Silence on the Road

Quiet. The silence that comes with the absence of noise. The stillness that comes with the absence of busyness.  The peace that comes with the absence of demands.  A truly, restful quiet, not only without in my surroundings but within the interior of my heart.  A quiet so rarely found and grasped in today's busy, demanding, marketing, success-driven world.  A silence that lets me expand and be completely aware of who I am in time and space.  This blessed quality of quiet - when was the last time I heard it?  When was the last time I felt it inside of me?
 
I have finally decided that this is something that I need to seek out.  After five years of being a full-time student and a part-time worker, always in a go-go-go environment, I am tired.  I have gotten so wrapped up in the busyness of life that I have forgotten how to listen both to myself and God.  In the process I have begun to feel lost and confused, like I don't know who I am anymore.  I need to rediscover a place of quiet.

This is why I have decided to take a pilgrimage retreat when the school year is up.  I have decided that I need to hop into my car and drive.  Driving is an experience of quiet for me, especially when I am driving through the mountains on an empty road.  With my radio off and nothing else but the road to distract me, there is only me, God and silence.  This trip is going to be both pilgrimage and retreat.  It is going to be both a journey in search of the transcendent and a withdrawal from the daily rhythm of my life.  I am going to places where I will find community, but I am also going to places where I will find solitude.  Through the silence of an introspective journey, I hope to experience a transformative state of quiet.

Pilgrimage is retreat.  Margaret Silf describes the essence of a retreat when she writes that "a retreat takes us closer to the core of our beings and to a space in which we also touch the reality of God" (Silf, 5). It removes us from everything that demands our attention in the everyday world, and gives us the opportunity to hear both the voice of our own hearts and the voice of God.

I am looking forward to the experience of retreat.  I am not going to bring my laptop on my journey; it is a distraction that prevents me from listening, from being attentive to the sound of quiet.  I am going to bring a few books, but they will be very limited in number - I do not want them to become a distraction, but to be  a tool that will encourage an inner state of silence.  Silence is "a regenerative practice of attending and listening to God in quiet, without interruption and noise" (Calhoun, 107).  I like that word, regenerative.  It suggests that silence has the power to heal.  That silence not only mends inward injury but also reintroduces a concept of health to the spirit.  For the spirit that feels battered, beaten, bruised, tampered with, broken and tired, silence is the medicine most often needed.  And yet, despite its restorative qualities, silence is also the medicine that is most often avoided.

Our society does not like silence.  It is too dangerous.  It can remind us of our loneliness.  It can make us  realize that our lives are not as fulfilling as they might be. Sometimes it seems easier just to cover up and ignore the sound of a wounded spirit then actually seeking out the isolation of silence. We need God but we do not always want Him, and thus, in an effort to shut out his voice, our existence has become inundated with noise.  Just walking through a transit station and noticing the number of headphones and earbuds that people are wearing alludes towards our addiction to sound.  Some people wake up to the radio and fall asleep to the same, not allowing one moment of silence into their lives.  As a result of all this noise we have forgotten how to listen.  We have forgotten how to listen to ourselves, to others and to God.

Silence, when it is embraced, draws us into a place of solitude.  Solitude is the opposite of loneliness. It is a state where we can discover inner fulfillment (Richard Foster, 84).  "Solitude opens a space where we can bring our empty and compulsive selves to God" (Calhoun, 113).  It is a place "where God's spirit and my spirit dwell together in union" (Barton, 32).  It is a place where we shed whatever masks that we might tend put on and allow ourselves to just simply be who we naturally are.  We allow our souls to communicate with God and discover that we are loved just for simply being.

Pilgrimage offers a place where I can experience both silence and solitude, and for my weary lost soul, this is exactly what I need.