You can’t hear God if your ears
are filled with
the discordant sounds of our modern Babylon.

Alone with God

By Lee Edwards

I nearly died on my first retreat some forty years ago—well, almost. I wanted to spend a silent, prayer-full week with the Trappists in Berryville, Virginia, reflecting on my first year as a Catholic and asking God if I should follow my unknowing mentor Thomas Merton into a monastery.

I knew from Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain that it could happen, even to the most worldly: first an unexpected conversion, then consultation with a priest as to whether you were suited for the religious life, and finally the conviction that you ought to surrender everything and become a monk. Compared with my discordant, frenetic days as a press secretary to a U.S. senator, a monk’s silent, God-centered life seemed, literally, heavenly.

It was the contemplative life of the Trappists that attracted me the most. In addition to the traditional religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Trappists (more properly the Cistercians) also took vows of silence and stability. The monks never spoke to each other, only to their superiors and then only when necessary. They rarely left the monastery, Merton pointed out in his autobiography, and sometimes spent years or a lifetime without ever visiting the nearest town.

The Trappist life, Merton wrote, was essentially “a life of contemplation in common” in which humility, poverty, and charity in common disposed the soul for union with God. Was such a life possible for me, a child of the never silent twentieth century, conditioned to be proud, acquisitive, independent?

I had arranged everything for my retreat, including leave from my job, when a wicked winter storm blanketed Washington and the surrounding area with more than a foot of snow. But the morning of my departure, the sun was bright, the sky was blue, and the highway was snow-free. On the bus, I felt a burgeoning anticipation within me, as though I were going home after years away. The bus left me at the still uncleared back road that led to the monastery, and I set off happily through the knee-high snow, praying the Rosary.

It was cold, in the mid-20s, but the sun shone and I was sheltered from the wind walking through a small hollow. I was surrounded by silence, except for a sound like sighing in the trees above me. The road steadily rose and the walking became more difficult. The sun was still bright but had lost much of its warmth.

At the top of the rise, there was a low brick wall and a sign that read “Our Lady of the Holy Cross, Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance.” But all I could see were wide snow-covered fields and a dimly outlined road swept by a keening wind.

I offered up my aching legs and labored breath in reparation for my sins and started down the road that led I hoped to the monastery. The deep snow was like soft sand on a beach through which you must force your way. I stumbled several times on rocks hidden beneath the snow.

I came up against an abandoned panel truck that I supposed the monks used to deliver their bread to the supermarkets. It was half-buried in the snow and almost on its side. I had to rest. I pulled open a door and gratefully sat, leaning my head against the wheel. I’ll just rest for a little while, I told myself. Time passed—I do not know how much. Suddenly I came awake, shivering. Time to get moving again. My mind slowly formed the words, or was it my guardian angel?

I struggled through the snow and the wind until I found myself shuffling up a gravel driveway toward a large white stone house. I pressed the door bell, and the door was opened by an old monk in a worn white habit.

“I’ve come for a retreat,” I said.

“Well,” replied the monk looking at the cold white wasteland behind me, “you certainly must have wanted to.”

There was no formal retreat schedule at Berryville, and I did what retreatants have done at Trappist monastaries for nine hundred years. I rose at a cold black two in the morning and walked to the main chapel where I listened to the monks chant the Office of Vigils, followed by a half-hour of meditation and the Office of Lauds. Back at the guest house, I attended Mass and received communion in the tiny chapel, not much bigger than a confessional. Father Louis, the retreat master, suggested I go back to sleep, but I was determined to follow their routine. For about two hours, I did some lectio divina and tried to write.

Breakfast was at seven, after which I walked to the main chapel for Tierce and High Mass, which the whole community, about forty priests, brothers, and novices, attended. I sat at the rear, separated from the monks by a wooden lattice screen. The chapel smelled of wool habits and candlewax. After mass, which was in Latin in those far-off days, a few monks remained behind to pray, kneeling on the bare wooden floor.

