Climbing the Mountain

Or, starting at the foot of Mount Carmel and discovering God in silence

Hello dear readers!

Today’s post is lengthy, and personal, and I’m sure at times inscrutable; yet I am sharing it in hopes that it will provide something of value to anyone who has ever felt, like myself, lost, bewildered, frustrated, uneasy, or spiritually desolate in this modern world. I’m also sharing it because I have to get all of this out somewhere, and where better than Substack?

So, get comfortable, and bring a cuppa (slang for ‘cup of tea’), because I’d like to talk about where I was last Friday.

To begin: I attended a ‘Young Adults Retreat Weekend’ with my sisters, one of whom is soon to enter the Discalced Carmelite order as a postulant. Thus, I was very pleased to spend a weekend with her — and she promised me the food would be top-tier, which is an infallible persuasion for getting me out of the house.

I wasn’t sure what to expect at the retreat, whether it would be very busy with lots of activities, or nice and peaceful, or (dear me) happy-clappy worship-event nonsense… so I came well-prepared with my trusty case of pens, a journal, my Bible, a couple of books, and three sketchbooks.

(‘Three sketchbooks?’ you might be thinking; well, listen, no two sketchbook brands are the same. Some paper textures work well with one type of ink and then are awful with another, hence the overkill.)

However, as it turned out, the retreat was a ‘Silence and Prayer’ retreat. It came as quite a shock to several attendees, who had come there expecting a social young adults event (of the happy-clappy nature, I suspect).

In hindsight, given that the retreat was being led by a Carmelite bishop, a Carmelite (active) nun, and a Carmelite friar, we should have seen the silence part coming!

Santa Teresa de Jesús, by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652)

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We start at the foot of the mountain

After a hearty dinner, we shuffled into the conference room for the keynote. Sister informed us that there would be total silence asked of us for the next 24 hours — no talking amongst each other, respect one another’s silence, put away our phones (or ‘gadgets’ as she called them), and read only the Bible or spiritual books. She encouraged us also to write in a journal…and that proved my lifesaver on this retreat.

The Bishop started the keynote explaining what silence is, the part that it plays in Carmelite spirituality, and why it is important. He posed questions like:

How much freedom do you really have, from money, from harmful habits, from sin, from the wants of the world?

Can you enter silence? What are your fears?
What noises do you fill your life with? What are these noises hiding?

He told us that once we stop and try to enter silence, true silence, then two things happen: either we rest, because we are weary; or our mind begins to get very loud, as the things that we’ve tried to avoid, or haven’t had time to think about in the busy-ness of our lives, have a chance to hit us. Naturally, our instinct is to escape — we want to get busy again. These thoughts must be faced head-on, or quickly dealt with, or sorted out and put aside, because they will persist until we reach out to God and stop running from them.

For some, silence is a peaceful experience; for others, their ‘inner demons’ start to come out and have to be dealt with. (At this point, I was trembling in my metaphorical boots — I knew I had a lot of those to confront!)

He spoke more about contemplative silence, about prayer; he reminded us that, as Saint Teresa of Avila says, “We are always in the presence of God”. We were to go away, and be quiet, and listen. Be attentive, and pray.

The Carmelite friar, Fr Joy, also explained:

When you enter silence, you are preparing to explore your soul: high mountains wreathed in cloud, shadowed valleys, the fields, the stones, the clouded pools and stormy oceans inside you.

It painted a magnificent, awe-inspiring view of the human soul — of every human soul in that room. Fr Joy also reminded us that, “Unless we abide in Him, and He in us, we cannot bear fruit, but will wither” (cf. John 15:1-7).

This absolutely floored me. I realised that during my long illness, while I had been carefully nourishing my sick body, and treating my unwell mind with therapy, there was one major element lacking — the spiritual. Though I attended Mass, sang at church, and volunteered as a catechist, my soul needed more. “How long have I been starving my soul, pretending it needed nothing, pretending my mind was sufficient to understanding and living my faith!” I wrote. I had been proud enough to think that I could bear fruit on my own, that doing ‘the bare minimum’ was enough.

I went away that night with my head quite whirling.

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Rough seas ahead

The next day, everyone filed into the breakfast room, and we sat there, and ate… in silence. As a naturally quiet person, I enjoyed not feeling the pressure of having to make small talk, but it became strangely awkward when I was mopping up my mess of gooey poached eggs and soggy toast, and the man opposite me was just staring over my head into the distance (whether lost in his own thoughts or kindly pretending not to notice the grilled tomato juice I was dripping over the table, I shall never know).

In the chapel, we recited Morning Prayer together from the Liturgy of the Hours, and the Bishop encouraged us to think about the words, to pay attention to what we were saying and to the movement of these beautiful psalms which have been prayed for over two thousand years by both Jews and Christians alike. When everyone had left, my sister and I whispered to one another our favourite psalms (sisters break silence; this is why the Bishop said we had to have separate cabins to stay in, hehe).

After that, we all wandered around, each on their own little mission. Fr Joy said afterwards that he was incredibly impressed with everyone’s commitment to silence — even from the people who didn’t really want to be there. I’m sure the staff running the conference center must have been very amused by our group.

However, while it was very quiet around me, it was far from quiet interiorly. As one of my sisters put it, “the more quiet the exterior becomes, the more aware you are of how loud it is inside you”.

After Sister’s opening talk, I had decided that for this retreat, I would do it properly. I didn’t touch my books, my sketchpads, my phone. My only companions were now my Bible, my journal, and the Divine Office. I embarked on the silence, as free of ‘distractions’ and ‘noise’ as I could make it.

I journaled madly. Since I could not talk, it was the only way I could clear my mind of the terrible thoughts that now raged inside. It was a distressing time. You see, I have spent the past four years of my illness trying to distract myself from my pain, my anxiety, my depression, my fears, by any means possible. Busying myself with work, my phone, my computer, games, anything — yet I was pursued by a constant, awful feeling of detachment, never really present in my life, passing through endless bouts of disassociation that I could rarely prevent or control.

I was now at a stage in my life where I was holding down a steady job, but still emotionally fragile; I was stressed and frustrated even when on holidays; despite my best attempts to ‘fix’ myself, I was spiralling over and over into insidious addictions, such as non-stop gaming, self-isolation, and ‘doom-scrolling’. By the time the retreat came along, I was near breaking point, and pretty desperate for a solution.

Now, in the silence, my head was running through everything I had been trying to forget, and reiterating all my failings as a person. I sat in the prayer corner, clinging to my Rosary, on the verge of an anxiety attack because I was so overwhelmed. I had written earlier in my journal:

If I were healthy in mind, body, and soul, I do not think such a host of emotions would have assailed my heart so intensely — despair, fear, grief, sudden insight, endless circles of worrying thoughts & hope; hope for healing — to become whole.

At the end of my prayer session, I found some peace. I went up and collected a little rolled-up paper from a bowl of scripture quotes, and mine was beautifully encouraging, telling me to not be afraid of my stormy inner thoughts:

Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them, for the LORD your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you. (Deuteronomy 31:6)

(It turned out later that many who had taken a paper had received something apropos to whatever they needed, such as my soon-to-be-Carmelite sister who received John 15:16 — “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.”)

After morning tea, Fr Joy gave a wonderful talk on the Eucharist (more about that in next week’s post). He also reassured us: “The mind is very powerful, it is very busy; we need to quieten it.”

Reflecting on this later, I wrote:

Perhaps the reason my mind is so noisy that it is clamouring to be heard above the bustle of family life and social media, above all the “noise” I am generating outside of my mind — and the more I try to drown my interior voice out, the more insistent it must become.

So.

Three things I learned about silence, in the 24 hours that followed…

1. Silence is confronting.

One of the men attending the retreat brought up an excellent metaphor from Saint John of the Cross: The soul is like a deep cavern, and at the bottom of that cavern is yearning, the yearning for nothing else but God. We can feed that yearning, or we can fill the cavern with junk.

(More on the spiritual cavern can be read in this article.)

Silence forces us to look at that ‘cavern’. To explore the map of the soul. To assess where we are in our spiritual life, and our physical life, and look at areas that need strengthening or pruning. It’s basic housecleaning. And like housecleaning…it’s only scary if you haven’t done it in a long while!!!

