Hope and quiet walk hand in hand
Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention by Sarah Clarkson. Baker Books, 2024. 192 pp., $18.99
The quiet has been one of the best parts of becoming a parent. Watching as a baby grabs his toes for the first time; rocking a child to sleep; sitting on a blanket in the grass and observing the natural world as if for the first time, in a sort of retreat from the hustle and bustle of the world.
The quiet has also been one of the hardest parts of becoming a parent. The bleary hour of two in the morning when it feels like I’m the only soul on earth who isn’t sleeping; folding laundry instead of attending parties; the anxious thoughts that can butt up against the stillness.
Yet there is still so much noise. I don’t mean the babbling of a baby or the yelling of a toddler or the sound of the blender as I make breakfast in the morning, but the digital noise that beckons from every screen in the house. My husband and I are intentional about how we let technology into our home. Even so, the noise can be deafening.
I had been dwelling on the quiet and the noise for some months when I had the good fortune of reading Sarah Clarkson’s most recent book on these themes. Ironically (or perhaps providentially) for those of us living in the United States, it released on Election Day—and it provides a perfect refuge amidst these post-holiday, pre-inauguration, new-year-new-you kinds of days.
Clarkson has spent many years providing refuge through her words. She wrote about finding a home among books in 2018’s Book Girl, about forging relationships to carry us through life’s storms in 2019’s Girls’ Club (cowritten with her mother Sally and her sister Joy), and about beauty as a source of hope amid suffering and illness in 2021’s This Beautiful Truth. Each of these books brought me comfort and peace when they came across my path. Reclaiming Quiet has been no exception to this pattern.
Clarkson’s “quiet” is akin to what Cardinal Robert Sarah calls “silence” in his book The Power of Silence, a condition of “interior rest and harmony.” But this internal quiet does call for the cultivation of exterior quiet, too. Indeed, in Cardinal Sarah’s view, it is “absurd” to speak about one without the other.
Think of the prophet Elijah, who encountered God’s presence in the small, still whisper, after failing to hear Him amidst the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Think of St. Benedict of Nursia, whose teaching on silence is a crucial part of the Rule he wrote for members of his religious order. On a more earthly level, consider the requirement to stay quiet at the library, or the role that daily quiet time plays in helping a small child regulate his emotions.
In the words of Blaise Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But even the man who is willing to sit in his room alone is finding it more and more difficult to find a room with the requisite quiet. How do we cut through the noise that seems to get louder and louder with each passing year?
Clarkson guides her reader with a deft and gentle hand, writing on the many facets of quiet and providing short prayers and reflection questions for those who desire to ponder more deeply. Three of the qualities discussed by Clarkson particularly stood out to me as I was reading: the terror of silence, the gift of silence, and the limitation of silence.
I think it can be tempting—especially for those of us who are introverted or who gravitate towards limiting the use of technology—to see silence through rose-colored glasses. But it can be deeply unsettling. This was especially apparent to me when I first moved to the countryside after a lifetime in urban and suburban settings. I had romanticized the rolling hills and open skies, but during these first months I think I would have been comforted by some noisy strip malls or a Super Target blocking the view. I felt vulnerable in a way I never had when riding the subway late at night.
Quiet is terrifying because it forces us to face ourselves—even the difficult thoughts and thorny feelings that we’d rather ignore. Clarkson writes that “there’s a real sense in which the choice to be silent ushers us into the presence of all the things noise obscures for us most of the time: the inescapable nature of our frailty, the dreams we have lost, the hovering possibility of grief, our pervasive failure.”
It’s no secret that excessive time spent on social media is associated with an increased likelihood of anxiety and depression. But the causality almost certainly runs both ways. For a mind in distress, the quick dopamine hit from opening Facebook or watching an Instagram reel can easily feel like a form of self-care.
In an honest and moving passage, Clarkson describes how this looks in her own life: “I turned compulsively to my phone not only in moments of relaxation but also in anxiety. I began to wonder if at times my smartphone had become my replacement for the Holy Spirit, the ever-present Comforter I turned to in times of fear.”
