In Pursuit of Silence (6 page)

I walked along the edge of a dark road that unspooled through the white landscape as far as the eye could see. Tiny clusters of gray farm buildings loomed off in the distance, silos like church towers from which the spires had been snapped. I recalled the message written by contemplative monks defending their vocation to a synod of bishops. The monks noted that God had created his people in the desert, and it was to the desert that he had brought them after their sin in order, in the words of Hosea, to
“allure her, and speak
to her tenderly.”

All ascetic practices, silence as much as fasting, can become forms of seduction if entered into deeply enough. But those of us who don’t adopt them can never know the possibilities of life revealed to their adherents. In the early twentieth century, Dr. Frazer, an American anthropologist, went off to study the so-called
Silent Widows
of a tribe of Australian Aborigines. It was the custom of these women to enter a period of silence lasting as long as two years after the death of a spouse to elude and repel the spirit of the dead husband. Because the rule of silence extended to mothers, sisters, daughters, and mothers-in-law of the departed spouse, it happened that the majority of women in the tribe were prohibited from speaking during the period of mourning. To the outsider, this suggested an awfully limited existence. Yet Frazer noted the “odd circumstance” that many of the women,
when the time of mourning was complete, chose to remain silent, communicating only by signs.

As I walked along, white feathers began to twirl down from the sky.

The Trappists are technically known as the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. The movement developed in the seventeenth century under the guidance of Abbot Rancé at the French monastery La Trappe, for which the order is named. Before becoming a monk,
Rancé had been a dazzling
polymath, an ardent hunter, and a lover of fancy dress. Then he had the unfortunate experience of walking into the sickroom of the Duchess de Montbazon, his grand passion, to discover that she was missing her head. After the duchess’s unexpectedly abrupt death, an impatient undertaker had decapitated her corpse to make it fit inside a mismeasured coffin. That sight marked the end of Rancé’s days of gadding about in lace from the Sorbonne to the chase. He sold everything he had, withdrew into La Trappe with his valet, and set about forging the most ascetic monastic order the world had ever seen. Their rule of silence was absolute, with the brethren discoursing between themselves by sign language alone. For half the year, strict fasts were observed. During the remaining six months, the monks subsided primarily on roots. When not praying and silently meditating, they performed field labor, sometimes adding a chastening innersole of thorns to their wooden sandals.

In the tradition of the older Cluniac order that the Trappists sought to renew, silence, as much as celibacy, was seen as a way
of
copying the angels
who parted their lips only to praise God. By observing quiet as a community, the monks blocked off the main highway to frivolity—chatter—and sought to lift themselves onto a plane of rapt attention where God’s sacrifice and human mortality became audible to all.

The idea of silence as the quickest route to solemnity is enshrined in countless religious practices and lies at the origins of national moments of silence as well. While we don’t know when silence first became part of mourning rituals where the secular and sacred intermingled, we might glimpse traces of the crossover in Carnival observances. An eyewitness of the Venice Carnival in 1868 recounted how, at the final moment,
“As the great clock of St. Mark
was striking the midnight hour, the band ceased playing and scarcely a sound was heard in all that immense crowd.” After the intervention of “a moment of silence and darkness,” a small light appeared, followed by a blaze of fiery serpents, Roman candles, and rockets. Eventually the flames ignited “the figure of the doomed Monarch”—King Carnival—who perished in a “deafening explosion.” The moment of silence at midnight signaled the end of the rule of the flesh and reminded the crowd that Lent was imminent.

There are competing claims for the first national moment of silence, most of which—like stories of a memorial silence held across the United States the year that the
Titanic
sank—are suspiciously unmentioned by contemporary sources. The first widely observed national moment of silence appears to have been one commemorating Armistice Day in England. It was begun in 1919, the year after the armistice, at the prompting of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, a former high commissioner in South Africa who’d been
deeply affected by a three-minute pause in work and conversation observed daily in that country throughout the First World War. In a letter he wrote advocating for the silent pause, Fitzpatrick declared that it would serve both to preserve the memory of the sacrifices made by the
“Glorious and Immortal”
war dead and to create solidarity among the living.

When the British adopted the ritual, not only sound but all motion was interrupted, with trains halting, factories shutting down, and telephone exchanges ceasing to connect calls. So powerful did this two minutes of silence prove to be that the BBC began lobbying to broadcast the silence, instead of just switching off during its observance. In 1929 they began doing so, and these transmissions of national silence became a phenomenon in their own right. As a BBC representative explained,
“Its impressiveness is intensified
by the fact that the silence is not a dead silence, for Big Ben strikes the hour, and then the bickering of sparrows, the crisp rustle of falling leaves, the creasing of pigeon wings as they take flight, uneasy at this strange hush, contrast with the traffic din of London some minutes before.” The BBC’s role, he concluded, was to allow the silence to be heard for what it really was, “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.”

