Inner Quiet

     Right off, I want to make clear that I love family get-togethers. Aside from major holidays, our immediate family gathers once weekly or once every two weeks, usually on Sunday, for the midday meal, lively banter, and lately, a game or two of Mexican Train Dominos. These gatherings take place here at my mother's house, the old homestead, if you will. It is a small—nay, tiny house in which one may easily hear from one end of it a conversation held at the other end, unless doors are closed or the conversants are whispering. When siblings mit  spouses are assembled all together in one room, be it the living or dining room, and everyone is talking at once, either to each other in pairs or on top of each other in a futile effort to be heard, the noise level can be truly astonishing.

     Astonishing, yes—especially to one who has lived fifteen years all alone in a small apartment, followed by nearly two and a half years in one of the quietest habitations on earth—a Catholic cloister. I didn't need to move to midtown Manhattan directly from the monastery to experience the noise equivalent of culture shock (sound shock, perhaps?); no, I simply had to move back to the family homestead. Even after six years back "in the world," I can still be easily and negatively affected by noise. Nor does the noise have to be excessive; it can be my mother's TV turned up just a tad past comfortable, a neighbor's stereo's mega bass thumping just a little too loudly, a crowded restaurant, a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. My sensitive ears are literally pained and, if I'm not vigilant, my quiet core can be jangled.

     This quiet core is something that was carefully nurtured during my brief time as a monastic. It has become essential to my day-to-day existence now that I no longer have the enclosure walls to shield me from the noise and potentially negative influence of the world. I believe those who adhere to Asian philosophies would call this inner peace a "Zen place." To Christians, it is that deepest part of the soul where the Holy Trinity dwells. It is the peace of Christ that creates this quiet core, a peace that is given when we, through a conscious effort of the will and with the help of divine grace, strive to keep its environment (mind, soul, and body) a fit dwelling place. It is where we meet God in moments of silent contemplation, where we hear his wordless voice speaking to us through the Spirit. It is not a silence of emptiness, but of sublime fullness. This is precisely why monasteries exist, and why a quiet environment is so crucial to monastic life.

     However, not everyone is called to be a monastic. Most people live in the secular, noisy, jostling, stress-filled world that is only a pilgrimage to the life we are all meant to live. Monastic life strives to provide a taste of that promised life, but if we can't live in a monastery we can at least build and maintain an inner monastery where we can retreat from the world's noise and confusion and listen to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit.

     My family's boisterous banter is by no means a negative influence, but in all honesty, it is at times aurally challenging and disturbing to one's calm. So when I'm sitting at the dining room table with my family, playing dominos, and everyone around me is talking at once and at the top of their voices, I make a special effort to remain as quiet and inwardly still as possible. When my mother turns her TV up near maximum volume because she's growing a bit hard of hearing, I try my best not to grumble, even in my mind. When my neighbor's mega bass pounds away through my bedroom wall, I delay my prayer time till he shuts it off, and in the meanwhile try to be patient by thinking of how patient God is with me. It's either that, or go mad.

The Quest for Silence

     This world is inundated with noise. So much so, that we have grown uncomfortable with silence. But it is in silence that we can speak more clearly to God, and in silence that God's voice is most clearly heard.

     When I was a professional musician, my days were filled with sound—making it, hearing it, evaluating it, refining it. When silence did, in rare moments, emerge like a sudden sun ray through storm clouds, its "noise" was deafening and discomfiting, a waste of the aural sense, a mere blank space. A mockingbird's recital, the tiny tapping of rain, even the distant hum of traffic— anything was preferable to that most uneasy of companions—total silence. Quiet was easier; quiet was the soft white blanket I could lay over sound, muffling it, but never banishing it altogether.

     Total silence became important to me when I recovered my faith and needed to communicate with God in the depths of my soul. I didn't want the silence that is simply a void; I didn't want the mere emptying of distracting or negative thoughts which is its own end and which has become so popular in recent decades. I wanted to meet God in the silence and allow him to fill the void, to let him become my thought and my very conscience. This is the goal of Christian meditation, the goal of the Christian contemplative, whether in the cloister or in the world.

     I have been to New York City many times, but I especially remember the first time I went there after leaving the monastery. Granted, I had been back in San Antonio for some months; but San Antonio, and the kind of life I live here, is calm and quiet compared to Manhattan (then again, most cities are). Just before that particular visit to New York, I had spent ten days at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, a period of peace in the company of people whose daily goal it is to maintain a state of prayerful recollection. Arriving in Manhattan literally straight from the abbey, my senses were assaulted by the cacophony of traffic, the scurrying of crowds, and, I have to say, general rudeness and lack of simple consideration. On nearly every face was that focused yet unseeing gaze of someone completely absorbed in his own teeming thoughts and the business of the day. Not one looked happy or at peace.

     Now, before you bombard me with objections and arguments, I realize that I'm making a huge generalization and that my impressions were strongly colored by my stay at the abbey; there are many things I love about New York, and I always look forward to my visits there; but I couldn't help being struck by the disheartening realization that God is becoming more and more drowned out by noise everywhere—the noise, both actual and metaphorical, of "living," and the noise inside our own heads. For nearly two and a half years in the silence of the cloister, God was at the center of my consciousness, my pulse, my speech. I mourn the loss of that silence, as I sit here typing this with the television on not three feet away (not my choice, my parents'). It has become a struggle, day to day, to find those precious pockets of silence in which to still my mind and body and listen to the deep stirrings of the Spirit. I strive for prayerful recollection while going about the business of my day, but I know how essential silent prayer and contemplation are, if only for fifteen minutes a day, to one's spiritual growth and health. The quest for silence will and should never end.