This, I think, is why those seeking quiet must resist the temptation to make exterior quiet the only goal, whether through the elimination of digital distractions or by foregoing unnecessary auditory noise. When the grieving and the lonely and the broken find themselves amidst silence, they are forced to face their interior turmoil. The absence of noise can’t do that; the presence of something—or Someone—is needed.
It helps when we remember that the myriad blessings of quiet are a gift, not something that we can grasp and optimize and garner for ourselves. In this cultural moment, we seem to increasingly value analog activities, intentional living, and minimalism of all shapes and sizes. But most people will, eventually, find themselves in a season of life that doesn’t allow for slow candlelit mornings or weeks without checking email.
Clarkson reveals that she first set out to write about quiet with the hope that it would force her to adopt a series of more stringent disciplines. The noise of the internet has a way of seeping into sleepless nights, and even the most habitual prayer routine can be thrown off by the unpredictability of a baby. For anyone who has experienced a major life change such as becoming a parent, a spiritual reset undoubtedly sounds appealing. But exhaustion is a difficult starting point for the espousal of rigor.
For those tempted to despair that quiet is only for “mystics and saints,” Clarkson offers words of comfort, writing that the presence of God is “never dependent on [our] discipline.” Even when we get sucked into the relentless noise of the world, God waits for us with, as St. Paul puts it, the peace that “passes all understanding.”
Yet this gift marks our lives in a definite way. It’s not merely about noise-cancelling earbuds, or self-care at the spa, or taking a mindfulness course. It involves building a life that looks foreign. It’s about forming habits that are “radically different from the windblown fury of the broken world.”
Again, this calls for more than just a negation. It is good to eliminate the flurry of notifications and the drone of the television, but we also need “the embrace of prayer, of daily wonder, of listening, of trust, of celebration that roots us moment by moment in that deep, watchful quiet that ushers us into the presence of God.”
A life shaped by quiet is also a life of limits. The noise of the world can make a person feel compelled to chase after whatever is biggest and brightest. Clarkson describes her time in the academic world, with its expectation to produce paper after paper and present at conference after conference. She also identifies this pattern in the publishing world, where authors are increasingly advised to drum up engagement at the expense of digital boundaries.
Of course, the solution—for most people, at least—isn’t to withdraw from the world, flawed though its paradigms might be. But we can learn to cultivate a greater attentiveness to the task in front of us here and now, especially when that task is lacking in obvious glamor: listening to a friend tell a story or a joke they’ve already told three times, sweeping Cheerios off the floor, mending a hole in a piece of clothing.
Even though she had hoped that writing a book on quiet would lead to the development of an iron clad prayer routine, Clarkson found instead that quiet had more to do with “the keeping of small faithfulnesses.” I cannot help but think of the closing words of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
As Clarkson reminds us throughout the pages of Reclaiming Quiet, Christian men and women can look to the example of a God who came to earth and lived a life that was, for the most part, a hidden one. Some found it difficult to accept a Savior who came into the world as a baby and who lived in this world as the humble son of a carpenter. We might find it difficult when we are unable to participate in rigorous fasts or lengthy prayer services. But cultivating a quiet attention to the gifts of God in our ordinary lives can be a kind of prayer too.
After finishing Reclaiming Quiet, I thought about Katherin May’s Wintering, which pairs nicely with Reclaiming Quiet. May makes an argument for the benefit of leaning into the “winter,” both the literal season and the seasons of our lives that mirror it—seasons that will come upon all of us, sooner or later. Instead of shirking the changes that accompany illness or grief or depression, what if we took our cues from the pattern of the seasons and took the time to withdraw and to rest?
Clarkson doesn’t avoid writing about the “wintery” times in her own life, mentioning miscarriage and mental illness and difficult upheavals. But “there will never not be a crisis”—either in our personal lives and in the world at large. Choosing quiet amidst “apocalypse” is the only way any of us will ever choose it. As the winter months settle in, as the storms of politics and social media and strife swirl around us, choosing quiet can be one small act of hope.
Abigail Wilkinson Miller writes from northern New York state, where she lives with her husband and sons. She holds an MTS in Moral Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her writing can be found online at publications like Public Discourse and The European Conservative and at her Substack, Little House in the Adirondacks.