The silence of God is elusive and inaccessible. But the person who prays knows that God hears him in the same way that he understood the last words of Christ on the Cross. Mankind speaks, and God responds by his silence.
— Cardinal Robert Sarah

I’ve finished The Power of Silence and it’s given me a lot to think about. Although few are called to the Carthusian silence which inspired the book, Cardinal Sarah nevertheless calls attention the need for some silence - especially interior - in order that we may better encounter Christ. Indeed, we have as much to learn from the examples of the Lord’s own silence as we do from His words - the long silence of of His hidden life in Nazareth, His solitude in the desert, His moments before His accusers. We want to be like Him, and so we must do like Him, and follow in the paths He trod before us. And how much of our interior noise is driven from the outside? From our own thoughts as we run from amusement to anxiety and back again? As we fill our eyes and ears with a constant drone, noise difficult to escape even when we try? Hell will be noisy for sure, and not the pleasant wholesome noises of field, forest, or hearth.

The search for silence is arguably more important than ever. As I write this, the urge to stay glued to the TV or social media is nearly overpowering. I’m caught in a tension between needing to stay informed and giving to the business of acedia, concerning myself with things I can neither control nor escape. We have not been affected at home nearly as much as others - we homeschool the kids, so they’re around all the time anyway. I’ve worked from home for over a decade, so we’re well equipped for that as well. Our extracurriculars have stopped. There are no public Masses. The weather has been rainy, so we really have been confined for large periods. We have each other, our respective (and largely overlapping) spaces, and moments of friction. Here within the four walls of our domestic cloister, perhaps the Carthusians and Trappists have something to teach us after all.

Am about halfway through Robert Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. The book is set in a sort of dialogue between Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, inspired by a visit the Cardinal made to Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order. This place, and the men who live there, can be seen in the wonderful documentary Into Great Silence. The filmmaker proposed the movie to the monks in 1984, and they asked for time to consider it. Sixteen years later, they responded in the affirmative. He used a single camera and no artificial light. As a feat of technical filmmaking, it’s wonderful. More precious still is the intimate look at this most austere of orders - a community of hermits.

Cardinal Sarah writes about silence - in prayer, worship, and secular life. It’s slow going - he’s a methodical, contemplative writer:

Christ’s public life is rooted in and supported by the silent prayer of his hidden life. The silence of Christ, God present in a human body, is hidden in the silence of God. His earthly speech is inhabited by the silence speech of God.
The whole life of Jesus is wrapped in silence and mystery. If man wants to imitate Christ, it is enough for him to observe his silences.
The silence of the crib, the silence of Nazareth, the silence of the Cross, and the silence of the sealed tomb are one. The silences of Jesus are silences of poverty, humility, self-sacrifice, and abasement; it is the bottomless abyss of his kenosis; his self-emptying (Phil 2:7).

And so we must seek the silence of the desert - within ourselves first of all. These means calling our relationship with noise by its name: a dictatorship under which we should (and do) chafe. We have forgotten, in large part, what true silence really is. I had forgotten, if indeed I ever knew it, until I sat in the empty chapel at Gethsemane several years ago. The silence was so profound as to feel positively physical. Time passes differently there, and you can return to yourself - to your senses - like the prodigal son.

In other news…with Lent underway, we have started our small group study. We meet on Monday evenings, here at our home. The first session went very well. Looking forward to next week. RCIA continues apace. The Elect have moved into the Purification and Enlightenment period. Looking ahead, I need to start preparing content for Mystagogy, which we’re sort of rebooting. In the background of all of this, the application process for diaconal formation is coming to a close. Lots of self-examination, meditation, and prayer going on.

I finished Nault’s The Noonday Devil last night. Really good stuff, and I’ll almost certainly be returning to it in the future, and the sections on the various remedies for acedia, in particular. When you see something described and then named, and then you look around and realize “oh so that’s what that is”, you feel struck first by surprise and then by, well, sheepishness. They knew what they were about fourteen centuries ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

