Sound of silence

Silence is essential because it allows you to hear the quiet voice of God...

I’m having a quiet weekend…

…literally.

I’m on my annual three-day silent retreat with the Jesuits at the Demontreville retreat house near Lake Elmo. I’ve been doing this for more than a decade now … you might say it’s habit forming (bad pun unashamedly intended).

After darn near 500 years, the Jesuits pretty much have this retreat business down pat – they’ve been at it since the order’s founder – Saint Ignatius Loyola – completed their retreat manual – the Spiritual Exercises – back in 1533. They’ve only been at it for 75 years at Demontreville. -- in this case, “only” being a pretty relative term – but the weekend gives me a chance to refresh and refocus that I look forward to for most of the year.

It’s funny how folks react when I mention it. Rarely does anybody bring up doctrine, theology or even God, for that matter. What they can’t seem to get past is the thought of keeping their mouths shut for 72 hours straight.

And that for me goes straight to the point.

For the record, here’s the official take on it:

“Silence is necessary because it removes some of the noise that we are surrounded by and bothered by all day long,” said the Rev. Tom Lawler, the retreat house director. “Being silent requires slowing down and focusing on the senses. It allows you to listen at different levels to what is going on within you – and what is going is going on around you.

“Silence is essential because it allows you to hear the quiet voice of God,” Lawler said. “That voice is often speaking in your heart, so you need to find room and space for that voice to be heard and recognized.”

Now, I’m not sure about the “voice of God” part. I have a pretty certain hunch that if the selfsame deity that goes around touching off supernovas really wanted to get my attention interrupting a rerun of Gilligan’s Island wouldn’t pose a real problem. My mother summed up the real problem when brother, sister and I would get a bit over rambunctious: “Get yourselves outside! I can't hear myself think!”

That’s no small problem for most of us most of the time. It’s probably not some rowdy kids trashing the living room, but how little time in the average day do any of us have to simply hear ourselves think.

Now, that noise Father Tom talks about doesn’t just come at us through our ears. That noise I’m retreating from and the silence I seek to experience isn’t just not having to hear some braying jackass pitching me to buy his brand of potato chips or drop fifty grand on a new car; it’s not having to involuntarily think of those damn potato chips or that overpriced car ... at least for a few blessed hours. It’s being able to hear myself think, rather than having my thinking taken over by others.

That’s an experience that’s hard to come by. Rare enough that it’s an experience we often find uncomfortable. How many times, no sooner than we shed our coats, do we flip on a radio or grab the remote for the TV – just to put some noise in the house. We equip our cars with sound systems to rival a concert hall to avoid suffering in silence all the way to the grocery store ... and at the store, of course, there’s Muzak to drown out the murmuring of other folks, equally distracted, keeping their distance. The jingles, the chatter, the videos, and headlines keep our attention occupied, from the back of the cereal box at the breakfast table to the late night monologue viewed between our toes just before sleep.

Truth is, it’s just the world we live in, what we’re born into, inherited. But there still is a choice. I remember Mom marching into the living room, standing between us and the Saturday morning cartoons with a command to “Shut off the boop-box and do something...” Well, that’s still easier said than done, but it’s amazing what comes to mind when it’s finally quiet enough to hear yourself think.