I do have a lot of junk in my cavern, perhaps because I’m afraid of the emptiness, of the yearning. This junk doesn’t bring contentment or peace, it’s just thrown in there, an attempt to fill the yawning void. By the end of the retreat, it became pretty clear exactly what I needed to remove and toss on the burning pile.

2. Silence is important, because it makes room for God to reach you. (Otherwise, as the Bishop joked, He might have to do a St. Paul on you — toss you from your horse and blind you for a while till you come around!)

The Bishop told us something quite amazing, something I’ll continue to think about:

As Teresa of Avila says, “We are always in the presence of God”.
Even when you are about to do the most horrible thing, God continues to be there. He keeps waiting and loving, looking, admiring (Spanish, ‘mira’), until he can slowly bring you round again.
Allow God to look at you the way you are. Not the way you perceive yourself, or the persona you project. You can only begin to see yourself as you really are, when you are in the silence, in the presence of God, who loves you as you really are.

That brings me to the final note:

3. You have to make a place of silence in your life regularly, in order to love, to be at peace.

After all, how can you say you love God if you do not give time to Him daily? — He spends all day, all night, at your side, yet you will speak to everyone in the room but Him.

Quod erat demonstrandum, as my arithmetic teacher taught us (meaning that which was to be demonstrated, indicating that a proof or argument is complete).

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The storm is calmed

During adoration, kneeling before the consecrated Lord, trying to reach out to Him, I was filled with greater torment than before. It is so hard to concentrate on prayer, so hard to dismiss distractions when they pile in, one after the other, like naughty children on a romp. And I’d been sorting through all the junk in my cavern and feeling pretty terrible about my future.

I sat down to journal after adoration, and finally had a moment of shifting in thought. Something very like peace entered into my heart.

I became aware of just how foolishly I had been spending my energy in worrying about myself, in despairing over my faults, my fears, and my sadness. I had been obsessed with myself.

(I hesitantly postulate that this is why anxiety can be so destructive to our relationship with God…it makes us naturally self-centred, we are preoccupied with our failings and our concerns to a disordered degree, even to the point that spiritual things become a torment instead of a consolation.)

As I wrote in my journal:

It is now that I realise it is time to stop reflecting on myself. It is time to reflect on GOD. When I pray, dwelling on the mysteries of His life, His goodness, His sufferings, will bring me far greater peace than endlessly bemoaning my shortcomings.

Worry not that you are imperfect — only fix your eyes on GOD. Dwell on Him, and you will have accomplished the first step to being taken out of yourself and into the realm of prayer.

You must rid yourself of these disordered habits, and begin to live properly; in rising and sleeping orderly, and praying daily. It will be hard, but be not discouraged, for God is with you. You know what is right. You always have. Now act on it.

An interesting side point is that my journal entry shifted into the exhortative second-person pronoun, ‘you’, rather than the previously-used ‘I’ (or, as the first-person pronoun is translated aptly in Latin, Ego). I was beginning to turn outward, away from myself, and it showed unconsciously even in my writing!

(N.B.: I fervently hope that I will not express anything heretical or theologically incorrect in this post. Friendly reminder to all, I’m just a layperson, an average human, figuring out a way through the messiness of life, so go to Saint Francis de Sales or Saint Teresa of Avila if you really want to learn about prayer and spirituality.)

I ended up quite unwell for the rest of the retreat with a migraine and fevers, so it wasn’t a pleasant time, but I was weeding the garden beds of my soul, so I jokingly told someone that perhaps it was a kind of spiritual heat-stroke!

While praying at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament that evening, though in pain, I felt a sense of Christ’s all-encompassing majesty, soft, tender, large as the world but HERE, so loving and small.

God brought me several personal graces after that, and I was overwhelmed with His goodness, and with the goodness of everyone around me.

Jesus walking upon the sea, by William Brassey Hole (1846-1917)

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The end…or the beginning?

We were permitted to break the silence at dinner that night, with the 24 hours having concluded. Everyone at our table shared what they had discovered in the silence. It was moving to hear the personal stories of God working in everyone’s life, or to see someone opening up about their struggles and reflecting on their spiritual journey.

