Into great silence

The website of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico states that the road which leads to it from Route 84 is either one mile north from the Echo Amphitheatre or south from Ghost Ranch, depending on which direction you are coming from. The directions don’t tell you that by the time you hit the stretch of highway from where the road to the monastery veers off, you’ll have been driving for over half a day through the topography of a waterless fish tank. This isn’t the soft green-blue-white grandeur of Big Sky country but a desert of pale pinks, ochre and sand; a rough, dry and muscular landscape of enormous red cliffs, twisting stone and above all that relentless aridity: a flat, bright and sunless sky.

I missed the turnoff so by the time I had double-backed and started down what I believed was Forest Service Road 151 but could just as well have been a random cow path, dusk was approaching and the humongous rock over my shoulder, which I mused looked either like a giant bear paw or an arrested tsunami, was striped with shadows. I noticed a coyote ambling down an embankment and began to worry that I would be spending the night out in the desert in my rental. I had been driving for almost an hour and still no monastery in sight. Half a planet away from family, half a country from the city I was temporarily living in, I had never felt so alone and at the mercy of my earlier decisions. Did I put enough gas in the tank? Why didn’t I buy water or a blanket? Was there enough battery charge left in my cellphone? I really should have told people where I was going.

It was late by the time I arrived at the one-story ranch house set aside for visitors. By the light of a portable lantern, I found my cell which contained a bed, a desk and chair, a sheet of paper listing rules and the schedule for meals and prayers and a necklace which I could put on if I didn’t want a soul to speak to me during my stay. Benedictines live in a way obverse to modern life. Here silence is the rule, not the exception. Here the task is not to project oneself, compete or conquer but to surrender oneself to living, without note or ripple, within a great and sealing silence. 

As a visitor, I shared meals with the monks — eating with a view of their backs, as chairs are positioned, as in church, in rows facing forward, was encouraged to pray and do chores. I volunteered to resurrect one of the kitchens from a barbecue gone wrong and spent my mornings scrubbing sinks and floor tiles. In the afternoons I walked around the property, through tall grass, alongside a river and under a cliff dotted with crosses marking the burial sites of the monastery’s dead. At night, I would sit on a tree stump and take in the evening sky, brilliant and undimmed by artificial light.

Sundays are when you can talk at the monastery. On that day I discovered that the abbot was Filipino, that among the monks was an aristocrat and a former corporate lawyer from Los Angeles and that the burly monk who shared espressos with me while I worked in the kitchen was Mexican and no older than me at the time. The monk in charge of the monastery’s external communications also told me that there was a convent not far away and that I might consider being a nun.  On my last night I sat with some visitors in the gift shop. Most of them apparently came every few years. One had recently survived a near-death experience and emerged a healer. Yet another, I can’t remember which, told me I reminded them, in my spiritual journey, of a snail crawling up the side of a mountain.

Reemerging into the world after my stay at the monastery felt much like what I imagine returning from a brush with death or sliding out a birth canal might feel like, if one were fully conscious while either was happening — the world emerging piece by piece, then in a flood of buildings, cars and people.  It wasn’t long until I was once again deep in the hurly-burly. 

Despite a reputation for chatter, I have a deep affinity and need for silence, not the quiet that brings up the demons, but the silence that settles the spirit. Maybe it’s having grown up with writers — I’m used to their habits which demand presence but not engagement. When my father ran a paper, I would sit in his room and read while he wrote: “Just 15 minutes,” he’d say and I would settle in for what I knew would be hours. My grandfather’s habit was to rise in the wee and silent hours, down a scotch and type out poetry. My mentor in college, an Austrian émigré who lived through two world wars, liked to listen to Marlene Dietrich in his book-crammed study, so softly you could barely make out her croon. When I asked him why, he told me gently, “Bianca, it is in the quiet that I can most clearly hear my soul.” 

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