Dear XXXXX:
Your mother has told me that you're taking off this weekend for your
first closed retreat and that you're a trifle concerned about the prospect
of three days of silence. All of us who have gone through such retreats had
similar concerns the first time around.
In fact, this concern never leaves us: it is with us every time we
start a closed retreat. And yet, at least in my case, there
is a certain fascination with closed retreats: when I start an open retreat, I sometimes wish it were a closed one
(your mother and father, who regard me as one of the
most talkative characters they know, will almost certainly
be surprised by such a statement coming from me).
There are a number of points I'd like to share with you about the
silence of a closed retreat.
First, there is more to the silence of the closed retreat than the
mere silence of the mouth -- which is all we observe when we merely "shut
up." Much as our retreat-masters may urge us to shut up, keeping silent in
this sense is not sufficient to enable us to make a good retreat.
You can say absolutely nothing, but "make up" for this silence by
keeping all your other senses wide open: you can make your eyes wander over
the environment you have often taken for granted; you can strain your ears
to catch the noises that sound just at the level of consciousness -- as did
a friend of mine (who rose to be a big executive with
Coca-Cola Export Corporation) who spent one entire
closed retreat observing how wasps make a hive!
There is such a thing, then, as the silence of the senses -- a little
harder to keep than the silence of the mouth. But even the silence of the
senses is not sufficient to enable us to make a good retreat.
We may shut up, we may keep our eyes and ears closed, but we can still
let our minds run riot -- recreating in our minds the last book we read,
the last movie we saw, or imagining the most outlandish
things we can think of. To the silence of the mouth and the silence of the
senses, we must add the silence of the mind.
Here, you may ask, "What is the point to all this? Why do we have
to keep these three kinds of silence?"
The best answer I can give is that keeping these three kinds of silence
makes it possible for us to "hear" whatever message the good Lord wants to
tell us.
Remember the story of the little boy Samuel, who was living in the
temple with the high priest Eli? In the dead of the night, he heard a voice
call him, and thinking that Eli was calling him, he went to the high priest,
who said he had not called. The third time this happened, Eli told Samuel
that it must be the Lord who was calling and that Samuel must respond, "Speak,
Lord, for thy servant hears."
It is this kind of receptiveness to the message of the Lord that retreat-masters
hope to develop when they require silence.
Of course, not all of us can maintain all three kinds of silence during
the full three days of the retreat. Too often, we manage to succeed only
in shutting up. Sometimes, we manage to shut our other senses down. It is
perhaps for only a few brief periods that we manage to keep the silence of
the mind.
But in the periods where we succeed in keeping the silence of the
mind, we can and do come to grips with ourselves. We start asking ourselves
such fundamental questions as, "What am I?" "What
do I want to be?" and "In what direction am I moving?"
True, these are all very human questions that we can ask ourselves
and even answer -- even outside the context of the closed retreat. But the
closed retreat puts these questions in a larger, non-worldly context: "What
do these questions mean -- and what do our answers mean -- in the context
of eternity, in the context of heaven and hell, in the context of our relationship
with God?"
And this is why the silence of the closed retreat can be somewhat
frightening, because it forces each individual to confront himself, judge
himself, not so much in terms of whether he is bright, popular, or otherwise
successful in the eyes of his family, friends, and acquaintances as in terms
of whether he is a good man in the eyes of God.
I don't know whether you noticed, but in the last paragraph, I started
using the term "individual"; in previous paragraphs, I used the term "we."
This is because the question of where one stands in the eyes of God has to
be answered on an individual basis. Because ultimately, it is you who decide
what "being a good man" means to you, it is only you
-- not I, not your parents, not your friends -- who
can give the best answer to the question of where
you stand in God's eyes.
And this is the other reason why a closed retreat requires silence.
We do not speak to other people; we do not compare notes with other people.
Rather, each person communes with himself to answer the basic question, "Where
do I stand on the road to eternity?"
There is something somber, even frightening, about a closed retreat,
Joe-Ed, because sooner or later, no matter how much the retreat-master may
try to sugar-coat the message, we cannot run away from the fact that sooner
or later, each of us is going to die: this is the unstated premise of the
question of "Where do I stand on the road to eternity?"
And each of us dies alone; our friends stand sad and silent, powerless to give us aid; alone we will stand before the
throne of God...and it is for this reason that when
a man poses to himself the question of where he stands
on the road to eternity, it is best that he confronts
the question alone.
And yet, because we are human, we do not like to ponder about death.
To a young person like you -- with your full life still ahead -- the question
of death seems by and large irrelevant.
And so, I wouldn't be surprised if your retreat master does not dwell
on this question too much. He may give one or two talks on death (this was
"standard operating procedure" in my time), but,
by and large, the talks will direct your thoughts toward more spiritual things:
even the practical guides to living a good and happy life will be couched
in moral and spiritual terms.
There is something to be said for this approach: we must learn that many of the things our day-to-day existence
consider to be important -- such as power, wealth,
beauty, strength, prestige, and glory -- are not so
important after all in the context of eternity.
So many people, Joe-Ed, make their lives unnecessarily miserable because
they lose out on the honor roll, a scholarship, an election, a job opportunity,
a friendship, or other things that are merely of passing value. It is human,
of course, to feel disappointed when one loses something he values. It is
human to feel angry, even vengeful, when we feel that life is unjust to us.
And yet, we must realize that when we make such losses and injustices warp
our very lives, it is we, not those who offended us, that sin most grievously
against ourselves.
The silences of the mouth, of the mind, and of the senses enable us
to step away from the cares of the day-to-day world, to place these cares
in a larger context, and to keep our eyes on the more important question
of whether we are becoming the kind of human being each of us would want
to be.
And this is the larger message of the closed retreat: that we should
develop the skill of lapsing into the three kinds of silences whenever we
want to. Later in life, we will not often have the chance of taking off for
a day or even three days to reflect on how our lives are going. And so, it
would be desirable if we learn from our closed retreats
how we can "retreat" into the three kinds of silences
for a few minutes, for a few hours, whenever we feel
it is necessary to do so.
By the way of nothing at all, I close this letter with a few verses that I used to reflect on during the retreats
I took when I was your age:
I walk down the Valley of Silence, down the
dim, voiceless valley -- alone;
And I hear not the fall of a footstep around
me save God's and my own;
And the hush of my heart is as holy as hovers
where angels have flown.
Long ago was I weary of voices whose music my
heart could not win;
Long ago was I weary of noises that fretted my
soul with their din;
Long ago was I weary of places where I met but
the human -- and sin.
I walked in the world with the worldly; I
craved what the world never gave;
And I said, "In the world, each ideal that
shines like a star on life's wave
Is wrecked on the shores of the real and
sleeps like a dream in a grave."
My best wishes for a truly silent retreat.