Silence, Revisited
The thing I needed to hear about making time to hear God.
I dragged myself to the parish Lenten retreat Friday night, not because I was excited about it or in the mood, but because my pastor had a stellar track record at putting together good retreats and the speaker looked interesting.
Fr. Philip Scott is a handful and he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he was what my husband and I needed (so Fr. Gonzo maintains a perfect batting average in his picks for us — hopefully everyone else in attendance felt the same way). One thing Fr. Scott talked about that helped me in particular were his comments on silence.
His central point was that if we don’t have prayerful silence then we’re blocking out God’s voice. This was bigger than just prayer-time or scripture-time; he spoke of intentional, long periods of silence for the purpose of hearing God.
For perspective, Fr. Scott said that when advising priests as a spiritual director, his goal is to work towards a habitual practice of three hours daily of silence before the Blessed Sacrament. Three hours. Wowzers.
That wasn’t something he was prescribing to the group, or prescribing to strangers on the internet, or prescribing to random priests he’d never met before. He shared it by way of example, and to underscore his seriousness about our need to hush up and listen.
The second thing that helped me tremendously is he said that silence in the middle of the night was particularly powerful. I needed to hear this because I am frequently awake in the middle night, not by choice or spiritual leaning but because I’m one of the many middle-aged people who is prone to insomnia. It happens. It’s dark, you want to be sleeping, but you’re not.
Sometimes at night I’ll get up to get a drink and at the kitchen window I’ll see the moon, or the cat wants to be let in and when I open the door the stars are so gorgeous, or the night air is so serene and alive that I just want to switch off the porch lights and go be out in the nighttime for a while. Occasionally I do it for a minute or two, and then go back inside and read or do the Wordle or something.
—> Legion of Mary folks know that you can only pray Who is she that comes forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon . . . ? so many times before you’ll never be able to ignore the moon again.
So I really, really needed that permission — that encouragement — to just go! That there was something to be sought and gained in the silence of the middle of the night. I don’t have the Blessed Sacrament at my house, but solitude out under the sky has always been a good place for me to clear my head and listen for God.
The third thing I needed to hear was a comment he made about the rule his community follows. He said that in order to provide this purposeful silence — a quieting of the self and an eliminating of the pleasant little distractions we tend to fill our empty mental spaces with — the members of the community spend the first half of their day in silent manual labor. He didn’t elaborate on that, and he in no way implied that anyone in the audience needed to take on that discipline. He was just giving an example.
In conjunction with those comments, he pointed out specifically how we (where you see “we” translate: me who is writing this) manage to find so much time to scroll social media or listen to the news or watch TV, but somehow barely squeak in a daily minimum of prayer, and only under duress. Sure, okay. I know that. I don’t need chapters on the importance of prayer. I write those chapters. I know. I KNOW.
But but but but . . . [insert vaguely self-convincing excuses here].
Fr. Scott’s comments this weekend put the internal tension I’d been dealing with in a different perspective. Silence not as an absence, or as a form of self-denial, but as a purposeful listening. Long periods without external noise as a goal, as an active work, as something being accomplished. Something that counts. The extreme opposite of multi-tasking. And finally: Silence ordered in a way that is consistent with one’s own vocation.
So the change I made was to identify an expanse of my day and night that could regularly be set aside as no-noise. Not as a Lenten penance. Not to eliminate good things in my life. Not as self-improvement. And without the pressure of a specific routine beyond these hours of the day are noise-limited, because one of the realities of my state in life is that very little can be reliably scheduled into a consistent routine.
—> For example, my personal rule for “silence” doesn’t exclude conversation with family members, which is central to my vocation — but I picked self-quiet hours when usually the people I live with are occupied elsewhere, so my odds of being able to pray or work in mental silence are fairly high. If they need me then, it’s part of my mission from God, good thing I was listening — ha!
One of the reasons I jumped on this idea is because there are very few spiritual practices I can include in my day and be 99% confident I’ll be able to do the thing every day, if I set realistic parameters.
Anything other than interior silence? I can point to a time in my life when I was literally unable to do it, even if it is a practice I love and ordinarily find beneficial. But interior silence, which is not about the noise I can’t control but only the noise that is in my power to direct? It’s realistic. It’s feasible. Worth a shot.
I wanted to share all that for three reasons. The obvious one is in case there’s someone who could use this information directly.
The second is to emphasize the value of retreats, homilies, spiritual reading, discipleship groups, and all that: It’s not so much that we’re hearing something completely new. But we do need things told to us, affirmed for us, repeated for us.
So if you’re feeling the pressure to come up with The Next Big Thing for your parish or your group, maybe the next big thing in your listeners’ life is an old and well-known thing, but said again, at just the right time.
And finally, please be encouraged if there’s something you’ve been wrestling with in your spiritual life but can’t quite get your head around yet, or something that used to work and just doesn’t anymore and you can’t seem to find your way back. Keep seeking God.
I just showed up open-to-whatever, and frankly not even that open. But at the right time — and even a month ago would have been the wrong time, for me — I happened on the things I needed to hear in order to put a lot of pieces together that I’d been, at best, fumbling with miserably.
So give yourself time. If you’re open to letting God act in your life, He’ll get you where you need to be, when you need to be there.
Nodding, nodding. Yes, Jen. Yes, LORD.