The monk’s motto is Ora et Labora. And so I and the other retreatant Jerry, who had arrived before the snow storm, worked every morning and afternoon, shoveling snow and chopping wood for the insatiable fireplace in the living room. Following the office of Sext at eleven-thirty, we had our dinner during which Father Louis read from the life of one of the saints or perhaps a book by Fulton Sheen. Father stuttered except when he said Mass when he might have been Laurence Olivier. At four we returned to the main chapel for Vespers. After a light supper, we made a final visit to the monastery for Compline and the Salve Regina—the white statue of Our Lady the only illumined thing in the dark chapel—after which the abbot blessed the brothers and us behind the lattice screen with holy water.

I gratefully sank into bed at seven. I remembered that on one of his first visits to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, Thomas Merton asked why a certain monk was so saintly. “He keeps busy,” was the laconic reply. In that case, I decided, all Trappists were certain to become saints.

But the Trappist path to sainthood was not for me. It was not because of the traditional austerities such as no meat, fish, or eggs in their diet (good for the arteries), the lack of sleep (who needed more than seven hours a night?), the hard physical labor, (I had survived Army basic training during a blisteringly hot Georgia summer), or the pervasive silence (free at last from the Washington Post and the New York Times!). I went home because with each passing day and prayer it became clearer that my becoming a Trappist monk was not God’s idea but mine. I had no calling, only a fantasy that would not withstand the first serious spiritual challenge. I loved myself too much to love only God.

But my first retreat had not been a failure. I had learned several faith-transforming things: You must get away from your regular life at least once a year to pray and meditate about where you are and where you are going. I learned that it’s best to spend this time, whether it is a weekend, a week or a month as silently as possible—you can’t hear God if your ears are filled with the discordant sounds of our modern Babylon.

This time apart, this retreat, must have a structure, whether it is the flexible schedule of the Trappists or the more formal schedule of the Jesuits. At its center must be the Mass, surrounded by confession, spiritual reading, instruction by those conducting the retreat, and serious silent prayer during which you say little and listen a lot to God.

I loved the silence and the freedom of the Trappists, and so I kept returning to Berryville. I remember the soft sweet voice of Father Stephen, who gently shepherded us retreatants, and his abiding love of the Rosary (although I could not imagine, then, taking half an hour to say one decade).

I remember the not very silent Palm Sunday retreats led by stockbroker Fred and restaurateur Phil, whose home-made pasta sauce was the next best thing to manna from Heaven, and 80-year-old Brother Stan, who made his way to the river bank every day to tend his flowers regardless of the weather.

I remember the rich yeasty smell of bread in the bakery and the rich earthy smell of cow dung in the fields. I remember coming across the Biblical passage, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” and asking God to help me understand what that meant for me.

I remember how the white crosses in the small cemetery below the main house slowly multiplied over the years and my mixed feelings about the new all-brick retreat house with its separate bedrooms, central heating, and an enormous picture window facing the distant Blue Ridge Mountains.

I remember most of all the unvarying example of the monks working and praying and waiting patiently for Heaven.

But when Fred and Phil died the same year, no one (including me) stepped forward to organize our annual retreat, and I did not return to Berryville the next Palm Sunday; in fact, I stopped going on retreat.

It did not seem to make much of a difference. I went to Sunday Mass with Anne and the children, and I sang in the church choir (there’s always a place for even an over-the-hill tenor). I got to confession every month or so. We said grace before meals at home and sometimes in restaurants. I kept a Bible (the Jerusalem edition) beside my bed and occasionally dipped into it. I carried a Rosary and said a decade now and then. When I wasn’t too tired in the evening, I would pick up Merton or Ronald Knox or Evelyn Waugh and read for a half hour.

Time passed, and our beautiful daughters Elizabeth and Catherine married handsome and devoted young men who were good Catholics. We no longer required our large split level house with its zoysia lawn and formidable taxes, and after twenty-nine years in Montgomery County, Maryland, Anne and I moved into a comfortable compact town house in Northern Virginia.

We knew there would be all matter of changes, from learning the way to the supermarket to the best time to avoid the traffic on I-395 into Washington (answer: before 6 a.m., and after midnight). But we were not prepared for the seemingly non-stop faith of our new parishioners at St. Lawrence the Martyr on Franconia Road. We loved our new pastor Father MacAfee for his eloquent and erudite sermons, the splendid choir, and all the well-trained altar boys (no altar girls in the Arlington diocese, thank you.) We reveled in the middle American and yet United Nations variety of our fellow Catholics—white, black, and brown, Irish, Italian, German, Vietnamese, Korean, and Philippine. Something was always going on: daily praying of the Rosary, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on Wednesdays, CCD, priest-led classes on the faith and morals, a full breakfast on the first Sunday of every month served by the Knights of Columbus, Saturday morning vigils in front of the abortion clinic on Duke Street. We marveled that so many were so committed to practicing the greatest commandment.

I noted that the same group of men was involved in most of the activities, and when one of them mentioned the upcoming annual men’s retreat, I immediately signed up.

At Berryville, I had been able to come and go as I pleased and as the Holy Spirit moved me. At the Loyola Retreat Center in Faulkner, in Southern Maryland, I was one of nearly sixty men who under the direction of Father Mike and the other Jesuits abided by a carefully drawn up schedule that prudently used every one of the thirty-six hours we spent there. Yet I did not chafe under the schedule, but drew inspiration and strength from the men around me as we prayed in chapel, received communion, and laid hands on each other at a healing service.

I had never prayed the Rosary with so many men before, and as we slowly walked together toward an outdoor statue of Our Lady, swinging our rosaries and intoning the glorious mysteries, I thought that this was surely a foretaste of what was to come. We divided into groups of seven one night and began, hesitantly at first, to share what God had done in our lives in the last year.

I had prepared myself to be on guard against the Loyola priests (dark visions of Berrigan, Drinan, and Teilhard danced in my head), but I found the Southern Maryland Jesuits to be apolitical and practical in their spiritual direction. Father Steve, quoting St. Ignatius, said that “you can not rush into prayer at a retreat or at home—you have to ease into it.” Find a comfortable place, he suggested, relax, offer an introductory prayer (perhaps one of the Psalms) and then place yourself with Jesus in a scene from the Bible.

He and every other priest talked about the need for silence on a retreat and in your daily life, quoting Jesus who said to his disciples, “Come by yourselves to an out-of-the-way place and rest a little,” and also Mother Teresa: “Silence gives us a new outlook on life. In it, we are filled with the grace of God, which makes us do all things with joy.”

At the end of my first retreat at Loyola, I reflected that a good retreat is like a taste of Heaven. You are focused on God, surrounded by people who love him. You try to please him, not yourself. You are aware of his light, not your dark. And you are reluctant to leave — you want to remain with him in that out-of-the-way holy place.

I came full circle in my retreat experience when I attended my first Opus Dei retreat at their conference center outside Boston two years ago. I had been approached by members of Opus Dei (the Work of God) shortly after my conversion forty years ago, and had attended several meetings in Northwest Washington. Their piety and traditional approach to Catholicism were attractive to me—we were then at the unsettling beginning of Vatican II.

But almost every Opus Dei priest at that time seemed to have a Spanish accent, and they seemed unnecessarily secretive. Why not have a sign of some kind—it didn’t have to be neon—on your building? Didn’t Jesus say that you shouldn’t hide your light under a bushel? I became involved in parish life and declined further invitations from them.

I did not think about Opus Dei for more than thirty years until I began seeing an always smiling all-American priest, C. John McCloskey III, at one conservative function after another in Washington, D.C. I discovered that Father John was the director of the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington where I had received my instructions in the Catholic Faith all those years ago. I made an appointment to talk to Father, and before I left, he had agreed to be my spiritual director, the first in my Catholic life.

