GUIDELINES: Take Quietness with You

Wherever I go, I take quietness with me. No matter what is going on around me, I want and need to have quietness at my center. Even in a loud city like downtown Chicago, the quiet that remains present within me helps me to think, to sense, to see.

I cannot explain how you can stand in quietness while the noises of modern life whirl are around you; it is something you have to discover for yourself. I remember as a pastor taking a youth group on a retreat several years ago. We were going to have a prayer service in the basement of the camp’s specious lodge. The problem was, right above us was a fifty-member youth choir who alternated singing and chatting raucously with each other.

The twenty of us could hardly hear ourselves think, let along talk. I suggested to the group that if we asked for and believed in it, a kind of shield of silence would descend around us. So we did; and it did. We had an extraordinary time of caring and sharing, and only after the service was over did we realize that the noise above us had never let up.

Noise can be a diversion, drawing our attention away from ourselves and our quietness, to the source of the noise. Music is such a diversion. Yet we need daily the diversion music offers. Music helps us gain a better perspective on our situation; music can sooth and succor the soul. And there is much silence in music. In fact, they say there is more silence than sound in a melody.

If you have not yet discovered the quiet within you, I assure you it is there waiting to be discerned. As a professor, I have guided many students through ten-minute silent breath prayer exercises, and have quietly basked in the light on the faces of those who discovered their own silence. And I have taken scores of adults on retreats, whether for two hours or two days, affording them the opportunity to discover the quiet, not only of their surroundings, but the quiet within them. It is like discerning another wing to your inner being, a kind of hidden sanctuary set apart for peaceful reflection, mulling and meditation.

I am a “muller.” I like to mull, which means to ponder or cogitate on this or that, usually slowly and over time. Some subjects, such as the meaning of life, I never ceasing mulling over. Mulling requires quiet; to mull you have to locate and enter the quiet within you. The ability to do that, to enter the quiet regardless of the external circumstances, is a mark of spiritual maturity.

It is interesting that the word “mull” also means “to heat, sweeten and flavor with spices.” That is what can happen when you mull on something: as you open up the depth of its meaning, you discover how sweet and flavorful both that subject and your inner life can be. Mulling also heats up the subject, for the light of reason subtly warms the subject being reflected upon.

One more interesting aspect of the word mull: “muller” means a hand or mechanical device used for grinding, such as a flat-bottomed pestle of stone. Once again, that is just what mulling accomplishes: you slowly grind down a subject to its essence. By mulling you can also make what you must do more understandable, palatable.

Mulling, while comfortably abiding in your inner quiet, feeds the soul like food the body.