The Unexpected Gifts of Quiet

Sarah Clarkson is just the loveliest writer who lives in an old English vicarage with her husband and four hobbitish children. She loves beauty, books, and imagination, and wants to offer those as hope to a broken world. She’s spent the last several years wrestling with what it means to reclaim quiet as a way of life amidst a culture driven by noise, screens, and distraction. With four children, a husband in ministry, and three moves, she’s found these to be some of the least quiet years of her life, yet she has come to believe that quiet is the homeland each person is meant to find, the place we discover ourselves held by a speaking God, and perhaps most poignantly, a place of refuge in times of grief or trouble. It’s my absolute joy to welcome Sarah to the farm’s table today…

Guest Post by Sarah Clarkson

The quiet I sought that day was a space to grieve.

I walked down to the café where my drink and name were known due to my almost daily morning attendance in that season.

Usually I came with a stack of theology and about five notebooks, ready for frantic work on the graduate dissertation that was fast escaping me amidst the turmoil of our lives. Today I came only with Bible and journal and the headphones that would make the corner table by the window the cloistered space I needed.

I was too restless for silence; none of my usual corners for prayer in the old Oxford churches I loved would do.

So I sat in the café window with my coffee and let the buzz of the street, the ebb and flow of humanity under the grey spring sky, give form to the start and stop of my own stuttering thoughts. But my mood did not lighten.

Dread gathered and tightened in the regions beneath my mind as I began to understand that what I had come to hammer out was not a decision between various options but rather my consent to the only option available, one I could not find it in myself to want.

For five years, Oxford had been my home, the place of an intellectual flourishing I had long yearned to find, the city in which I married and settled in my first little red- doored row house, the place in which my first child was born.

But my husband, after three years of training for priesthood in the Anglican Church, was required to serve a further three-year curacy (an internship under another priest). Our options were limited for various reasons, so we had to consider random offers from other churches in England. Only one had really come through, and to me it did not seem a place we could flourish; it meant removal to a far corner of England I barely knew, one with no friends or connections nearby.

It meant young motherhood with no support, uncertain housing, and a church and culture that looked very different from what I knew and trusted.

“The gifts of quiet are nothing if not a return to what is essential, what is elemental within us: the stripped- back, barefaced truth of heart and mind.“

I knew there would be more goodness than I could yet see, but I also knew, viscerally, that it would be hard. I did not want the struggle I knew would attend our lives there. I could have wept, there in my seat in the sealed quiet of my headphones, but I began to write instead.

And what I wrote was lament. The beat of my blood was strong in my ears, a protest that thrummed in my fingers as I penned my anguish, my sheer revolt. The quiet of that day was a stripping of any pretense I had of acceptance or calm. Quiet revealed the roil and outrage of my inmost self. When I had finished writing, I sat in a drained, ravaged silence.

Sometimes what quiet offers isn’t peace but grief. In all my long years of writing and thinking about quiet, it has always been far too easy to fall into the assumption that quiet, rightly performed, guarantees serenity. As if, should we find struggle and anger and lament in our hush, we’ve done it wrong. But I’ve learned to understand it usually means we’ve done it right. The gifts of quiet are nothing if not a return to what is essential, what is elemental within us: the stripped- back, barefaced truth of heart and mind.

Much of that stripping does bring peace as we discover God’s presence and kindness haunting our lives in countless ways we had forgotten to notice. But the condition of all quiet in this world is that of grief. When I picked up my Bible that day with limp, reluctant hands, feeling I had failed in my task, I turned to Psalms. The ancient, anguished poetry of the psalms has always sheltered me, given voice to my rebellion and grief.

They did not fail me that day. In the regular cycle of my reading, I found myself at Psalm 31. I read listlessly until I found the words in verse 9 that gave voice to my lament:

“Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress.”

From that point, I read the words of the psalm as if composing them myself, until I reached David’s affirmations of God’s abundant goodness, and then I slowed. I tried to mean what I read, but I failed until I stumbled into this strange and wondrous verse:

“Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was in a besieged city.” (Psalm 31:21)

“Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was in a besieged city.” (Psalm 31:21)

What could this mean? That David’s prayer was answered, and answered well, not by removal from his uproar but with wondrous shelter in its midst? I held this idea in my mental hands, turning it over in its strangeness. Would I, then, know God’s kindness in the besieged city of this unwelcome choice? Was it all right to name this decision for the hard one it was, to fully assert the distress I knew it would bring?

A great hush came finally to my interior world as I understood that God did not despise the struggle revealed by my quiet but rather allowed me to understand he would be present within it. Our lives would be difficult; I knew it then and found it to be true.

Those three years of curacy saw the death of Thomas’s mother, the birth of two babies, demanding ministry, three moves, pneumonia, appendicitis, and a worldwide pandemic that meant we were utterly cut off from any help amidst these crises. We were indeed isolated, too far from those we loved.

“I am more convinced than I have ever been before that the almighty Creator of the world involves himself in our affairs.“

But God’s kindness came to David in the very middle of deprivation and destruction, with enemies at the gates and fear in the air. God’s kindness came to me countless times in that difficult place; after those three hard years I am more convinced than I have ever been before that the almighty Creator of the world involves Himself in our affairs.

But I also know even better now that it’s always amidst the siege that God’s kindness arrives.

We live in a world at war and will until the kingdom comes and the story of the cosmos begins again. Our pursuit of quiet will always be attended by our anguish, our wrestling, our loss. Quiet does not remove those things from us; it offers the space in which we may give voice to them so that they do not destroy us, so that the alternate voice of God’s kindness may turn the besieged cities of our lives into “the rock of refuge” David found in his own wild distress.

In quiet, we learn to watch and wait for God’s help as it sets up camp in the very heart of our darkness.

Sarah Clarkson is an author who loves to explore the kinship between literature, beauty, and theology. She’s written about mental illness and beauty as theodicy in This Beautiful Truth, and her latest work is Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention. She studied theology (BTh, MSt) at Oxford and hosts a regular series of talks exploring literature, poetry, and theology at her Patreon fellowship. She can often be found with a flat white and book in Oxford, where she lives with her Anglican vicar husband, Thomas, and their four children. You can explore her work at SarahClarkson.com or subscribe to her newsletter From the Vicarage, at SarahClarkson.Substack.com

In Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention, Sarah invites her readers to step away from the rush and hurry of a life driven increasingly by distraction into a story shaped by the gracious power of quiet. What is quiet? What shape does it take in our ordinary hours? Who is quiet for? In writing about her own wrestle with quiet amidst four children and a demanding life, Sarah beautifully answers these questions and draws her readers with her into a life shaped by a chosen and joyous listening.

{Our humble thanks to Baker Books for their partnership in today’s devotional.}