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If renewal in religious life is to be genuine,
communal silence needs to be
brought back into our convent homes.
Silence in the convent:
A lost treasure
By Mary Terese Donze
I walk down the Valley of Silence—
Down the dim, voiceless valley—alone!
And I hear not the fall of a footstep
Around me, save God’s and my own;
And the hush of my heart is as holy
As hovers where angels have flown.
—Father Abram J. Ryan,
“Song of the Mystic”
It was five a.m. A bell sounded through the cloister hallways. The echo had scarcely faded when, from one of the curtained cells in the big dormitory, a voice called out, “Praised be Jesus Christ!” From behind the curtains of the remaining cells came a
chorus: “Now and forever. Amen.”
The wakened nuns began praying aloud the so-called dormitory prayers. Except for the sound of their praying and of the faint splashings in their water basins, there were no other sounds. It was still the time of the Great Silence begun after Night Prayers the evening before.
Twenty minutes later the bell rang again, and the group assembled in the chapel to begin the community morning prayer. Later there was breakfast together, still in silence. After that the Great Silence ended, and the work of the day began.
Some of the nuns went to the nearby school to teach. For those who remained in the convent to do the household chores and prepare the meals, the regular silence prevailed.
When the nuns met again for the noon meal, they first sat for several minutes of spiritual reading. Only then did they talk as they ate, a concession made on “school days.”
After school the nuns had a short break before gathering in the chapel for an hour of prayer. The evening meal followed, with reading from a spiritual book, and, afterwards, time for preparing for the next day’s classes. Later, before the bell rang for Night Prayer, was a period of recreation. While they talked, the nuns usually engaged in some type of needlework.
At the end of each month was a Day of Recollection and then the annual retreat during the summer, both times of silence.
Such was the routine in the life of many nuns. Did they find all this silence difficult? At times, yes, as any discipline is demanding. Depressing? Apparently not. The nuns laughed a lot—real, honest laughter, carefree and hearty.
Silence was the soul of the convent home. It brooded over the religious houses with an aura of otherworldliness. Silence gave one time to reflect, to pray with greater ease, to develop a calmness and serenity that came from self-discipline. In retrospect one might say that silence was a priceless gift that was ours without our recognizing it for what it was, an all-pervading presence analogous to the air we breathed, something we took for granted until, following Vatican II, it was no longer there.
It was not that silence was ruled out by any directive in the renewal process. Silence was simply ignored, forgotten, allowed to slip away without our noticing its departure, and then, finally, gone before we were aware of our loss. Now, along with the changes that have come into religious life and the emphasis on ministry, silence as a scheduled discipline no longer features with any prominence in religious life. We are the poorer for its absence.
A change in the rule of silence has affected our lives in manifold ways. We no longer sleep in dormitories or rise as a community. Bells have been done away with, and each nun gets up when she chooses. Dormitory prayers are no longer said in common. Some nuns rise and turn on their personal TV to get the news as they dress; others prefer the radio. Breakfast is a pick-up meal where, if two or three happen to be together at the table, they exchange bits of news they have heard or perhaps just talk casually.
If any of the nuns wants silence, she is free to maintain it at any time she cares to. But there is no communal silence when one can be assured that the entire house will be quiet. Talk goes on at all hours of the day and as far into the night as one cares to remain awake and carry on a conversation. And, since there is no longer a set hour for retiring, it is not uncommon for TV’s or radios to go on until relatively late hours.
There is nothing wrong with all this in the sense of right and wrong. It is not a matter of right and wrong. Those who further its continuance have reasons that satisfy them and those of like mind. The most common reasons put forward are that any type of imposed ruling in so personal a matter as speech interferes with one’s liberty, and, of itself, the observance of religious silence has nothing to do with the keeping of the religious vows. Most of today’s mentality toward outside control on something so indifferent as when and where to talk is negative and would affirm the above reasoning. Mature adults are expected to know what is good for them in such ordinary matters without the need of having it spelled out for them or imposed by regulation.
At the same time, with such a mentality, we are getting dangerously close to an individualism that is contrary to the submission and humility essential to spiritual development. More to be deplored, we are forfeiting the greatest means to a life of interior prayer. Only a ruled silence, willingly and gladly submitted to, will restore the good we have lost, a good recognized and valued for centuries.
Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It is the outward manifestation of an inner stillness. This inner stillness does not come without the price of effort. But the effort to meet that price pays off in patience, self-control, humility, and a deeper appreciation of the things of God. Most of all, as already mentioned, silence brings with it the possibility of a more profound prayer life. The practice of silence also endows us with strength and courage to meet life’s contingencies with equanimity.
The author of the Imitation has much to say about silence. Quoting another he says, “As often as I have been among men, I have returned less a man.” We have our own experience to verify this. Rarely do we regret having kept silence on a matter; but frequently enough we have had occasion to regret a word we said at some unguarded moment. How rightly does the same author say, “No man can safely speak but he who loves silence.” Only in the rarefied atmosphere of silence can one gather the wisdom necessary to speak without fault or excess.
If renewal in religious life is to be genuine, communal silence needs to be brought back into our convent homes. Not any kind of silence will do. There is no question here of that timid silence that fears to speak out where a matter of principle is concerned. Neither is it a silence encrusted with elements of rigidity that may have crept into some of our past practice of maintaining silence. What we need is to rediscover the authentic religious silence that we inherited from our holy founders and lost in the post-Vatican II scuffle for renewal.
But what of our ministry? How can we practice silence and carry on a fruitful ministry? We need not fear that a return to a grace-inspired silence within our religious convents will interfere with our ministry. On the contrary, silence will be a means of enhancing and enriching whatever we do. All who minister to others need time and quiet to nurture within themselves the gifts they plan to share with those they serve. Otherwise ministers face the danger of burnout.
Besides the good that it does for the ministers themselves, religious silence is a positive factor in its own right. The atmosphere of peace and quiet that pervades a religious house where silence is observed has a redeeming effect on those who come under its influence.
At a recent convent festivity where a group of nuns kept the singing and dancing and high spirits going late into the evening, they received a phone call from a nearby elderly neighbor. “Sisters, you might want to check in your back yard. There is a group of young people there making a terrible racket.”
The nuns laughed it off. They felt they had a right to a bit of joyous exuberance after a day’s hard work. And there will always be those who find fault with any noisy merriment. At the same time, had there been some notion of silence within the convent, this would never have occurred. A scheduled silence would have made an accommodation before it happened.
If we are sincerely interested in renewal and hope to find it effective in our convent homes, we need to become aware of what we have lost in rejecting conventual silence and, fortified by humility and prayer, take positive measures toward reclaiming the treasure once ours.
Sister Mary Terese Donze, A.S.C., taught in the elementary and high schools of Illinois and Missouri from 1929 to 1973. She does not consider herself retired. Since 1971 she has been free-lance writing and has published many articles on religious and general interest topics. Three of her books have won National Catholic Book Awards from the Catholic Press Association. Her latest book is Peace Be with You (Treehaus, 1996).
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