We ate in silence. At seven-thirty sharp we had filed down the stairs for breakfast. There were about sixty of us, sitting in a cramped refectory at pressboard tables in plastic chairs. The sisters had prepared nutritious food, which was primarily intended for the elderly nuns who lived in the Notre Dame Mission Center’s nursing home, where we were having our retreat. You could hear the sounds of serving spoons against chafing dishes, and coffee slurping into ceramic mugs. No one spoke. It was the second day of our retreat, and the first in full silence.
I signed up for this retreat in February, when I was casting about for things to do on my sabbatical. It was hosted by an organization called the Shalem Institute, which provides spiritual deepening and formation for laypeople and clergy in Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist congregations. They run a fifteen-month spiritual deepening program for ministers and rabbis beginning every July. A friend of mine did this program and got a lot out of it. However, it requires several weeks of residency at Shalem’s Baltimore campus, spread out over the fifteen months. Since my baby was due in August, this didn’t seem like the summer to apply to the long program. A short retreat on the North Shore seemed like a perfect way to dip my toes in to the work of Shalem for the time being.
When I signed up for the retreat, it was advertised as a retreat for spiritual deepening, with times for silence and conversation. When I got further details after I registered, about a month before the retreat began, I discovered that most of the three day retreat would be spent in silence, with some guidance from a contemplative leader at the beginning and end.
Now, self-awareness is an ongoing spiritual discipline for all of us, and I, like anyone, often fall short. But I am fairly confident that I am not, by nature or by practice, a silent person.
There are different ways to accomplish ministry. For me, the talking, preaching, conversational part of ministry has always come more easily, and the part of ministry and spiritual life that takes stillness and listening has always been harder. When I learned that my retreat would be largely silent, I seriously considered whether or not I should still go. Finally I decided that I had often benefitted from taking risks, and this would probably be no different. And, after all, it was only three days.
I often feel that I am in a minority of spiritual seekers when it comes to appreciating silence. Some of our greatest spiritual leaders, in both the western and eastern traditions, have been grounded in the intentional practice of silence. My retreat, as an example, was over-registered almost instantly–I registered months before the retreat and still had to find lodging in Ipswich, because the rooms at the retreat center were filled.
One contemplative leader from the western monastic tradition whose spirit thrived in silence was Thomas Merton, a writer and Trappist monk. As a young man, Merton was a libertine, drinking heavily and spending freely during his first year of college at Cambridge University. Most scholars now think that Merton fathered a child while at Cambridge, although the Trappists have been oblique on this issue. Merton had first encountered silence in faith when he worshipped with a Quaker congregation in Flushing, New York as a teenager (“Thomas” 1.5). But it was not until he was a grown man that he was able to leave the world behind him and enter into the silence as a way of life.
At the outbreak of World War II, Merton, a pacifist, found himself at a crossroads in his life. He knew that the United States army would shortly summon him as a draftee to fight in a way he could not support. He had tried to join the Franciscans some years before, but had been asked to withdraw his application because he was seen as unsuitable, possibly because of his out-of-wedlock child (Merton 455, n. 11). He was then, in the fall and winter of 1941, living in Olean, New York, and teaching English at St. Bonaventure University. He felt he could not continue in that secular work, but was unsure about which of two paths to follow: to move to Friendship House in Harlem, New York to work with the poor; or to apply as a novitiate at the Trappist monastery Gethsemani in Kentucky (“Thomas” 3.2). Finally he was convinced of his vocation as a monk, and had to wait for the Trappists to accept him; and in the meantime, the threat of the draft loomed over him. He wrote, “I can’t think of desiring anything else but the cloister, or of doing anything else but praying and striving to get there, and suffering in patience every trial, everything there is to be suffered, everything that makes the vocation seem hopeless (Merton 466)!” Gethsemani accepted him in December 1941, seven days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
The Trappists are a cloistered order, which means they live apart from the world. They are also a silent order, not speaking aloud to each other at all, but rather communicating through sign language. When Merton entered the monastery, he entered a world of silence. To him, this was part of his calling, and part of his desire as a young man to live completely apart from the raucous world he had known as a youth. Silencing speech does not mean living without sound or meaning. The monks sang their prayers and masses at the appointed hours of the day, and heard scripture read and sung in chapel. Merton himself was a prolific writer, committing to paper the many words he did not say aloud. Although he at first felt unsure about continuing his work as a writer once he had become a monk, his superior in the monastery encouraged him. The silence of the monastery became the fertile earth for the poetry, autobiography and journals of Thomas Merton.
