Club Med for Introverts

I’ll admit that I’m an introvert. Not so painfully that I can’t hold up my end of a dinner conversation; I’m just someone who draws strength from solitude and quiet.

Not until after my father died, however, did I realize to what degree I needed that time apart. In spite of his protracted decline, my father’s death came as a shock. The distance between us had grown for years, largely as an outgrowth of his illness, and I had prayed to reconcile. But the last time we spoke, a week before he died, and despite my prayers, our conversation failed to proceed according to my idealized script.

Eighteen months later, I still struggled with depression, grief, and especially anger—some of it at my father, most at God.

I had heard of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in northern New Mexico, and in a brief moment of clarity, I decided to go there for a retreat. I flew to New Mexico, then drove to the Chama River valley, 13 miles from the nearest highway, and turned down a corduroy dirt road.

Like the other guests, I fell into the monastic rhythm: sharing meals, praying the hours in the chapel, working a little, but most of all keeping silence: for an introvert, this was Club Med.

Silence is rare in all of our lives, not only because our schedules are overflowing but because we avoid aloneness. Turn on the TV, grab the iPod, call a friend . . . we maintain sonic clutter because we misunderstand silence. It accuses us, we think; no one cares about us. We’re unimportant. We must be a miserable friend/sibling/parent, or we’d have someone to talk to.

But I’ve come to understand silence as essential to growth. In the words that later became the hymn, "Come Down, O Love Divine," Bianco of Siena wrote:

And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace,
till he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.

To welcome silence into your life is to create space for the Holy Spirit.

Once I opened that space, quiet retreat for me became full of God’s loving presence. In my walks along the Chama River, the wind in the trees became holy whispering. I hadn’t really wanted to be reconciled to my father before he died. I had wanted him to be reconciled to me. I had wanted God to change my father into the person I thought he should be.

I saw that God loved and accepted both my father and me. And that allowed me—finally—to love my father for who he was, not resent him for who he wasn’t. Heading back down the dirt road a few days later, I felt restored—grateful that God had spoken to me through the silence.