictine monks at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. Every day of their lives, these fellas get together in their Abbey Church for morning prayer (5:30 AM), Mass (7:00 AM), midday prayer (noon), evening prayer (5:00 PM), and night prayer (7:00 PM). They call this community prayer schedule their “Office,” because it is the core of their job description. By the way, each of the monks also nurtures a private prayer life as well. This monastery, along with 4000 other Catholic monasteries across the globe, sees their job as holding the world in prayer. And that’s to say nothing of all the non-Catholic monasteries who also lift humanity up in their own ways. In a nutshell, their lives proclaim that prayer changes things. Contemplative practice changes things. Guests are welcomed to join in for whatever part of that they want. And so I did…some. At first, I found all that chanting and recitation annoying. Then I kind of got in the groove. And that’s when it happened.
Sousousiance! When the monks weren’t singing the psalms of their Office, they spoke them in unison: one side of the church would recite a stanza, and then the other side of the church would respond with the next stanza, back-and-forth, until the psalm concluded. It was during this spoken recitation that I heard it: that unmistakable whispering waterfall of sound. Their voices were so unhurried, so soft—like the flight of butterflies—a creature that seems so fragile, but accomplishes the totally badass feat of flying thousands of miles in a lifetime.
That same feeling overtook me as if I were in a eucalyptus/butterfly forest…Like I not only wanted to keep quiet. I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to go deeper. With my spiritual director’s guidance, I prayed for the grace to take my contemplative practice to a new place.
It was on a similar retreat at the very same location, five years ago, when I began a practice of twice-a-day centering prayer—a kind of meditative practice that’ll remind you a little of Buddhism. Over the last five years, if you could take the fantastic journey into my mind and heart, you would have been hearing an awful lot of internal dialogue, punctuated by my anchoring phrase, “Jesus, my light.” That phrase is intended to re-orient me back into the silence of God’s Spirit within me. I’ve come to think of my contemplative practice as God patiently and lovingly listening to me as I talk to myself. Suffice to say, that when it comes to contemplative practice, I’m a work in progress.
On the retreat last week, rather than my usual quiet times, where I have something that seems a whole lot like a conversation with myself in God’s presence, for the first time, I really attempted to empty myself. I attempted to sit wordlessly, thoughtlessly, and image-less-ly, in the gaze of the One who loves me with an enormous love. Time will tell if this is an evolutionary step forward in my spirituality. I hope it is. I pray that it is. I feel a little like what I imagine a monarch caterpillar feels when he gets the hankering to build a chrysalis. I have this hope that pretty soon….
….. I’m going to get to fly!
An Exercise for You:
I asked a friend, Jennifer Theby-Quinn, who is a fellow contemplative wayfarer, if she would offer a reflection by the poet/spiritual writer, Edwina Gately. She generously agreed to do so. You will find the link below. I’d recommend that you carve out two to three minutes for this. If you aren’t used to this way of praying, try to push through the discomfort and give it a whirl. You’ll want to begin by putting your body in a comfortable, meditative posture. Next, you’ll want to open your heart in whatever way works for you. Many like to receive three deep breaths, particularly concentrating on the exhale. When you’re ready, press the “play” arrow, start at timestamp 8:28, and take these words in the way a hot mug of water takes in tea leaves—allowing the words to infuse you with their color, flavor, and aroma, from the inside out. At the end, sit in silence for a minute or two, paying attention to whatever’s happening in your heart. I’ll be curious to hear what it brings up for you.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for giving this a try. Thanks for being a part of Sunday Morning Café, where “what’s deepest within us is most universal between us.”
Start this video at timestamp 8:28 for the reflection:
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