Have you ever heard quiet so loud you could hear your stomach digesting? Or been in a room so still you could hear the electricity buzzing through the wiring?
For the last month, I’ve been sitting in this kind of silence as I wander the countryside of south England. I’m here to work on a book and am staying in monasteries so I will be close to the Eucharist and the gift of silence.
Most often, I am the only retreatant in the monastery guesthouse. I ramble through rooms and then on walks through the countryside, quiet, alone with my thoughts and Jesus.
Before I left, I told my favorite seminary professor my plan to do this, to step away from my family and the city for a full month. He replied, “Being alone with the Lord is truly one of life’s great blessings.”
I thought that sounded lovely. There have been moments where I have been in adoration or even stopped on a hike, before a waterfall or field, and sat in the Lord’s presence, basking in his love. But I didn’t really know what my professor meant until I got here — away from all the noise.
I started to realize how much of my inner dialogue is random clatter — refrains from songs on the radio, words a friend said that hurt me or lines from a newspaper article that angered me. Here, although the monks do check on me from time to time, most of the words I hear are during Mass each morning. Each day, a line from the liturgy, one I might have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times, strikes me in a new way.
Yesterday, the priest pronounced, “We DARE to pray, Our Father, who art in heaven...” And with those words, I saw the Our Father as an act of defiance, a weapon against evil and sin, both “out there” in the world, but also in my feeble heart. Today, the responsorial psalm was, “Here I am Lord, ready to do your will.” I sing it all day long, sometimes without thinking, and I know this is a prayer: I want his will to be my own; I want to glorify him.
These lines are replacing my inner dialogue. Now I understand a little more clearly what my professor meant. It is as if God’s words, the living word, are replacing my own. In silence, I am finding Jesus there, to talk to and listen to. I am no longer interested in checking my notifications or watching the latest episode of that Hulu series. None of that is better than what is going on in my mind and heart right now. Clarity.
“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist writes, having heard these words so clearly from the Lord as he spent time with him. I’m no psalmist, but I know that being alone with him has shown me that he alone has power — over my little problems and the big ones of this world — and still wants to love each of us tenderly.
I don’t know how I will bring this silence home with me. Whether it is in small moments at Mass or in my own morning prayers or in a walk down by the lake, I know I won’t rest unless it is in him.
Shemaiah Gonzalez, a member of St. James Cathedral Parish, is a freelance writer with degrees in English literature and intercultural ministry. Find more of her writing at shemaiahgonzalez.com.