Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

Reclaiming

Quiet

Reclaiming

Quiet

Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

SARAH CLARKSON

C

© 2024 by Sarah Clarkson

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

BakerBooks.com

Ebook edition created 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024005425 | ISBN 9781540900524 (paper) | ISBN 9781540903198 (casebound) | ISBN 9781493439515 (ebook)

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Cover art: abstract painting Promise © by Stephanie Marzella

Published in association with The Bindery Agency, www.TheBinderyAgency.com

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and postconsumer waste whenever possible.

To my children, for whose sake I have sought the quiet, in whose presence I have gleaned its wonder.

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction: Kingfisher Sight

Part One:  The Nature of Quiet

1. Kitchen Table in My Heart: Presence

2. Native Ground: Home

3. Trust amidst Apocalypse: Peace

4. Lover’s Quest: Pilgrimage

Part Two:  The Shape of Quiet

5. Ox-Cart Man: Limit

6. Words Make Worlds: Cadence

7. Color of Wonder: Prayer

8. Halcyon Day: Rest

Part Three:  The Gifts of Quiet

9. Becoming Small: Assent and Amazement

10. Wise Woman’s Cottage: Imagination

11. Seeing from the Inside: Conviction and Courage

12. Mara’s House: Lament

Acknowledgments

Notes

Back Cover

Introduction

Kingfisher Sight

If you keep your eyes out, you might see a kingfisher. I saw one down by the lake the other day, Mark said.

The words of our new friend startled me. Kingfishers? I’d yearned for years to witness one of these magical birds; they haunt the lines of countless poems I love, dashes of electric blue whose presence is like the flash of divinity. Swift and small, they always seem to appear in books as portents of some subtle revelation or gift. Mark’s words reached my ears on one of our first Sundays in the church to which my husband, Thomas, had come as priest. The world and ways of our parish were still new to us, each day an exploration. We’d begun to fill and form the great rooms of our old Victorian vicarage. We’d found the bridge over the lake that led to the woods. We’d met the ducks and chased the trains down the nearby track and visited the farmers’ market down the lane. But kingfishers, my goodness, this was a grace beyond expectation.

Where did you see it? I asked a little breathlessly. Mark, whose knowledge of the natural world and our little neighborhood were a constant gift, described the spot in detail and added that he’d actually seen three. But you have to be in a certain state of heart, he warned. And then, you just see them.

Ah, yes.

Of course. I knew in an instant what he meant. 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.

Quiet has been my study, my pursuit—my frustration, even—for most of the last three years. Mark’s comment about the state of heart needed to spot a kingfisher sums up in an image what I mean by quiet: an openness to the presence of God at play in creation, at work in our hearts, directing our ways and drawing us into his story. I suppose that’s a lot to pile on the shoulders of quiet as a concept. But after all these years of study and pursuit, I am convinced that our capacity to be quiet will shape the whole of the way we come to love and trust the living God, to have a lively faith at all.

I started this journey deeper into the realms of quiet (for journey it is; I’m nowhere near its end) because I was exhausted. We’d come to the end of the first pandemic year; I found myself expecting a third child after a season of illness and felt the severe isolation of a new lockdown to be almost unbearable. I could not get my hands round peace, and my mind felt in a constant state of uproar. On New Year’s Day, I read Psalm 23 and those words—he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul—became the theme and cadence of my prayer as we entered the new year and the coming of our child.

But I quickly realized my prayer was not one God would answer with a sudden dump of serenity. As I prayed almost desperately for peace, I began to be aware of the patterns and shapes of daily life by which I was driving a certain frenzy within myself, by which I was disquieting my own mind. Every day I crammed it with the images and thoughts of countless screens and headlines. I turned compulsively to my phone not only in moments of relaxation but also in anxiety. I began to wonder if at times my smartphone had become my replacement for the Holy Spirit, the ever-present comforter I turned to in times of fear. 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.

And all these habits were shaping my outer life, drawing the hours of my rest or work into their whirlwind, invading the moments of my outdoor wandering, my mothering and rest, my daily capacity to walk in joy. 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.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that we in the modern world increasingly struggle to hear the voice of God, and sometimes we forget to even desire it because our minds and ears are so crammed with the voices online of the internet, headlines, social media, and news feeds. Our attention is drawn constantly to the addictive scroll of a feed or screen, our minds trained to skim information, restless for the next tidbit, incapable of rest or depth. Our devices are with us at all times so that whether we walk, rest, grieve, work, or sleep, we never need to be silent.

