Why I’m Afraid of Silence
Drive three hours. Arrive at monastery. Check in. Unpack duffle bag consisting of proper amounts of toiletries, clothes, choice books and journal. Read for ninety minutes. Pack up bag. Drive three hours home.
The moment was rather embarrassing although it’s definitely advantageous for my job. As a pastor, part of my weekly duties is to develop some sort of interesting story or analogy to illustrate whatever point is necessary. Therefore it was easy to take my inability to take a sabbatical and turn it into an amusing anecdote.
The reality was that I was absolutely ecstatic to have several days to myself to read, write, study, pray and immerse myself into the spiritual world I so easily dismiss with my busy schedule. A concept like Sabbath is so easy to forget about, considering I’m so busy doing God’s work. Pulling into the driveway at the monastery and its campus seemed to be a spiritual dream come true. After all, endless paths through peaceful woods next to an equally placid lake…it’s perfect for such a time as that.
But I couldn’t do it. I nervously stood in my window and looked out and realized how much time I had ahead of me. I read for a half hour and journaled for another twenty minutes. Glancing to and fro completed my first hour there and I was already mentally panicking. No internet. No access to the outside world. Just me, a few gathered belongings and my Creator. And I learned it sounds much better than it really is.
I got home and made a joke of it. While at the monastery I developed many reasons why this was poor stewardship of my time and how I needed to be present at home. There were articles I needed to write. There were people I needed to meet with. I can’t deny doing God’s work and just relaxing like I am living in my parents’ basement. The moment I got home, I realized what I’d done - wasting this planned moment and coming home to the hustle and bustle that made me want to leave in the first place.
So I used it as a story that Sunday morning. People nodded their heads as they understood and it was a nice moment where we all realized that we are just busy and it’s hard to unplug. I felt okay with my illustration - “Ha! That funny Matt. He’s just like me.” And I was going to be fine and forget the whole episode until one friend chastised me.
“You failed. And don’t paint it any other way. You were afraid. It’s not a joke and it’s not something to pass off lightly. I’m disappointed in you because I know that you needed this. But you’re afraid of being alone and you left out of fear.” He was right. I’m afraid of what I look like when there’s nobody to impress. I’m afraid of what God might say to me or ask of me when I give him all the time in the world. I’m afraid of being, well, naked and ashamed as humans can tend to be.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I look around and it’s hard to find anyone willing to endure the silence. I am surrounded by a culture refusing to allow stillness to find their soul, to allow themselves to be re-created. Wendell Berry says it best, I believe:
“There is indeed a potential terror of [silence]. It asks a man what is the use and what is the worth of his life. It asks him who he thinks he is, and what he thinks he’s doing, and where he thinks he’s going. In it the world and its places and aspects are apt to become present to him, the lives of water and trees and stars surround his life and press their obscure demands. Once it is attended to, admitted into the head one must bear a greater burden of consciousness and knowledge - one must change one’s life. If one has nothing within oneself with which to respond, it would be unbearable. If the silence within the man should be touched by the impenetrable silence that ultimately surrounds him, what might happen to the thin partition of flesh and possessions?
“In the face of that silence…no wonder he turns on the radio. No wonder he goes as fast as he can. Pursued into the wilderness by questions he is afraid even to ask, no wonder he finds his comfort - to his bewilderment, surely - in what he thought he wanted to be free of: crowdedness and commotion and hurry and mess.”
My thoughts exactly.
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
Great post Matt.
As a 36-year-old single guy, I live alone and have for most of my adult life. I’ve got silence around me all the time and you’re right, it is scary. Man was not meant to be alone and I feel it deeply everyday when I come home from work to my empty house. I loathe my days off because for me, days off are exile from other people. Does it give me time to do things I want to do, sure, but after years and years of having no one to please but myself, I find it more and more difficult all the time to find motivation and escape from depression. I’m terrified to think of what I might have become were God not there to fill the silence at times. Silence can be good, but you can have too much of a good thing.
I understand that for some people, people with busy lives and famlies, that aloneness can be alluring, refreshing, and therapeutic, but to others, like me, aloneness is awful, not because we are afraid of it, but because we are afraid we might never escape it.
