Silence is very difficult to find and cultivate in our culture. The fact that we can be reached or connected to others 24/7 through smartphones leaves us in a constant state of unease. We don’t acknowledge this agitation. Instead, when we start feeling the anxiety or itch to “connect,” we simply grab our phones to avoid the initial discomfort of sitting alone with our own thoughts, not endlessly scrolling, texting, or messaging. All this agitation is extremely bad for our bodies and souls, but we live trapped in this cycle. We need rest, healing, and silence, but so often we refuse to do what it takes to be freed from the constant noise of the digital world.
Recently, I led an overnight retreat with five college students who make up the leadership team for our Catholic Campus Ministry (CCM) program with the chaplain. We took the students into the Appalachian Mountains to a retreat house with no Internet and very low cell service. I told them beforehand that the retreat would be technology free. I told them they needed 24 hours without their smartphones attached like another appendage. The only exception was for photos and a timer for a game, both scheduled for the end of the retreat.
They were anxious initially. None of them had been “unreachable” before. I had to give them a phone number to give their families to call the on-duty staff member in case of emergencies. This was a completely new experience, even for the two Boy Scouts. The latter are from urban areas, so their Scout camps all had Internet and cell service. I told them that if they got the shakes from the detox, it would soon pass. They joked repeatedly about my dictatorial rule of no technology.
These young people—and often I—are living in the manner Cardinal Robert Sarah describes in his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise:
Without noise, postmodern man falls into a dull, insistent uneasiness. He is accustomed to permanent background noise, which sickens yet reassures him. Without noise, man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent. With its festive appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself. Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a morphine pump, a sort of reverie, an incoherent dream-world. But this noise is a dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness. The awakening will necessarily be brutal.
It is not that I wanted to torture my college students into silence; it was ultimately my love for them that compelled me to create a no technology rule. I knew smartphones and iPads would be a distraction and noise that would prevent a deeper rest in Christ. As Cardinal Sarah explains: “The desire to see God is what urges us to love solitude and silence. For silence is where God dwells. He drapes himself in silence.” It is only in silence that we can fully encounter Christ in the depths of our soul.
The chaplain and I also decided to introduce the students to complete physical silence by requiring a half day of silence during the morning. The only voice they heard was mine as I led two spiritual talks. We had Mass, Adoration, prayed the Rosary, and gave them free time to go for walks in the chilly winter air or to journal.
As time went on, I could see the students relax and settle. The first night was filled with the anxious energy of experiencing something new. We visited while we ate dinner, prayed the Rosary, listened to an introductory talk from the chaplain, had small group discussions, and played games the first night. This allowed the nervous energy to expend itself before we entered into silence the next morning. The initial smartphone detox didn’t feel quite as intense for them the first night.
As we sat in Adoration together the next morning for an hour, something beautiful started to happen. There was a moment when stillness and silence enveloped the whole room. The students stopped fidgeting. The hum of the Machine—to use Kingsnorth’s and others’ name for the digital thing that rules us—was forced into silence. The anxieties, cares, and stresses the students carry dissipated as they adored their King.
There was no blue glow emanating from smartphones, iPads, or Kindles. It was a stillness and silence that begins to heal a weary soul. A moment when everyone could breathe in deeply the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Healer, the Paraclete. Everyone seemed to forget about social media and instant communication as they rested in the Lord.
This healing continued as multiple people ventured out into the cold, 20-degree morning to walk in silence in God’s creation. To continue breathing in deeply the rest and peace of Christ. Everyone walked their own way around the retreat center. I wandered up the back road of the complex that heads towards a 3-mile hike to a waterfall. I stopped near a frozen pond where I silently watched leaves dancing across the ice in the breeze and listened to the creaking trunks of Quaking Aspen, a tree that reminds me of my upbringing in Montana. I knew Christ was there with me.
The purpose of silence on the retreat was to facilitate a deeper encounter with Christ, but also one another. As Cardinal Sarah writes:
The silence of everyday life is an indispensable condition for living with others. Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving, and understanding the people around him. Charity is born of silence. It proceeds from a silent heart that is able to hear, to listen, and to welcome. Silence is a condition for otherness and a necessity if one is to understand himself. Without silence, there is neither rest nor serenity nor interior life. Silence is friendship and love, interior harmony and peace. Silence and peace have one and the same heartbeat.
Young people are much too exhausted, overwhelmed, and burdened. The constant noise makes it difficult to hear God and one another. Part of the reason for this is because they never give their minds, bodies, or souls rest from the Machine. The Lord is available to us in the present moment. We must turn to Him with our whole hearts and minds. Divided attention destroys peace, creates division in relationships, and causes love to whither.
When we broke silence at lunchtime, it was clear the silence was good for everyone. It was challenging, but it provided a much-needed balm for their weary souls. The students drew closer to one another, and closer friendships started forming. The two-fold goal of the retreat—helping the students draw closer to Christ and one another—was accomplished through silence. The students left rested.
The retreat confirmed for me something I have observed in some young people. There is a growing cohort of young adults who are retreating from the noise and stress of it all. I have met multiple young people recently who were sent to me for spiritual direction by priests or friends who have jettisoned their smartphones. They want to live a desert spirituality in the world. These young people desire simplicity, detachment from things, silence, and freedom in Christ. It’s consistent with last year’s Exodus90 partnership with Bishop Erik Varden on the Desert Fathers.
They report to me that by getting rid of their smartphones, social media, lots of possessions, and seeking to live this simplicity, they are filled with deeper peace, and they can spend long hours in prayer. This makes sense. We are our own worst enemies. It is not that we don’t have time to pray. It is that we are wasting our time on technology. I include myself in this problem as I fight against myself and the spirit of the age in this regard.
If we truly desire to see God and to live in communion with Him and others, we must seek silence each day. Whether or not this lesson will penetrate the depths of my students’ souls now post-retreat remains to be seen at this early stage. If not now, hopefully it planted seeds for the future that the Holy Spirit can grow and nurture much the same way He has in these young people who have come to me freed from the shackles of their smartphones.
My hope is that these students, and the students they will impact, begin to learn how silence is essential on the path to holiness and freedom.
I am certain that silence is a divine liberation that unifies man and places him at the center of himself, in the depths of God’s mysteries. In silence, man is absorbed by the divine and the world’s movements no longer have any hold on his soul. In silence, we set out from God and we arrive at God. – Cardinal Robert Sarah