But I believe our greatest loss is spiritual because our disquiet leads us to a certain kind of life; it shapes the whole of the way we interact with each other and the world around us. We become driven by a sense of urgency, stressed and distracted from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep. We become increasingly disconnected from our physical and emotional surroundings, incapable of enjoying a nature walk without a screen to document it, increasingly dismissive of the tiny and faithful acts of the ordinary that constitute the spiritual richness or poverty of our everyday lives. 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.

What, then, shall we do?

God’s answer to my desperate prayer three years ago was to invite me to journey homeward, into the realm of quiet where rest always waits and love always gleams. God does not change. His grace is not dependent upon how disciplined we are or how good we’ve been, but sometimes the grace we most need to experience is his aid in healing the forms of life that have made him feel distant to us. This book is my invitation to you as a reader to journey with me, to journey homeward to a life and heart rooted in a peace beyond the touch of any trouble in this world.

We are called to quiet, all of us; this is what I have come to believe with the whole of my heart. 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. But every Christian is called to be a person capable of hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit, of practicing God’s presence in the midst of the everyday. Quiet is not a special state reserved for introverts or particularly pious people or the lonely. 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 his Word into our darkness and sing us back to life. Quiet is the space from which we pray and worship, the condition of our learning, our creativity, our literal in sight.

In this book, I want to explore what it looks like for an ordinary person to choose the radical way of quiet. To slowly (and often with great difficulty) choose the patterns and ways of hush rather than of hurry or information. To open days with prayer or a moment of stillness instead of a quick scroll on a screen. To turn, in grief or fear, to the inner refuge of God’s presence rather than Google.

This book is written as much out of my frailty as my strength. This is a work of exploration, sometimes exasperation, and, just now and then, epiphany.

I struggle with addiction to my phone. I wrestle with boredom in prayer. My work here proceeds from my life as a writer (working intensively online), as a mother of four adorable and very active children, and as a vicar’s wife with the social schedule this entails. I am a soul seeking to take part in the issues of my generation yet deeply convicted that I am called to cultivate a life shaped by the holy wild of quiet so that God’s Word may sing amidst my days.

I love the contemplatives, the saints of heroic prayer and vast silences, but this is not a book about the contemplative life. It’s not an exploration of radical acts or extreme states. The thing is, I don’t think quiet is really about great feats so much as it is about small faithfulnesses. And that’s a work available to every believer alive.

What I am asking is how we may grow quiet in our lives again like a seed planted in the ground. It may burgeon into a great tree that gives form to the whole shape of our living in the world—it may bear contemplative, radical fruit. But here in the rush and flow of daily need and demand, how may we cradle and tend the seed of quiet in our hearts so that something new begins to grow in the fallow earth of our hurry and fear and distraction?

I did see a kingfisher eventually, you know.

A dash of the brightest blue I’ve ever seen, a flash of grace amidst the scratch of wintry branches and rush of brown river water as I walked home down the footpath one day.

It must have been at least six months after my talk with Mark. By that time, I’d forgotten to look, had ceased a kind of inward striving toward attention. My life was just as busy, my sight still more entangled than I liked with screens, my days full with need and demand. The only difference I could see in myself was just . . . the opening of my hands. I’d managed that a little more in those months. The opening of my heart here and there throughout the day to listen for the windsong of God’s presence, the news of his weather, his goodness at work within the wildlands of my heart. I’d honored my limits a bit more, too, learned to assent to the smallness of my days and the smallness of my strength.

And there it was, my little flash of blue quiet, of sapphire peace, a sign of the love always haunting my steps.

As it does yours.

May you find that same love drawing your own heart into the great quiet of God’s presence in the pages that follow.

Sarah Clarkson

The Vicarage, Oxford

2023

Part One

The Nature

of Quiet

1

Kitchen Table in My Heart

Presence

The priest, my friend, set a cup of coffee before me. A brown pottery cup and saucer brimming with black, fragrant liquid. The morning light slanted in through the tall kitchen windows, silvered September rays that rippled over my hands. Time slowed. I rested my hands on the gold-grained wood of the table and watched the steam rise from the cup. The echo and thrum of cars in the street sounded faintly in the bright room. A strip of blue sky sliced through the London rooftops, and I watched a bird leap from ledge to ledge in joyous bursts of flight. I cradled the cup in my hands and took a sip. But for a long moment I could not take another, for I knew that if I did, I might begin to cry.

The morning had not started with any intimation of emotional crisis. The kitchen in which I sat was part of the vicarage belonging to the old East London church next door. My husband, Thomas, training for ordination in the Church of England, was doing a placement at the church. Our hosts were the resident priest and his wife, old friends of ours from Oxford who had invited us and our six-month-old daughter to live with them for the monthlong duration of Thomas’s stay. We had arrived perhaps a little crazy-eyed. The passionate weariness and joy of our first months as new parents lay just behind us (along with my