Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

by Sarah Clarkson

If there was one thing I had pondered in the years before our move to this new home, it was just this: how to dwell in the kind of quiet that opens one up to the gift and wonder of the world.

I noticed the heightened stress I felt, the phantom fear of being left out because the online world was always updating. I realized how much I had become driven as a writer by a need to produce work that was rooted not in conviction or joy but in the restless competition stoked by the online world.

I wanted God to give me quiet and bring me rest, but all the habits of my daily existence were shaping a life of exhaustion, of inward disquiet and outward unease.

Our inner worlds are so noisy with the countless images we have seen that there is no room for worship, rest, or real and heart-changing prayer.

Every Christian is called to cultivate kingfisher sight, to a life shaped not by a frenzied mind or a changing screen but by a heart set fast upon the light of our Maker as his love invades our hearts and all the world.

Too often, though, we hear the word quiet as something negative and abstract, a subtraction of activity or even a relationship available only to mystics and saints. Too often we think of it as merely a discipline we cannot manage, another hard thing that only the very holy or very rigid can attain.

Every Christian is called to cultivate an interior world, to make mind and heart a space of expectant silence as we wait for God to speak

What is quiet but resting in the brightness whose presence within our hearts remakes the world?

Our action comes, in a radical and roundabout way, before our full understanding.

Quiet often feels that way to me at first, a vast presence that is my fascination and also my dread.

Before and after and bearing all the horror is a beauty that will redeem and heal it. At the heart of our devastated silence is still that great Word speaking us back into life. He has never ceased to hover over the dark and unformed waters of our beings, speaking our names, his calling always an invitation to redemption.

At the end of darkness, at the heart of quiet, there is love.

The downs in their springtime luxuriance, the hedges peppered with valerian, the fields starred with buttercups—their beauty wasn’t a neutral distraction, peripheral to the suffering at large in the world. They were a kind of answer and defiance, an order and loveliness that endured, that had grown up amidst and after disaster and would again.

And what is trust except a kind of quiet attention?

Don’t we all want more than the world can give us? And where shall we go to remember that this hunger is holy?

It is a truth universal but rarely acknowledged that human beings are born into a state of pilgrimage. We are, by nature, seekers.

And why would we seek a quiet in which all we might find at first is the awful shape of an ache we do not know how to heal? Why seek solitude and silence if those things might unravel our capacity to reach, run, and perform all the activities keeping us from the despair of naming a desire we’ve come to think can never be answered?

What I learned in these discoveries is that to hunger profoundly, to yearn for something that seems almost cosmic in the heft of its absence within our hearts is a holy thing. It is an integral part of seeking what is ultimate and meaningful, what hovers at the edge of human existence, beckoning us to a completion we have only begun to imagine.

At our truest, we are all of us pilgrims at all times of our lives. But it takes a little quiet to remember this.

all gesturing to this state of poised expectancy that is a kind of sublimated action.

We wait because we cannot save ourselves. Because the enemy is strong and cruel. Because we are not the source of our own blessing and there is so, so much that we desire. Because we yearn for the King in his beauty. And in that waiting, we gather up these hungry needs and recognize that the pitted and pocked world we know cannot be all we were made for.

Before my own heart ever learned its hungry cry, the hunger of God himself cried out for me. No grief escapes his eye, no tear slips from his hand. As God incarnate, he cried in anguish over his city; he reached out his arms on the cross in his hunger to hold the whole of his stubborn, shattered little world. Our pilgrim hunger is simply our response to the ever-present keening of God over his people, a summoning our desire does not instigate but answer.

The hunger itself remained, made clean by the love that kindled it. For God’s hunger is first a holy force that draws our hearts homeward and finds its satisfaction in meeting every need we bear.

But when I stopped for breath and looked around, I found myself already hungry for the next thing, and at the back of my joy grew a great fear of falling behind. I wanted a third degree, I wanted my books to be published, my voice to be heard, not from a sense of my particular importance but because the hunger still drove me. I still had this sense that significance was out there to be claimed, and I needed to push a little harder to grasp it.

Nietzsche sees freedom as the means by which we impose and establish ourselves in many senses against others. Balthasar, radically and beautifully, sees freedom as primarily a form of generosity.

Our hatred of limit is a loss of the fundamental trust that existed between human and Creator in the beginning. Satan has always been against limit and always works to make us think it is a form of divine withholding.

Words make worlds, you know, and each one we speak forms the way we see our own.