We encouraged one another, talked about the addictiveness of phone apps, replacing disorderly habits with good ones, discussed prayer and scripture and how we could incorporate more of it in our lives, and in general shared a very Catholic, very wholesome hour together. Words like ‘love’, ‘relationship with God’, and ‘journey’ had always felt fake to me in a spiritual context, because they have become overused buzzwords for the charismatic movement, but during our dinnertime conversation, those words gained a much realer meaning for me.

Someone also brought up a quote that had stood out to them from the Psalm readings for that day:

When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. (Psalm 4:4, NRSV)

Not everyone had benefited from the retreat in the same way. A few were quite angry, and doubtless felt misled by the weekend being a silent retreat instead of the social event they’d anticipated.

The more extroverted people agreed it had been good to step inside themselves and reflect for a while, but frustrating to go against their natural desire to connect with people; it was clear they were full of a lot of energy and love! As Father Joy admitted, he too was an extrovert, and found silence draining, yet absolutely necessary to his life as Carmelite Friar, in order to know himself better. (There you go, folks — your natural personality isn’t reason to dismiss a vocation to which you are called!)

In the end, however, it became apparent that the silence didn’t separate us — we all felt drawn close in a different way; we could be quiet and still with one another, because we had all experienced the silence as a community, eating and walking and praying together. Hilariously, someone also mentioned that people gave a lot of REALLY good hugs and handshakes during this retreat, because we weren’t able to talk, so we had to rely on other ways to convey our joy and affection for one another.

Descending the mountain

As the final keynote, before we departed and returned to the lives awaiting us ‘on the outside’, the Bishop gave us a few practical tips to start putting into practice what we had learned:

1. Spend at least 10 minutes every day being silent & thinking about God, giving Him time. If distracted, read the Gospel for the first 5 minutes, and try again. Pick a good bit of time to put aside for this, not just leftover time.

2. ‘Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi’ — to be frank, I’m still figuring this one out, but it was something like: in the Carmelite understanding of spirituality, Belief is the bridge between Prayer and experiencing God.

3. Live simply. Be wary of wanting things that you do not need. Don’t clutter your life. Focus on others, not yourself. Lastly, be wary and alert, always, to discern whether something is of God, or of yourself/others.

My sisters and I returned home. I felt an urge to keep everything I had learned over the weekend inside myself, in my heart, pondering it in silence as Our Lady did. Yet once I reached home, I couldn’t stop talking about the experience! I felt like the merchant who has found the pearl of great price, or the woman that found her lost silver coin and called her friends together to rejoice over it.

This week, I’ve been reflecting on my journal notes from the retreat, and started putting them into practice: at least 10 minutes of silent reflection with God daily (I’m still needing a Bible for this, it’s difficult), less computer time, more spending time with family and attending to other matters. Nothing drastic, just small, manageable changes. As a friend so wisely put it, it’s about intentionality — prioritising God and the wellbeing of my soul, being more aware of how I spend my time, and ensuring that it is being poured into things I truly value.

For the first time in a long while, I’ve found direction. I feel as though I am free to open my heart again, to God, and to other people. Already, I am less anxious, less easily disturbed. I have a strategy for the future, for tackling the weak spots of my soul and bolstering them with good habits. I feel at peace and even-keeled. If the opportunity arises to go to another ‘silent’ retreat, I shall be certain to jump at it.

What I thought would be a relaxing weekend away had turned into an intensely profound experience that will, I hope and pray, change my life from this point on.

I am still too small, too weak, too inexperienced to ascend the mountain of Carmelite contemplation. Yet it bothers me not: I have set my foot upon the base of the mountain, and I will keep my eyes upon the summit, upon our Lord. I know that, step by step, I can begin to ascend.

Following this retreat, I made an artwork, but it’s yet to be scanned, and this post is already interminably long, so I’m leaving that for another day. Stay tuned!

Once again, I know this post has been deeply personal, and probably not what you expected to read when you signed up for The Inky Corner, but if you’ve read this far, God bless you, and to all of us, I hope we will find the peace and contentment in God that we crave.

xx The Inky Baroness

Mount Carmel, by Gordon Frickers (1984)

Resources discussed during the retreat

• The Way of Perfection by St. Teresa of Avila

• The Living Flame of Love by St. John of the Cross

• The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila

• Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross

• The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (available free online)

• Presence: The Mystery of the Eucharist, by the Augustine Institute Press

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