One of my other Christmas books was a guide to gardening with native plants, a subject I’ve gotten more interested in as time has passed here. We live on a small bit of acreage and I’ve let several parts of it “go wild,” principally because the areas are rocky and difficult to maintain but partly because they also serve as a bit of privacy screening from the road and surrounding houses. Watching the local plants, shrubs, and trees take back over has been a lot of fun. I’m cutting less, to be sure, so I’ve got that going for me. Many local insects, birds, and other critters have moved back in. I’ve used a nifty iPhone app called Seek to ID the local plants and found quite a few of them in this gardening book. Using the native species honors the spirit of the place, and also makes concrete the dictum of “the right plant in the right spot.” I don’t want to have to coddle things or beg them to grow. I’d rather they sit right where they’re supposed to be. I already have some ideas about moving some passionflower vines, and there are enough elderflower bushes nearby for cuttings. If I left a few of the rocky areas revert back to something like the cedar glades that are common for this area, why, I’ll have even less grass to cut. Everybody wins.

I’ve also just started The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, by François-Xavier Fauvelle. So far it’s fantastic. The chapters are short, beautifully written, and heavily documented. In the midst of an interminable grey and rainy winter, you could do a lot worse than peer through the stained-glass window that Fauvelle has carefully reconstructed and gape in wonder.

The retreat was good. As usual, I went expecting one thing and left with something different. The conferences were interesting, in no small part because priest who led them was something like six-foot-six, friendly, personable, and full of stories. There were numerous opportunities for prayer, Mass, Adoration, and the like. Plenty of silence, and the sisters who manage the retreat house do a wonderful job of keeping the retreatants fat and happy. It was also good to meet the others - some of whom I had met last year - and catch up on things. I found myself answering a fair number of questions about homeschooling, parenting teenagers through the college experience, and the like. Some of the men were considering things we did about ten years ago, so they were keen to hear how things had turned out, and what sorts of insights I had to offer. I’m not going to lie; it was a little weird.

I started The Noonday Devil while on retreat and am very much enjoying it. You wouldn’t think that a book about a capital sin would be all that, but it is. Acedia was known to the Desert Fathers and described in detail by Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth century theologian. Monks living a solitary existence would come into periods of dryness and weariness, rendering prayer difficult or impossible. In some cases this was accompanied by torpor, in others, a sort of frantic business. As time passed, acedia sort of fell off the radar in favor of sloth, which took its place in the lists but calls to mind general laziness and losing something of its depth. St. Thomas Aquinas briefly wrote about it, describing it as a sin against the love of charity, and points to an ingenious remedy: The Incarnation itself! Go read it to see how. Ultimately, William of Ockham may have been responsible for acedia’s place on the back-burner. By reducing events and actions to individual, separated occurrences, sundered from a larger pattern or totality, the need to describe a broad tendency (like acedia) is diminished.

Fortunately, acedia’s made something of comeback in the popular consciousness. Unfortunately, it never really left us. The Noonday Devil traces the notion of acedia through church history, starting with Evagrius and the others, through the middle ages, and into modernity. The Fathers were wise - the concept of acedia is no less relevant today than it was in a desert cell 1,600 years ago. Consider the mid-life crisis, or the pervasive nihilism, or the constant desire for novelty as its own end. I’m not quite finished, but can see that I’ll certainly be returning to it, especially the section I’m in now, which not only describes modern acedia, but goes on to describe the remedies.

Christmas is done, Epiphany is finished and here I am with a stack of new books: Doors in the Walls of the World by Peter Kreeft, The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Rule of Benedict by Georg Holzherr OSB, and a guide to gardening with local Tennessee plants. I’m still slowly working my way through Tanquerey’s Spiritual Life, which I’m liking very much. I used parts of it for a recent RCIA lesson on sin and temptation, in particular the explanations of the threefold concupiscence. I’ve just started the section on the capital sins - also very engaging stuff.

I like Kreeft’s books. This one feels like it could have been a transcript of a lecture - very conversational and approachable. There are moments where his enthusiasm is nearly too much, that maybe the printed word is just barely enough to hold him still. Reading him is like having a couple of beers with a friend who just happens to be on fire and can’t wait to ignite you as well. But in a good way of course.

I had another meeting with the director of vocations yesterday. The process continues, and I left with another book recommendation: The Noonday Devil by Dom Jean-Charles Nault, OSB. This is an exploration and study of acedia, more commonly known as sloth, one of the seven capital sins. From the dust-jacket blurb:

The word “sloth”, however, can be misleading for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest itself as business or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaning.

The Noonday Devil will be going with me next week as I head to a weekend men’s retreat.