"At the edge of waiting."
"For this is the secret of rinnfheitheamh — we are always waiting, we are always shaped by longing for the One who can never be held but whom we may behold. But the waiting itself is a satisfaction, only it is a satisfaction that, paradoxically, deepens the longing. As we move deeper into silence, we realize that the silence is always within us, even if it is covered over by the noise of our restless minds. And realizing that the silence is always there, we discover that the edge of waiting is the center of our hearts." Carl McColman
The Irish word for contemplation — or contemplative prayer — is rinnfheitheamh. Yes, that’s a mouthful! I only have enough Irish to be dangerous, and the pronunciation of Irish depends on which of several dialects you’re speaking, but to the best of my knowledge the pronunciation is something like RINN-eh-hev.
So why such a big word, for such a simple concept? To answer that question, let’s take rinnfheitheamh apart.
Rinn means a point or a tip, as in the sharp point of a sword. Fheitheamh means “waiting.”
So a literal translation of rinnfheitheamh would be “at the edge of waiting.”
Which could easily be the most evocative and useful word for contemplation I’ve ever come across, in any language.
Remember, Celtic spirituality is the spirituality of the edge of the world. It’s the spirituality that stands on windswept rocky shores, gazing westward to the open, stormy sea. It acknowledges that “edge” place in our hearts where time meets eternity, where words fade off into silence, and where heaven silently gazes into the turmoil of earthly life.
And we are always invited to gaze back, to gaze out of the chaos and the tensions and the paradoxes of our lives, into the silence, into the deep waters of eternity.
So to be a contemplative is to enter a place where prayer is shaped by waiting. This is not unique to the Irish, or to the Celts. Indeed, waiting is a theme that crops up again and again in the Psalms. Jesus counseled his disciples to practice a spirituality of watchfulness, telling the story of the wise and foolish maidens as a cautionary tale about the importance of remaining mindful.
Indeed, my other favorite word for contemplation is a Hebrew word for silence, found only four times in the Hebrew scriptures, and always in the Psalms. That word is dûmiyyāh (דּוּמִיָּה), which means not only silence but a kind of repose, a kind of still waiting. We find it in Psalm 62, in the line “For God alone, my soul in silence waits.”
Perhaps the most enlightening usage of the word is in the first verse of Psalm 65, in a verse that often gets mistranslated in English — the Hebrew literally reads “Silence is praise to you, O God on Zion, to you our vow must be fulfilled.” But it’s not any silence which functions as a way of worshipping God — it’s the silence at the edge of waiting: the silence of contemplation.
The edge of contemplation is a sharp edge: an edge like the tip of a sword, the thin blade of the knife, an edge so sharp that it can effortlessly separate those things which need to be set apart. For a contemplative, this means setting apart the very words and daydreams and cluttery emotions that cloud our minds and hearts and distract us from the presence of God.
When we pray at the edge of waiting, silence becomes a surgical scalpel to carefully remove our attachments to transitory pleasures or addictive compulsions. The silence of waiting sets us free — but it doesn’t do so violently or instantaneously. That’s where the “waiting” part comes in.
We pray at the edge of waiting when we bring our patience into the silence, trusting that the roots and thorns of our graspings and our anxieties must be slowly and gently pruned away, measured by a process of unraveling that opens us up according to the leisure of eternity, not the relentless ticking of terrestrial time. And yet, this waiting, this silence, this edge of prayer is something we live into breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, instant by instant.
From Carl's beautiful book, An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom.