Be still
Stanton, Vincent P.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~r=._._;-~i~ . . . . BE STILL Vincent P. Stanton i n Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard wrote of herself: "I have a taste for solitude and silence, and...
...For the past half-dozen years the need has been met, in part, by spending several days each year at the Trappist monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts...
...Some came for a week, many for thirty days, others for a year...
...For me, attendance at a symphony concert is a transporting, even a transcendent experience...
...A stay at the monastery guest house itself will mean something different to each person who goes there...
...It even gets so bad for some that a retreat is seen in terms of "career enhancement," the opportunity to establish an inner calm that allows the subconscious to strategize...
...On my first visit, I was invited to sleep on a cot in an unfinished basement where I could lie awake at night listening to the mice crawl through the wood pile about three feet from my head...
...The pleasure is visual as well as auditory...
...Rather, we begin to appreciate that these eighty monks have given their lives totally to the perfection of an art, so that both individually and as a community they may render more perfectly a symphony of oblation to the composer in whom are found all beauty, goodness, and truth...
...But awareness that God speaks to us in silence grows, and the urge for genuine withdrawal persists...
...There were Eucharistic adoration around the clock, liturgies at the Jesuit retreat house, and otherwise perfect silence, save for the pounding of the waves upon the rocks...
...It too is a house of prayer, so graciously, tastefully, and comfortably appointed that a spirit of peace and reverence comes easily...
...We deny ourselves solitude, convinced it's the right thing to do...
...But not always...
...Later, career building and attention to family take hold...
...Those who love music might liken the experience to attendance at a concert...
...r=._._;-~i~ . . . . BE STILL Vincent P. Stanton i n Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard wrote of herself: "I have a taste for solitude and silence, and for what Plotinus called 'the flight of the alone to the Alone.'" I wonder if she does not speak for many...
...Privacy and quiet also abound...
...There was a flight, but the flight was more from than toward...
...I'm one of the lucky ones who haven't always been forced to suppress the desire...
...Vincent P. Stanton, a retired investment manager, lives in Massachusetts...
...The immediacy of other realities in our lives, such as family and work, presses in on us...
...As an interloper, I was kept at a safe distance...
...and that hundreds have left their quotidian world behind to share in that experience...
...I cooked alone, ate alone, and walked alone four times a day up the steep hill to the monastery to participate in the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours...
...Watch Thou, oh Lord, with those who watch or wake or weep this night...
...On my second and subsequent visits, I was allowed upstairs...
...One is twice blest, first by the genius of the composer and second by the artistry of the orchestra members...
...Since one must reserve a room six months in advance, I made plans last fall to visit this Lent...
...It was located in the servants' quarters above the kitchen at the old estate, but closed after her death in 1986...
...The hours between 3:30 A.M...
...and 7 A.M...
...There is great irony in choosing the penitential season to spend a few days at the monastery because, with little doubt, it is the most "self-indulgent" week of my year...
...I am awed each time by the realization that eighty-some people have come together for the sole purpose of creating, afresh, a work of beauty...
...But it is hard to imagine anyone coming away unaffected by the life and by the liturgy, particularly if one is able to begin the day with the monks at their vigil...
...Solitude and silence seem an unaffordable luxury...
...It was populated almost exclusively by nuns in transition from one apostolate to another...
...The words of the Jewish (later Catholic) psychiatrist, Iolande Jacobi, come to mind: Human life is something "outward and discrete and centrifugal, a continuous dying into the full life of the self through the self's dissipation in action" (Masks of the Soul...
...It takes courage to be alone...and a lot of work to "make" the time...
...And, there is silence...
...On my first attempt to spend time with the Trappists at Spencer, I was unable to get a room at the abbey, so I stayed at Mary House, about a mile away...
...So we rationalize that a sixtyhour work week is the path to the core of our being...
...one of my earliest retreat memories is of a quiet-mannered Jesuit seated at a small table in front of the high altar, summoning us into retreat with the words of the psalmist, "Be sffil and know that I am God...
...For many years I found myself at House of Prayer on the Beach, run by the late Sister Isabel Green at the Jesuit retreat center in Gloucester, Massachusetts...
...The total experience humanizes the listener by helping him or her to realize what we are capable of and to what we are called...
...Commonweal 3 | January 28, 2000...
...Their success seemed to depend on their intensity, and their intensity depended on the rhetorical ability of the preacher to inspire a sense of contrition for past offenses...
...are precious ones...
...The experience at Spencer is parallel, but the inspiration is not simply from the monastic music, beautiful as it is...
...Annual retreats were de regueur at Jesuit high schools and universities when I was a student...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 2
