Carving

“Silence can exist without speech, but speech cannot exist without silence. The word would be without depth if the background of silence were missing.” – Max Picard, The World of Silence

I learned silence early. My father was a solid, quiet man, so some of my fondest memories of him are of times when we were quiet together: fishing out on the lake, working in the yard, driving somewhere on an errand. We had our chattier moments, of course, but what I loved about being around him—and I always wanted to be around him—was not having to say anything at all. He showed me the purity of silence, a purity that grabs you and holds you to the luminous insistence of the moment: to the smell of cut grass, the blue of the sky; to the warm undercurrent of a father’s love for his son, a son’s love for his father. It was my mother, however, who introduced me to the meditative and creative aspects of silence. On Good Fridays growing up, after a spare Lenten lunch (a scoop of cottage cheese for her, a bowl of tomato soup for each of us kids), she would head for the master bedroom with her rosary and prayer book, telling me to play quietly in my room. So I’d close the door and be very quiet, think about Jesus and try to color as sadly as I could.

It is, therefore, not terribly counterintuitive that I’m now an oblate with a contemplative order of monks. I’ve been with the monastery seven years now, and all of my exchanges and conversations with the brothers probably wouldn’t add up to a week’s worth of chat. Though if you factor in the hours and hours we’ve prayed together, we have, in a sense, never shut up. But the rest, as Shakespeare said, is silence. And it was the profound silence of the place, really from the very first moment I settled into it, first felt it, without having yet prayed with the brothers, without having yet done anything retreat-y, that told me my life had just changed in a significant way, in a way I couldn’t quite understand at the time—and probably still don’t entirely understand now.

One of the aims of monastic life is the attainment of interior silence, and it is indeed something I work at (make that: “work at”; monastic spirituality throws a lot of things into air quotes). But I also think, in a chicken-or-the-egg kind of way, that people who are drawn to monasticism already have a sense of the silence within them: the silence we come from; the silence we’ll go back to. In between we fill it with the narrative of our lives, the thoughts and phrases, sometimes complete sentences, of lived experience bouncing off the walls of Time, but we’re still basically a silence—a silence in which only one word is spoken. Only one. And monasticism is about getting quiet enough to hear that one Word. I remember one Saturday afternoon at the monastery when I was down in the crypt sitting before the Blessed Sacrament. I’m sure I was praying initially, but then suddenly I fell silent. Words gave out, just kind of fell to the floor. And as I sat there, the longer I sat there, I realized that silence actually had a texture, a thickness. It was thick with presence. With the presence of God, I thought for a moment, a fraction of a moment. And then even the word “God” fell to the floor.

I get up at 4:00, 4:30 every morning so I can, even at a distance, pray Vigils with the brothers. Despite the propaganda about New York being “the city that never sleeps”, it’s actually fairly quiet at that time of the morning, the neighborhood calm. And sometimes in the silence, in those deep pools of it between the Psalms, I’ll suddenly get a line for a poem, sometimes just a fragment, but very often something in perfect iambic pentameter. Just comes to me out of the silence. And the more it’s happened, the more I’ve realized that that’s the way it always happens, even, later in the day, when I think I’m working on the poem. My “work” is really just putting myself in the spiritual disposition—the emptiness, say, between the rules of a sonnet—to pull more lines from the silence. Michelangelo famously claimed that a statue already existed in the raw block of marble, and that all he was doing was releasing something that was already there. I’ve come to see the writing of poetry as much the same thing: it’s not so much an act of assemblage as of carving; of letting my own words drop, as they did that afternoon in the crypt, and carving a poem out of the silence I first experienced there. It’s only in that silence that I feel how consistently and delicately my life is poised on the edge of grace, and every poem I write—at least every one that works—traces that edge. It was the same visit I had that experience in the crypt that I wrote Monastery Song…

I seek the mundane joy, the movement dry
from psalm to psalm, from phrase to holy phrase,
from breath to breath, that thus my numbered days
might one by one toward endlessness apply.
I seek within the silence to descry
the heartbeat of some deeper song of praise
and let its sacred rhythm as it plays
in me my very fiber magnify.
I claim the dream of father Jacob here,
my head set restless to the pillow stone:
the midnight dream of an ascending grace;
and wake with him to daylight’s strange veneer
to know again what I have always known:
that truly God is present in this place.

It was one of the brothers who first told me to write verse. I didn’t want to at first, but then I did it as an act of obedience. I trusted him. I trusted not so much that he knew my writing better than I did, but that he knew silence better than I did. He had lived in it longer. He knew it was ripe for carving.