I was going to thank you for writing this and mention how it described a feeling I am personally familiar with, something I experienced myself last time I went to the monastery, something that I don’t really know what to do about. But then I realized I still had work to do tonight, and some email to open, projects to complete, a blog or two to read, some music to download…
(Here’s a question — when you’re reading articles and such online, how often do you really actually READ them? Or have you gotten in the habit, like me, of skipping around, trying to get the general idea so you can move on to the next thing in your long list of “things to check”? Is this true in the offline world as well? It seems to me I’m spending a considerable amount of time not spending time on anything in particular. What is up with that?)
In any case, I’m obviously way too busy to participate in this conversation. So I’ll just say “yes” and “thank you”.
I thought I would share my own positive experience of discovering silent retreats. A friend of mine recommended a Jesuit retreat house that she’d been to. The idea really appealled to me - I was quite aware of how the familiar spiritual experiences of my Evangelical Protestant experience tended to be characterised by hectic activity (summer camps, conferences etc), and I instinctively felt that something was amiss.
So I signed up for a four day silent retreat. Now, the good thing about silent retreats with the Jesuits is that they’re not completely silent - you get half an hour a day to talk things through with a director, and I would say that that’s invaluable. The director isn’t there to sort out your life, or to be an external voice of discipline - he or she is there to listen and make suggestions, to help you to pay attention to the conversation that is going on between you and God over your time away.
It took me about 3 of the 4 days of my first retreat to “get it”. I neatly organised my time into little activities - checking out the different prayer rooms in the house, walking the grounds, perusing the centre’s library and book shop, going to the little evening service in the house, reading one of several books I’d brought with me (of the worthwhile “spiritual” type), and even trying out the suggestions that my director had made (e.g. imaginative contemplation-type things, doing some creative things in the art room).
Round about day 3, while spending time with a bible passage that my director suggested, the silence crept up on me and I “got it” - I realised that were was stuff I really wanted to talk to me about, and conversely, I realised there was stuff he really wanted to talk to me about as well. I ended up feeling quite annoyed with myself for bringing so many books, when in the end, that had only delayed the experience of God creeping up on me, and left me with less time at the end of the retreat to talk openly about what was going on. I had been filling my time focusing my thoughts on spiritual books that were full of someone else’s helpful principles, when my time could more profitably have been spent drinking mugs of coffee and staring out the window!
Since then I’ve gone on two more similar retreats, one 4 days, and the next one 8 days (when I realised that once you enter into the time away properly, 4 days can really feel like its not enough!) I went to a conference with Dallas Willard where he shared his own self-discipline of a quiet weekend every 6 months - and so my own rule of thumb I took away from this was a week-long retreat roughly every year. I’ve found this absolutely invaluable as an annual spiritual reality check - “so where exactly am I with my relationship with God these days?”
But from personal experience, I think I would recommend going on retreat with a group that has some experience of spiritual direction (or soul friendship, or whatever else it might be called). If you really don’t know what to do with a load of silent space, then it’s very helpful to have someone there to make some simple suggestions; and who has enough wisdom to listen to what’s going in your spiritual life, and not try to send you off in a completely irrelevant or unhelpful direction.
The Jesuits are very good at this sort of thing (the first book on a Jesuit’s reading list after the Bible is “The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola”, a collection of practical observations on people’s experiences of God, things that often prove to be a help or hindrance along the way). I understand that the Benedictines have a tradition of this work as well, as do some other monastic communities (but not all).
Anyway, enough rambling - that’s been my own experience of silent retreats, just thought I would share them!
P.S. All that is not to say that I don’t find silence a scary business - it certainly is! Who knows what God’s going to say to you whenever you stop long enough to listen…
Thank God for friends who will call us out when all we want to do is joke about our failure. They are invaluable.
It is easy to deflect failures into an illustration, when we really are just trying to put them out for acceptance by other people. You’ve got a great friend who challenged that notion. I have not done a retreat, but have talked about it often enough. For most of my life it has seemingly been enough to live off of the experiences of others and be happy to “get it”, but not living it out like I should. This is all a part of the process of not getting it, but becoming it. So thank you for helping me think and identify.
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