Holy Week Retreat-in-Pl ace 2020
Entering the Silence that Changes Me by Br. Leven Harton A little while back, a book showed up in my monastery mailbox without a note or any kind of explanation. The book was a kind of self-help book, identifying a character defect and offering a program for addressing this defect. Seeing the title, I immediately took offense. I resorted to blaming and accusing a particular person, someone whom I had no good reason (really) to identify as the culprit, and of whose motive (were he the perpetrator) I had no inkling. Fortunately, I discovered the book just before morning prayers and so was forced to enter into the silence and stillness of Vigils and Lauds. And it wasn’t too long, maybe three minutes, after the offices began that I had a moment of grace and asked myself, “Why would someone put this book in your box? Do you have this character defect?” And, all of the sudden, because I was willing to investigate the matter, I was open to it, a memory came back to me from just a few months before: me going to this very brother I had in mind, having to apologize to him and ask his forgiveness because of the very defect addressed in the book. This was a wonderful moment for me. Independent of the origins of the book or reasons for its advent, I felt my entrenched anger just begin to collapse in the cold light of the truth about my person—I DO need to work on this negative quality! And the resistance in my heart to simply admitting that I needed to work on a part of myself, perceived
The silence in the Church is palpable – not an appalling silence, yet a silence that pierces...God is revealing to us his plan of salvation, and making present to us the very life he desires to offer us – your situation in this moment is where God is choosing to reveal his love to you.
- Abbot James Albers Holy Thursday Homily
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Kansas Monks
by another person, it, too, began to melt— very gently, very peacefully. The desire to accuse and blame diminished too and, even though I still had a little bit of a hurt ego, I was able to allow the judgment against me in. I was able to receive it and I felt freer in being able to receive it. But free from what? Probably fear. My anger, I think, had more to do with feeling uncomfortable with being seen as deficient, fear that this weighing of my person was true. To be free from that fear in acceptance was wonderful.
Speaking and teaching are the master’s task; the disciple is to be silent and listen.
This event has brought me back to a key distinction that one of my confreres, Br. Karel, has made. He notes that St. Benedict’s chapter on silence is titled De Taciturnitate, which is often translated as “On Silence.” But that is not a very precise translation. The - Rule of St. word for silence in Latin is Benedict 6:6 silentium. Taciturnitate is better rendered, “restraint of speech,” like someone who is (in English) taciturn. And in that chapter of the Rule you can read, “Speaking and teaching are the master’s task; the disciple is to be silent and listen.” Br. Karel explained that St. Benedict sees silence not as an experience of going out to Walden Pond and fleeing the distractions and noise of others, achieving a “zero” on the decibel scale. Rather, silence in the monastery has to do with me being silent—me not putting myself, my ideas, my noise out there. Silence, as a Benedictine virtue, is not avoiding being bothered—it’s not running from what is bothering me. It’s being still, even if we are being bothered, because we are being bothered. I was lucky to be forced into this kind of silence at prayers after finding the book in my box. Unable to turn my attention away from prayers and concentrate on all the ways I’d been wronged, I was positioned to sit with what was bothering me. In the early monastic tradition, Abba Moses has a pithy saying that expresses the optimism that I can learn from even painful and bothersome situations: ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’ Staying in place, in silence, with one’s troubles is not consigning oneself to doom or destruction. At least it does not have to be a defeat. Fr. Julian Carron, the leader of the movement Communion