When we exercise our spirituality in a realm of silence, other dimensions emerge. I did not realize how intrusive speech could be until I went a few days without it. At my spiritual retreat, there were no expectations of how we would spend our time in the silence. I had brought some reading and my journal, as well as my knitting, which had reached a difficult spot. I found in the silence freedom to do whatever I wanted: to knit without interruption or questions about what I was making; to write in my journal whenever I felt moved or to go be by myself without being rude to anyone else. I did not expect anything social of my fellow retreaters and could feel confident they had no expectations of me. In the late afternoon I began to feel that the large room we were all sharing was getting too dark, and I realized that I would have to decide to turn on the lights without asking anyone else. There was no way to ask anyone else to share responsibility with me for my actions.
In the writing I did over that retreat, I found new images and depths occurring to my mind. I imagined the world of faith as a deep sea on which I had only been floating, and felt invited to go deeper. I felt that the comforting presence I have called God was with me on my journey. I felt free from the need to plan my day in advance. I walked up a hill to the garden and cemetery, and down behind the retreat center, along a disused path to the marshes which lead out to the sea. A woman led a group of us in body prayer, instructing us to chant and move our bodies in certain ways to allow the spirit to flow through us. She spoke to instruct us, but all of us participants–moving and chanting together–did not speak. I attended mass with the sisters on the morning of the third day and delighted in the singing and sounds of mass. There were riches in the silence which I could never have imagined.
The silence was also exhausting. Not having a room at the retreat center, I could not find anywhere to be truly alone during the days. I felt handicapped, as though tool as indispensable as a thumb or an elbow had been taken from me. I did not get to know anyone I met at the retreat. I even reconnected with a man I had gone to divinity school with, but now can’t remember anything about him (not his name, not his denomination) except that he is married and has children. When I returned to my bed and breakfast in the evenings, it was a relief to sit and have a cup of tea with the innkeepers, and to walk down to the corner store to get a newspaper to read. I had on purpose found a room without a television, and I had not brought my computer, so that I wouldn’t be tempted by the lure of electronics. As it turned out, I was so tired every night that I just wanted to go back to my room–which, of course, was silent and solitary–and go to sleep.
Silence is a part of certain Christian communities, like the Trappists and the Cistercians, but it is a large part of Buddhist practice. Some Buddhists, whether exploring being monks or nuns or studying in a cloistered community, live for days in silence. The Dalai Lama told the story in the reading we heard this morning of a monk who remained silent six days of every week, and spoke only on Saturdays. But even Buddhists who do not commit their lives to silence practice silence as a spiritual discipline. Meditation, the central Buddhist act of piety, is done in silence, or with chanting (but without conversation). I once spent a year attending a weekly Buddhist meditation at the First Parish in Cambridge (Unitarian Universalist), led by a Buddhist man who had spent several years living in a monastery. Just as I did with my more recent silent retreat, I signed up without really knowing what I was getting myself in to. We started by beginning and ending each session by sitting in meditation for ten minutes. Our teacher told us we would, by the end of the class, be sitting for twenty minutes or more. I was very skeptical. How could I sit still and count my breaths for ten minutes, let alone twenty? Yet I was surprised, even on that first day, that I could not feel the time going by as I quieted my mind and counted my inhalations and exhalations.
In Buddhist practice, I learned, not only should I remain physically silent during meditation, I should also allow my mind to become quiet. This doesn’t mean forcing down all the things your mind flings up at you when you give it a chance. It means allowing thoughts and distractions to arise, and then to let them go, and return to the focus of the breath. Enlightenment comes, when it does, out of this profound spiritual silence.
Our world is full of noise. The noise of electronics, the noise of the television and the radio, the noise of automobiles and airplanes, the noise of the marketplace and the noise of endless complaint. We can even use these noises to keep us from the work of faith which we know waits for us in quietude. Complete silence is almost impossible to come by. Seeking out silence as a spiritual practice reconnects us to a deeper and greater source of our own spirits. The Spirit is in the silence, waiting for our attention.
I’d like to end this sermon with a longer period of silence than usual. We’ll take about five minutes to sit in quiet together. If you wish, you may follow the Buddhist practice of following your breath, counting each inhalation and exhalation. If you become distracted or lose count, begin again at one. I will ring the bell to bring us out of our silence together.
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Sources
Dalai Lama. Spiritual Advice for Buddhists and Christians. Ed. Donald W. Mitchell. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Merton, Thomas. Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The Journals of Thomas Merton. New York: Harper, 1996.
“Thomas Merton.” Wikipedia. 11 Dec. 2009. 1-11. Accessed 11 Dec. 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton.
Tags: Sermons, Spiritual growth