A subversive silence

In memory of Sister Maggie Ross (1942-2026)

Hello friends

We have been gifted, this week, with a series of perfect sunsets. The wind has stilled and even the sea’s endless motion has been no more than the quiet lapping of gentle waves.

But the light! The light has been spellbinding. People have pulled their cars over on their way home and rolled down the window to watch it, or taken unaccustomed late evening strolls, pausing whatever they’ve been busied with to simply stand and witness its gorgeousness, its lustre, its slow, luxuriant fade, as the Sun slides behind this tilting Earth some time after 10 pm. “Did you see the sunset last night?” we ask each other the next day. “Wasn’t it amazing!”

Unlike the rest of the UK, we’ve had a grey, chilly, rainy June. When July rolled in with more fogs and grey drizzle it seemed like we were to have a year without a Summer. So the period of settled, clear weather that arrived this week has come as a relief, not least for the farmers hastily cutting and gathering the coming winter’s silage.

The other evening I sat outside with friends towards the end of a welcome Sunday afternoon of sea swimming, shared food and conversation. We wrapped ourselves in blankets as the evening chill descended, and settled together in a row, like a movie audience, to watch another perfect sunset slowly unfold. Our talking gradually stilled. Even the birds fell silent. Only the occasional bugling of a distant cow rang through the quiet air. A few pale moths flitted among the tall summer grasses and the Sun slowly reddened and ripened, flooding the world with sheets of soft colour, as it slid behind the horizon to leave a fading, pearlescent sky. We watched and listened together in silence as the natural world filled us up with its beauty.

In the car earlier that day, I had the radio on, and heard, entirely by chance, that Sister Maggie Ross, an Anglican solitary nun, had died recently. I heard myself cry out ‘Oh no!’ and turned up the volume to hear better as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke of the life of a remarkable woman I’d had the good fortune to meet a few years ago.

Maggie, or Martha as she introduced herself to me, knew a thing or two about silence. It was her life’s work. And so I share below a post I wrote about her a while back, by way of remembrance:

The Work of Silence

A couple of years ago I took myself off on a winter meditation retreat at the Centre for World Peace and Health on Holy Isle. I was there for three weeks. It felt like a long time for me, but the whole retreat runs for three months every year, and many others there were going the full distance.

One of these brave souls was a fascinating woman I had many quiet fireside conversations with at the end of a day otherwise passed in silence. She was an Anglican solitary nun who introduced herself simply as Martha. Quite elderly, I guessed, but stocky and active, she was usually to be found at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes or washing up after our meals.

Acerbic, humble, and plain speaking, there was something about Martha that made me gravitate towards her. I felt the presence of real, hard-won wisdom and insight. As we spoke I discovered that here was someone with a deep, scholarly and practical understanding of solitude, silence and the contemplative life. I was told by another retreatant that in her younger days Martha had spent many years in solitary retreat far out in the wilds of Alaska.  

Although I don’t share her faith, I was fascinated to learn from her about the place of silence and contemplation in the Christian tradition, something she felt had been deliberately suppressed and was in danger of being lost.

Silence: A User’s Guide

When I got home I looked her up. It turns out that my new friend was in fact a scholar of some renown, a Stanford-educated professor of theology, who had at one time been Bishop Desmond Tutu’s spiritual director, and who had published a two-volume study as Maggie Ross, called Silence: A User’s Guide.

It’s not a read for the faint-hearted and there are certainly more accessible books on silence available, but it’s written from a deep scholarly and practical understanding of the subject. I thought I’d share some gleanings from her writing on silence, solitude and community as I find new relevance in her thought each time I return to it.

It’s clear that our culture is not conducive to silence. In fact it’s seen as suspect, a kind of death. Solitude is often cast as loneliness, although the two experiences are utterly different. And both silence and solitude are viewed as passive, anti-social, even a dereliction of duty.

But Martha/Maggie has no truck with this view and nails her colours firmly to the mast:

Communities are only as healthy as the solitudes that make them up, so that it is incumbent upon each of us to do the transfiguring work of silence.

This makes me sit up and take notice. Silence, then, is not a self-indulgence or a dereliction of our public and civic duties. In fact it’s the opposite. It’s our public duty. And an urgent one.

The human race is sleepwalking into extinction. If we are not to destroy our beautiful planet and our selves with it then we must learn to live more simply, more carefully, more joyfully. 

Maggie/Martha proposes that our hunger for wildlife documentaries and trips to windswept beaches is symptomatic of our estrangement from the inner silence which is in fact our birthright and the source of our own wisdom.

Silence is a necessary rebalancing…noise obliterates silence and these days we are pressured on all sides by the noise of twisted minds spinning in closed loops. The babble used to sell their crazy agendas is persuasive because most listeners have no experience of silence, and therefore have no intellectual or emotional autonomy through which to critique the insanities and inanities on offer. But this is exactly what politicians and corporations want, because if we stopped to balance our lives with a little transfigurative silence…we might become aware that we are rapidly becoming their slaves.

No wonder, then,  that we find these clamorous, argumentative times so bewildering. But what can we do? We can’t all take lifelong vows and become a hermit in the wilderness like Martha.

A Practice of Silence

Thankfully, it isn’t necessary to take such drastic measures. All we need to do is remember to create some space for silence to enter our lives and do its work in us.

Anyone can undertake the work of silence. It requires only openness and receptivity, a relinquishing of the complex blandishments and noise of consumer society for simplicity, silence, and self-forgetfulness, a turning away from narcissism to welcome the other. The work of silence is so simple, yet to go against the grain of society and the culture is very difficult. But it is worth the effort: the work of silence…provide[s] stability and even joy in a disintegrating world. People who undertake to live like this become beacons, islands of safety where others can find a refuge. The resonances of silence permeate around them, whether they are aware of them of not.

She suggests this very simple practice:

…perhaps one of the most important, and that is learning to sit perfectly still for half an hour, perfectly relaxed mentally and physically, not meditating or doing anything with the mind except allowing the silence to seek it. This can be done, like learning to meditate, in increments.

Gradually, over time, again without your knowing why or how, silence will seat itself in you, in your core, and you can access it with increasing fluidity. In fact eventually you will be living from the wellspring of silence instead of having silence as something you seek. It will come to live in your core.

In this understanding of silence and solitude they become not only more accessible to those of us with jobs and families, but a necessary part of being a good citizen, neighbour, friend, parent.

Silence is ecological, our natural habitat, not the world of noise that surrounds and stresses us.

Silence is political. It’s ecological. And it’s subversive. It’s our birthright and our natural home.

In the midst of increasingly tumultuous world events and snowballing calamities, it’s time to reclaim it.

May you find some silence this week

Sam

Life Raft Co-Working

Please note: Our little life raft of quiet co-working will not set sail this week as I have another commitment. Fear not, however. You can find the recordings of our previous sessions in the paid subscriber chat, and we’ll be back at the usual time next week.