I remember experiencing some of these emotions myself when I once observed the two minutes of silence held in Israel on Holocaust Memorial Day. I had no expectations for the event, but when the sirens began wailing and everything stopped moving—pedestrians freezing in place on the sidewalk, people stepping out of their cars and simply standing, doors left hanging open—I found myself immediately overwhelmed. I remember
watching the traffic lights change color over and over—red, green, yellow; red, green, yellow—with no car responding to the signals. Silence seemed to create a hole in the present into which the unspeakable past poured in a flood, swallowing our individual lives. At the end of it, the trivia surrounding those two minutes sounded painfully loud. I wanted somehow to live up to that moment of suspension.

The yearning to be great and universal, so often awakened by war and disaster, seems to lie behind the last boom time of novices entering the silence of New Melleray Abbey as well. Since the surge began shortly after the Second World War, one might suspect that mass revulsion at the violent ways of humanity lay behind the increase in applicants.
But an oral history
of New Melleray that I paged through from the monastery library suggests a more complicated picture. One monk who came to the abbey after his army service explained, “You can’t look at a block of houses that’s just been blown to pieces and not realize there is more to life than consumerism and having a good time.” For this man, it wasn’t a repudiation of war and violence that fueled the decision to enter the monastery but disgust with the peaceable, vacuous face of the American consumer society he returned to. The military and the monastery are each, in their own way, dedicated to the watchful preparation for death—often in silence. The interviews with monks that I read suggested that the spike in monks in the late 1940s and early 1950s reflected the desire not to flee but to
perpetuate
certain intensities of life during wartime.

When Alberic and I met at the breakfast table the morning of my second day at the abbey, he looked glum. On the following day Brother Jonas was to be ordained as a priest. It had been a long process for him to reach this milestone. He had family and friends coming from all over to witness the ceremony, and now because of the weather many of them were canceling their visits. We also would be unable to set out to Trappist Caskets, where Alberic had intended to show me the quiet of monks at work. Instead of touring the coffin plant, he’d made arrangements for me to speak to several other monks about their pursuits of silence. “Nature is not friendly here,” he remarked, nervously eyeing the window, curtained with white snowfall from the outside. “She’ll walk over your face. She’s a bipolar mother. The monk in me loves this. We live on the edge, at the extreme of human capacities, but my human nature struggles with it.”

The local population struggled with it too, and though not upholding vows of silence, they were little given to idle conversation, Alberic said. The farming was relentlessly difficult and unprofitable. It would also, I knew, have been deafening, despite the rural setting:
75 percent of farmworkers
are said to have a hearing problem due to their use of heavy machinery.

Indeed, the traditional Midwestern tight-lipped stoicism is now only rarely complemented by a larger environmental quiet. A priest I met at lunch after Brother Jonas’s ordination told me that his parishioners simply have no experience of silence. In consequence, Father David and other religious leaders increasingly prescribe very basic, pragmatic experiences of silence as part of
their ministry. “We’ll tell people, ‘Allow for a period of no television or music each day,’” he told me. “‘Sit alone in quiet for a while.’ And I’ve had some people—after as little as
half an hour
—say, ‘Father, that was the most profound thing I’ve ever experienced!’ They just have nothing comparable in their life.”

But what do they do with that profound experience? I asked. Father Stephen, an older, retired priest who was seated at our table, said that in his experience the problem was that without silence people had no ability to understand one another. He currently oversees meetings for councils that set policy for different parishes, and he has recently stopped allowing any difficult decisions to be made by discussion. Doing so, he has found, means that “the noise makes the decision.” Instead, he sends everyone off to meditate on their own about their place in the discord. They’ll regather much later and as often as not he finds people’s minds have changed. “‘Father, I was out walking the farm, and I was thinking about how I would feel bad if I were them and the matter were to be worked out the way I said it should be.’” Perhaps this was what Saint Bernard, the patron saint of the Cistercians, meant when, in one of his letters, he cited Isaiah to the effect that “silence is the work of justice.”

As Alberic spoke of life on the Great Plains, much of which revolved around an extraordinary work ethic, I began thinking about the laborious rigor of the monks’ own lives. It seemed a far cry from the idyll my friends had envisioned. “Why
do
you get up so early?” I blurted out. “Why skew the day to begin at 3:15
AM
?”

“We’re supposed to cultivate wakefulness,” Alberic said, and he described vigil, the first prayer service of the day, as a microcosm of the hyperawareness that a Cistercian monk is called to
uphold at all hours. To him, Alberic said, “the darkness is a very safe space. It’s about birth. Christmas night. The night when anything can happen. The quiet, dark places are where the treasure is buried.”

“What do you do after you’ve finished vigil?” I asked.

“We go back to our cells and read. Monks and books just belong together. We study. We pray. We meditate. We have six free hours before our workday begins. How many rich people can say that? We call it ‘holy leisure.’ Having that time does something to your humanity.”