Monday morning, in the gym locker room, I share a mirror with a young woman half my age, as we ready ourselves for the day. She tells me about her weekend: drinks with officemates, brunch, a walk with her boyfriend, and lots of Netflix.
Pulling out a tube of mascara, she returns the civility, “What did you do this weekend?”
“I went to a monastery for the weekend.”
“Really?” She puts the mascara wand back in the tube. “What do you do there?”
“I write. I take walks. And I pray the liturgy of the hours with the monks five times a day.”
She is now looking directly at me in the mirror. “How do you get used to all that silence?”
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The question arrests me because I remember what it was like to be afraid of silence.
Silence brings its own noise — our thoughts, our anxieties, and our fears.
And, as poet Christian Wiman says, “Silence is the language of faith.” What if you don’t believe? What if you are uncertain of what you believe? What if you think if you stop and are quiet long enough, you might have to hear all those questions and deal with them?
And what if, for all these years, your idea of God is of someone who will yell and chastise you and make you feel bad about yourself?
So you busy yourself. You wear earbuds constantly, so that you will never feel lonely. There will always be someone in your ear, talking to you, teaching you, telling you that you are alright. On walks, while we drive, alone in our house — there is always noise in the background, news, podcasts, music, or talking on the phone.
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The first time I went to a monastery I could not get over how deliberately the monks walked. Frankly, it drove me crazy. Didn’t they have somewhere to go? How could they walk so slowly? If I was walking with or behind a brother, my own gait slowed to match theirs, until I felt as if I was hovering in midair. I heard the swish of their tunic each time their right leg came forward.
The silence drove me bonkers. I could hear my own heart pounding. Each movement in the retreat house seemed to echo to embarrassment. And my body felt awkward — nothing but corners to knock on door frames and the edges of tables.
It took me a few days to slow down enough to hear the silence. When it finally came, when I finally let it come, silence flooded me with His love.
The silence did not reveal a school principal God who wanted to let me know which rules I had seriously disobeyed. Neither was God angry, judgmental, or argumentative. He just was.
God was peace — pure, unadulterated, complete peace. When I sat in that silence for a while my problems began to shrink. I started to see how some did not matter as much as I thought they did, and I began to see the solutions to others more clearly. And, with some, I simply was not afraid of them any longer, for I found His silence strengthened me.
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Silence is the language of faith. Silence is where we surrender our ego and admit that we cannot do it on our own. It’s in silence that we can hear the still small voice of God, beckoning to us in love.
I wanted to tell the woman at the gym how, now that I have drunk a few glasses of silence, I am all the more thirsty for it. That is why I schedule time once a month to be absolutely quiet. I wanted to tell her how God will be waiting for her in the silence, to love and guide her. And that she will long for it more than mules and margaritas, and will wonder why she spent so much time on that horrid Netflix series she hated, when she could have all this and come back to work and the routine feeling like if God is for her, who can be against her.
But someone started up a blow-dryer and we couldn’t hear each other anymore.
What do I do with all that silence? I rest in it.
