Fr Matthew Reese

For God alone my soul in silence waits. —Psalm 62:1

Dear Friends,

Some years ago, my fellow seminarians and I went up into the New England countryside for our annual class retreat. The church center where we were being housed was bucolic—a cluster of pretty, low-slung bungalows and rambling colonial-revival dormitories. At the center was an old stone chapel, behind, a wide, shallow stretch of river, winding around great smooth boulders covered in snow.

It was gorgeous.

And we were all grumpy.

The preceding semester had left us exhausted and fractious. Administrative vagaries and the petty disputes of small community life had sapped all the excitement and joy out of the proceedings.

This retreat was mandatory… but announced late. People had cancelled family plans and travel to make the trek.

Compline and the first Morning Prayer diverged so blatantly from the Prayerbook liturgy we knew and loved that many of us started praying double offices—the one out of the book on our own, and then the hodgepodge version second.

At the first session of contemplative prayer, the facilitating priest began proceedings with a temple gong strike, and—rather uncharitably—half of us rolled our eyes into the back of our heads.

And then she read only a single verse of Psalm 62: “For God alone my soul in silence waits.” Not a word more.

We sat in silence for seven minutes. It was tortuous.

That afternoon, we met again. “For God alone my soul in silence waits.”

Fifteen minutes.

The next day: “For God alone my soul in silence waits.”

Thirty minutes.

By the end of our weekend, we were sitting on the floor, in total silence, for nearly an hour. And it felt as if it was only long enough to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Where had the time gone?

In spite of all the fractiousness and grumpiness, in spite of all the draws on our time and attention, the simple act of sitting in silence, of waiting in silence, had allowed the Holy Spirit to break through. An exercise that was at first tortuous became a balm to our souls.

It is hard to stop, hard to wait, hard to sit in silence.

It runs against the grain of everything else in our busy lives.

But if we can really wait for God, we will surely hear His voice.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew