The Silence That Sings

I am on a silent retreat this week. That is to say, I am conducting a retreat for a religious community. So the experience is not quite the same as when you opt to go on a retreat for your own spiritual refreshment and renewal, or just because you need some peaceful time away. When you are giving addresses each day, and seeing retreatants who have asked for a conversation or want to make their confession, you are not there for yourself but for others. There is work to be done. 

Nevertheless, this week is a gift. Even though it's less than a month since I got back from leading an ordination retreat, it's still a welcome and a precious time. At the heart of the religious life is daily prayer, the eucharist together with the four offices of morning, midday, evening and night prayer. This community's beautifully reordered church, its architecture and furnishings noble but restrained, speak of spiritual values we should emulate. In its clear light, you feel that this church is a place of truth where we come to transact the business of God and of ourselves as we are before before him. There's no hiding from God here. You feel that you are seen, and known. That can be uncomfortable, painful even. But you also sense that this place of truth is also a place of humane companionship where pilgrims share bread and walk together before God. And a place of love where you are held in the embrace of a community that lives out the love of God himself.

Worshipping here has a stabilising, calming effect. The ancient plainchant of the psalms and canticles have a spiritual clarity that matches the quality of light. Words are spoken very slowly, softly and deliberately so as to reverence the sacred truths we are taking upon our lips. The daily prayers give the day focus, shape, direction and structure. Life feels intentional: there is a quiet prayerful purposefulness in the way the community goes about its business. There is something graceful about this life lived together that imbues ordinary things with meaning. No one is in a hurry. Walking purposefully becomes a religious act in itself. You begin to understand how in the religious life, space and time, activity and stillness become suffused with the spirituality of the conventual church and all that happens there: eucharist, prayer, scripture, psalmody, silence. (Because of the importance of the psalms in the community's daily prayer, I am offering reflections on the psalms of the day and trying to show how the whole of human life is contained within these marvellous texts. I'm also suggesting how they can help us to pray more authentically.  You can read my addresses here. I am adding them each day as I give them.)

It's the silence of places like these that we secular Christians tend to seek when we go on retreat. For some people this is more difficult than for others. As an introvert, I'm fortunate not to find this a problem myself. I've always valued silence and solitude, perhaps to a fault - who can say? In any case, retirement is necessarily a lot more silent than life used to be when time overflowed with activities, meetings, conversations and all the business that goes into an ordinary working day. That has taken some getting used to, though it is most welcome (for now).

But silence of the kind I'm finding here is more than just the absence of noise or music or conversation or digital stimuli. It's a rule of life, a discipline that's chosen, whether permanently or simply for a while, to help us quieten our spirits, practise stillness, become more aware, learn how to listen, discern God's presence in our midst. It's this that religious communities strive so hard to maintain and protect. At first it can seem odd to live in this way, especially at meal times when common courtesy and our innate sociability suggest that conversing amicably is the natural accompaniment to eating and drinking. So it is, most of the time. But silence is far from living in some private world of your own. On the contrary, it gives you the chance to meet and get to know others in surprising ways even if you never exchange so much as a single word outside the liturgy. When you pray with people and sit at table with them day by day, strangers become friends. Don't ask me how it happens. I'm just saying that it does. 

This kind of silence, inhabited by a community of prayer, can feel highly charged. A retreat can be an intense experience, especially when it takes place at a time of personal change or transition. My retreat before being ordained priest was like that. It was an important place to explore my hopes and expectations of ordained life, offer my vocation and my gratitude for it, try to be realistic about the failures and the flaws in my life of which I was acutely conscious at that momentous threshold. I was all alone (always the introvert!) on that retreat in a Benedictine house where the silence, and the holy warmth of the community, and the beauty and generosity of its liturgy made me so welcome. For me, then, it was a vital place of truth. 1976 was a blazingly hot summer. Perhaps that has helped the memory to glow. I sat in the gardens on the parched grass and read Jean-Pierre de Caussade on The Sacament of the Present Moment, and George Herbert's A Priest to the Temple together with many of his poems. But it's the quality of the silence that I most remember. I realise forty years later how thirsty I was for it.  I've been on many retreats since. But that experience stands out as life-giving in a special way.

The Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem about silence that inspired the title of one of Thomas Merton's best known books. It begins:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Silence can sing when we have ears (whorlèd or not) to hear. There is a music we become aware of when we elect for silence, attune the senses and start listening. You never know what kind of music it will be. But as the desert fathers used to say, you "go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything". It's a matter of being open to the Spirit of God, that's all. Like William Blake hearing angels singing in his garden, and seeing heaven in a grain of sand.

Walking Into 2017

Today means getting back to work after the holiday. Even in retirement time has its ebbs and flows, is shaped and configured by the seasons. After Christmas and new year, ordinary time is here again (not liturgically I know - but it feels that way). A new term has begun and the caravanserai of school buses snakes past the house with youngsters from across Northumberland. My wife returns to her day-job with people to see. And I have some thinking to do.

It's a beautiful day: crisp, clear and sunny. The sky has that exquisite duck-egg hue you get in the north in winter and which it's almost impossible to capture accurately in a photo (I've tried). I need to walk, not so much to slough off Yuletide excess (there's a bit of that) as to limber up, get body and mind into shape for whatever awaits this new year. Walking is good mental and spiritual exercise as well as good for the body. It has a way of sorting things, putting them into their proper places. Pascal said: "just carry on walking, and everything will be all right".

I've said I have some thinking to do. So I find some classical music, plug in my earphones and head off up the hill. Who else finds that BBC Radio 3 is among the best of all walking companions? So enjoyable. So civilised. So stimulating. And most of the time, so harmonious in ways that in the open air suggest nature and art echoing each other in praise of creation's eternal harmonies. Every walk out of the village takes you up a hillside. When you live in a steep-sided valley, walks bring their rewards early on. Quiet narrow lanes criss-cross the hills with only the occasional tractor or post van to disturb the tranquility. The holly trees are thick with berries. Snowdrops are tentatively pushing through the hard ground. Mossy drystone walls glow green and silver-grey in the morning light.

I climb clear of the village outlier, an intriguing group of Northumbrian bastle houses gathered round a green in a place that clearly has a long defensive history in this land of border reivers. Here is where I set about getting my mind round the project I need to think about. It focuses on the three sets of addresses I have agreed to give in 2017. Why on earth did I take on so much in one year, my wife has asked me, as if to say, will you never learn? I respond, feebly, that favours are being called in here, and promises about how I would have so much more time to give in retirement. I hardly convince myself, let alone her. But on the other hand, I am honoured to be asked to do important things like these. I am glad still to be useful in my superannuation. And I shall enjoy the mental and spiritual stimulus of preparing for these assignments because I know how much I shall learn in the course of it.

The first is to preach through Holy Week in an English cathedral. I have always thought that the public proclamation of the cross is the year's most awesome undertaking, and I won't deny that even after all these years of preaching I am still daunted by it. The second is to lead the summer ordination retreat for deacons and priests in another diocese. This will feel private and intimate by comparison, but it is no less awesome to be ministering to men and women who are experiencing one the biggest turning-points they will ever have known in their lives. And the third assignment is to conduct the annual week's retreat for a community of monastics. It will be the first time I have lived and prayed with this particular religious community and the first time I have led a conducted retreat for monastics (as opposed to lay people or secular clergy). So this too will bring its sense of both privilege and challenge.

I figure that if I can have identified the central themes of each of these in good time, it will help me find some coherence in the considerable amount of preparation that lies ahead during the first half of this year. Recognising what I should offer in each place and how I should set about it is of course itself an act of spiritual discernment. Prayer comes into things, and so does conversation with those responsible for arranging these events. The last thing any preacher or retreat conductor wants to do is to speak into the vacuum of not knowing his or her audience, what their needs and expectations are, and why they have asked this particular person (me) to address them. At this early stage, my own thoughts and instincts are inchoate: morsels of bread cast on to the waters. But the process has to start somewhere. And I have wanted to take the first steps on my January Northumberland hillside.

I find (think? feel? believe? so many perhapses and maybes) that I am sensing a direction, a shape. As the lane twists round the little old church where centuries ago St Cuthbert's body once lay, I detect faint outlines of a discernible picture on each of the three blank canvasses. Below me, the village is laid out in the valley like a patterned hearthrug. I take in the majestic Tyne that has given our valley its shape and much of its history, and which flows swiftly across the tableau from right to left. I pick out the two bridges that span the river, the one old and narrow where the medieval bridge used to be, the other built more recently to carry traffic. I glimpse the parish church with its distinctive pagoda tower where we worship each week and where I join the Vicar for daily prayers. At the station a Newcastle-bound Sprinter has stopped to collect passengers. Wisps of smoke from a score of hearths (one of them mine) hang over the village in the stillness. The sun continues to shine. I am feeling warmed by my exercise.

"Angels whisper to you when you go for a walk" someone said. I regain my front door sensing I have been whispered to. I wish I could say that the big problems facing humanity could be resolved by an invigorating winter walk. We take off our walking boots and everything is manifestly not all right - yet. But I suspect everything has a way of looking a little different when we go for a walk. Is this what Pascal meant - that the sheer act of striding out has a way of getting us mentally and spiritually engaged, making us participants rather than bystanders? I think I've glimpsed that this morning. I have certainly been given a lot to think about.

Not Busy in Lent

So Lent comes round again. For me, this year's 'forty days and forty nights' will feel very different from any previous Lent I've known. The reason is simple. This is my first Lent in retirement.

When I started visiting France frequently, I used to be surprised at the number of signs pointing to a maison de retraite. 'Retreat house' I thought - every town seemed to have one. Was this the sign of a contemplative people for whom regular time out of the normal routines of daily life was regarded as a priority? Alas, no. I soon discovered that retraite means 'retirement', and only carries the sense of 'retreat' as a secondary meaning. Retirement home, retreat house: not quite the same thing.

But it got me thinking about the relationship between these two linked words 'retreat' and 'retirement'. Both mean a withdrawal from working life, the one temporary, the other permanent. At least, that's the traditional understanding. The implication is: you can live at a different pace, be more present to the gift of being alive, cultivate reflectiveness, draw nearer to God.

However, if we've ever been on a retreat, we know that it entails real work: emotional work, spiritual work, work on the development of our whole human selves. It's not a matter of idle wool gathering. And no-one who retires imagines that laying down your life's 'work' means an existence free of commitments, obligations and tasks. There is work to do, even if it's not the same as quotidian ordinariness. Here, the French can help. It's the sense of oeuvre that I'm thinking about, what we might call life-work, heart-work, and not just travail.

I've been retired long enough (a full four months!) to know that travail doesn't vanish the moment you lay down your paid employment. But I also know that it supplies abundant opportunities for oeuvre, giving time and attention to the kind of work that ultimately matters most if we want to become fully human: our values, our aims and aspirations, our quality of life, our personal relationships, the part we play in society and the local community, our sensitivity to human need, and above all, the formation of our human selves: our emotional health, our spirituality, our prayer. This oeuvre is about what John Keats called 'the vale of soul-making'.

All these things seem to me to be true of Lent as well. We've become used to thinking about Lent as a kind of annual opportunity for retreat. For some, this will mean nurturing silence and contemplation, perhaps by literally going away for a while to spend time in a place of 'retreat'. For others it will bring the gift of opportunities to deepen their understanding of faith and its practice in the contemporary world. There will be many who actively 'take on' rather than 'give up', whether it's undertaking some project that will help the suffering and needy, or making a financial commitment to charity or church, or adopting some discipline of spiritual reading, study, fasting or some other way of deepening faith and life.

All these things can - maybe should - be good projects for retirement as well. In previous Lents, when I have led a demanding life in church leadership as a cathedral dean, I've been impressed and helped by resources developed under the rubric of 'I'm not busy- give up busy-ness for Lent'.** My mantra became 'Do less well'. I would say it to myself to catch the different nuances of that phrase: 'Do less well' meaning 'give up your perfectionism that so often cripples you - be content with what is good enough'. 'Do less - well' meaning 'don't do so much, but concentrate on the quality of what you need to do'.

Now that I'm officially 'not busy' (or supposed to be), these Lenten questions now feel like everyday challenges, and not specific to six weeks in February and March. Retirement is a marvellous opportunity to do what St Benedict advises - living the whole of life as if it were one continuous Lent. He doesn't mean us to be miserable or burdened. I think he wants us to cultivate as a daily habit the art of being as 'present' as possible: present to God, to other people, to ourselves and to life itself. This is the only oeuvre that ultimately matters.

Benedict called daily prayer the opus dei, the work of God. What did he mean by this? God's 'work' in us, or our 'work' for God? The answer is surely, both. If it were only God's work, we would be disengaged, our hearts and wills inactive rather than co-operating with God's grace. It would make us lazy. If it were only our work, it would be a matter merely of human effort and achievement. I suspect that to the Pelagian British, the latter is the far bigger temptation giving birth to the sins either of pride or despair.

I'm trying to learn to see the whole of life as opus dei. Retirement has given me a more space and time to pay belated attention to this, but Lent is a special opportunity for us all to try to focus more on it, whatever life stage we have reached. So I wish you a holy and fulfilling Lent. I hope and pray that we all find it to be the gift it's meant for, a joyous journey in the company of the saints, an adventure of spiritual exploration and discovery in which we find grace, find God, find one another and find ourselves in new and life-changing ways. Go in God.

**See www.notbusy.co.uk