All of these “coincidences” brought me to an Opus Dei retreat conducted by Father Malcolm Kennedy (as American as a degree from Harvard and a passion for golf can make you) who told us retreatants—active in politics, medicine, finance, law, education, publishing, and other pursuits of the world—that we were like Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, who called to Jesus on the road outside Jericho. Like Bartimaeus, we were blind and poor and in need of Jesus’ mercy. Like Bartimaeus, we needed to cry out to him and follow him to Jerusalem and join in his passion, death, and resurrection.

Father Malcolm got right to the point: “Most of you are on the back nine,” he added, looking at our thinning gray hair, “and the time to start a spiritual plan is now.” That meant the Eucharist, spiritual reading, the Rosary, confession, meditation, acts of charity.

He stressed the centrality of the Eucharist, calling it the “ticket to holiness.” He pointed out that in Ecclesia in America, Pope John Paul II said that the Eucharist “is the outstanding moment of encounter with the living Christ.” Father Malcolm urged us not to leave the church immediately after receiving Holy Communion but to stay and give thanks. “Ten minutes,” he suggested, “is the minimum we can do.” Remember, he added, the ten lepers who were cured and that only one came back to thank him. “We are cured,” Father said, “every time we receive him.”

Father constantly leavened his meditations with humor. “If you start levitating during the retreat,” he counseled, “hold on to the arms of your chair.” “If you start hearing voices after the retreat,” he said, “call a doctor, not a priest.”

He urged us to pray all the time, every day, to get to know him. Otherwise when we die and meet him, we will be meeting a stranger.

Toward the end of the retreat, Father Malcolm asked the question that gnaws at everyone: Why don’t we persevere in the resolutions we make on a retreat? It was, he suggested, because we make too many resolutions and of the wrong kind. We should make one concrete, realistic resolution—not to wear a hairshirt but to say grace at meals—and be determined in its application. One good resolution leads to another, he promised, if we are successful with the first.

Father recounted that on one retreat a layman whom he admired for his impressive faith had told him about his resolution—he had a very comfortable wingback chair in his study and had resolved not to sit in it. “Here I had been knocking myself out during the retreat,” Father recalled, “talking about the need for prayer and sacrifice and the Cross, and he tells me about some chair in his house.”

He later understood what a wonderful resolution it was. The man had been using the chair as a cocoon to get away from his wife and children. He realized he had to do more for his family and one simple yet effective way to help him do that was to give up his chair and his refuge.

As much as we Americans with our work ethic hate to admit it, Father concluded, we cannot reach Heaven all by ourselves. We need assistance from God, from our spiritual director, and from the Virgin Mary who may be “the missing link” in our spiritual life. He quoted Thomas Merton, who admitted that a year after his conversion, he discovered in himself a lack of devotion to Our Lady. Merton had regarded her as a beautiful myth when she was in fact not only Christ’s mother but our spiritual mother.

“I didn’t know my need of her,” Merton wrote. “I had no sense of her power. I was a very small child. As we run our race in life, we need to hold on to her hand.”

What Opus Dei did, I discovered, was to help the layman sanctify his work wherever he was, in the factory, in the classroom, in the hospital, in the boardroom, in the legislature. “Our interior life [contemplation],” Blessed Jose Maria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei wrote, “flows from—takes its impetus from—each person’s exterior life [work].”

I discovered (I blush to think how long it took me) I could pray in my office, in my car, at home, on the street, in the shopping mall, on the golf course, at a party, everywhere. Ora et labora. I had become a Trappist after all—well almost.  

Dr. Lee Edwards is a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, President of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Senior Editor of The World and I magazine, and Adjunct Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America. The author of ten books, his articles have been published in Reader’s Digest, National Review, The Wall Street Journal and similar publications. Born in Chicago, Dr. Edwards resides in Alexandria, Va., with his wife Anne, who assists him in his research and writing. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.