Asking these questions has helped me to move away from an idea of quiet as something primarily about negation—subtracting people (a near impossibility with four small children in the house), noise, and activity from my life—to something that is claimed or created. To a positive thing I craft by shaping the hours I have been given, understanding them not as neutral space but rather the soil of my life out of which will grow whatever I choose to plant in the loamy earth of my given days.

story. When I choose to shape the hours of my life in such a way that they become the space in which I listen for God’s voice and expect his arrival, I am entering the Christian way of understanding time as redeemed from a fallen cascade into disaster by the arrival of God himself in the circles of our embodied days.

There are three necessary prayers, and they have three words each. They are these, “Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.” Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.

Part of me feels profoundly detached from this moment, mired still in an abstract place of frustration, but the sudden belly laugh of my son startles me awake. Abruptly, I remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s whimsical but reckless poem requesting God to waken his dulled, bored soul by “stabbing his spirit broad awake.”2

Such moments, they are so fleet. But their grace is an unceasing invitation to turn and try once again, to reach toward the real, to find, at the heart of my dusty old life, a love that makes all small things precious.

Reorientation means to turn literally toward the east where the sun will always rise, so I reorient my heart to the dawn of God’s presence within me.

Without the trappings of what I thought prayer should include—focus, rest, solitude, silence—I felt that I was not praying, and I labored long and guiltily under a feeling that someday, when I was more disciplined and ordered, I would finally return to the patterns of prayer that made my spiritual life feel valid and real.

pick a color, and every time you see that color, turn your heart to God. Pay attention to his goodness in the smallest things around you.

receptive wonder

workaday miracle,

Can I taste, touch, join this wildness pouring into the open portals of my whole sensing self? What is this but the abandoned sort of prayer we all crave?

If we define a life of prayer as one measured only by the subtraction of relationship, service, and creativity, then we will think prayer is something we cannot attain and ought not try for. But prayer is that inmost communion with God that roots and nourishes the entirety of our lives. Prayer is an inward conversation, the yielding of all things we find in the tumble of our days to the God who orders and holds them fast.

O God, let us revel like children in the rainbow glimmer of your goodness as it glints in our days. Let us count nothing as too small for praise or prayer; no splinter of grief, no sliver of amazement. Catch us with your kindness in all the tiny spaces of silence that fall between our busy hours. Give us a child’s grace to find prayer in all its color and love and in all its shapes, through Jesus, the Lord who haunts and hallows each corner of our lives, Amen.

“all that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food.”

Part of my bitterness was a sense that if I could just do the right thing and choose the right job, or person, or work, I would finally move beyond my loneliness, my need. I was so afraid, so afraid. Of isolation, of a life obscured by suffering and hidden from those who might love or help me. My breath, for months, had been the quickened inhalation of existential panic as I gazed upon my frailty and knew how it curbed and limited my future. I did not reckon upon any strength but my own, and I knew it would fail me.

In an internet age, when time is no longer marked by daylight or the limits of the embodied world, it is harder and harder to keep this command that also seems strange to our ears. Why shouldn’t we work or buy? But in Scripture, the keeping of the Sabbath as a day of strict rest is not meant as a performance of righteousness but a return to faith, a homecoming to the benevolence in which the whole of our existence is rooted.

What I am certain of is a grace that works in and alongside me so that my life equals more than it ought to.

so wildly believable to me is how preposterous and gorgeous it is; the fact that God wants to save this world, save us, as we are—arrogant, fragile beings with wills blown wind wild, making havoc of creation yet also crafting a beauty that recalls our origin, embodying a preciousness that cannot be described without tears. That God counts these lives, this world, worthy of his own diminishment, and that he is, like me, a besotted mother capable of any sacrifice for my demanding, bumbling child, draws belief from me as the sight of a sleeping child draws my gasp of tenderness.

I am less certain, these days, of predicting how or when or in whom God might work because he seems to spring up, wild and merciful, in all the places I least expect him.

I came to my quiet times as if God stood with arms crossed and back turned petulantly toward me until I said the right incantational prayer, confessed my small litany of sins, appeased his rightful grumpiness. I used to think he asked so much: holiness of life and a swift performance of righteous deeds and a clear conscience and constant prayer.

Driven idealist that I am, it is far too easy for me to come to church as one more thing to do, to see worship as something I accomplish, an inward state dependent upon me. Rest rarely occurs to me in worship.

The Eucharist restores the bread of grace, the bread that is given, the life that flourishes because it is rooted in the generosity of God.

What place does rest take in your faith?