One day, however, I realized that I was setting myself up for failure. Instead of trying so hard to change the environment around me, I simply needed to take note of the small pools of silence that lay hidden along the pathway of my noisy daily round.
I’d already developed the habit of spending fifteen minutes in solitude each morning on my bench beneath some pine trees on our property. There, I’d learned to open my eyes in a new, childlike way to ducks in flight, clouds, and acorns half-buried in oak mulch. Now I focused on what was happening with my ears. The first thing I noticed was that the wing feathers of flying ducks make a hushed but definite squeaking noise, like the stiff rustling of hurrying petticoats. This, of course, was not silence — but it required some measure of silence for me to even notice it.
Next, I heard the dawn wind stirring the tops of the pines. This reminded me of Jesus’ words in John: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). I realized that a person who did not regularly listen to the wind would miss entirely the point of Christ’s metaphor — and would also miss a significant theological statement about how things work in the spiritual realm.
Ambrose Wathen says in his book Silence, “The present age is recognized by many as an age of noise. . . . There has been a rise in the incidence of deafness, and some are even afraid that man as a species will lose his sense of hearing due to the constant bombardment of sound.”
Wathen’s words came back to me one night when, no matter what I tried, I could not fall asleep. As I lay there between the sheets with clenched fists, frustrated and anxious about the exhausting day ahead of me, I suddenly realized a wondrous thing: our usually chaotic house was utterly still. I slipped out of bed, padded downstairs and made myself a cup of tea. Then I sat cross-legged on a patch of moonlit carpet, reveling in the quiet of a house filled with sleeping loved ones.
A few days later on the way to work, I had another breakthrough: my car could be a sanctuary too. All I had to do is turn off National Public Radio, which at first felt like a sin. How was I going to stay in touch with world events without my daily dose of Morning Edition? After a couple of dead-air minutes, I grew nervous and turned it back on again. Suddenly, however, the radio voices seemed clamorous, invasive, and I realized that I was hungrier for silence than I was for up-to-the-minute news.
The search went on, and the opportunities continued to open up. One afternoon between my university classes, I stumbled onto a tiny herb garden I’d never noticed before. Here, among clouds of rosemary, sage and thyme, I began to sit for fifteen minutes each day with my face eyes closed and my face to the sun. Not yet true quiet, but the usual sounds of a busy campus (chatter, laughter, engines) seemed curiously muted. I was beginning to see that it was possible to become a more peaceful human being without having to change the world around me.
Morton Kelsey, psychologist and Episcopalian minister, says that “the first step in finding . . . contact with God is learning to be alone and quiet. . . . There is just one aim to start with, to still the tumult of activity in mind and body and center down in a state of recollection. And this means shutting out the invading noises from both the outside world and the inner psychic one.”
Certainly, this will seem quite difficult at first, given the bustling society in which we live. Should we become discouraged in our quest for quiet, however, St. Gregory of Sinai reminds us that “the first requirements of silence are to have faith and patience, and, with one’s whole heart . . . to love and to hope.”
Paula Huston’s most recent book is The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola, 2003). She is also co-editor and a contributing essayist for Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton, 2000). A National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing, she is the author of a novel, Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995) and numerous short stories. She is married, has four children, and is a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate. For more information, visit her website at www.paulahuston.com.
(This article was excerpted from The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston (Loyola Press, 2003). Reprinted with permission of Loyola Press. To order copies of this book, call 1-800-621-1008 or visit www.loyolabooks.org.)
