Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. We live in a world of pervasive noise. Even when we’re alone, our surroundings are quiet, our devices bombard us with an endless stream of inputs, messages, news, opinions, entertainment, and we feel constantly connected. My guest argues that this lack of both silence and solitude isn’t just generating stress and fragmenting our attention, but doing real damage to our souls.
His name is John Mark Comer, and he’s a pastor and the author of Into the Quiet. Today on the show, we discuss what noise is doing to the deepest parts of us and how engaging in silence and solitude can help us cultivate inner stillness. We explore the monastic tradition behind these spiritual disciplines, why engaging in them can sometimes feel like a negative experience, and what happens when all our usual distractions disappear. We also get into simple ways to bring more quiet into everyday life. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/silence. All right, John Mark Comer, welcome to the show.
John Mark Comer:
Very happy to be back with you, Brett. Thank you.
Brett McKay:
So we had you on the show about two years ago to talk about the idea of spiritual disciplines, which you explored in your book, Practicing the Way. And two of the spiritual disciplines we briefly discussed were solitude and silence. Well, you got a new book out where you just go deep into these two spiritual disciplines. It’s called Into the Quiet. What prompted you to really dig into solitude and silence?
John Mark Comer:
Brett, I spend a fair bit of time in the quiet corners of my noisy and busy life as a dad and worker and all that kind of stuff, sneaking away to quiet places to just come to peace and find stillness, and in my case, to pray. And one of the places I go a lot is this monastery up in Big Sur. I actually just got back from there. I go at the end of every summer for a long solitude retreat just by myself. And this place is wild. I mean, Big Sur itself is wild and gorgeous. And this is in the most remote part of Big Sur, you lose cell phone reception an hour and a half before you get to the turnoff. Then it’s like this wild two and a half mile switchback road up to about 1,500 feet up this cliff. And you get there and then there are signs all over the property saying just silence, not like, “Hey, keep it down or please be mindful.” Just silence.
And you don’t stay in dormitory style. It’s not that kind of a monastery. You stay in these little hermitages, or they actually call them cells, like prison cells, and these little kind of 10 by 10 cabins. And you take all of your meals totally alone, in silence, back in your room. The only sound you hear is three times a day, there’s like a 30 minute moment of prayer with the monks that you can sit in on. So I would always go to evening prayer, which is at five. And after evening prayer, they do this 30 minute silent meditation where you just kind of sit there. They have this gorgeous old octagon kind of chapel, just natural light as the sun is going down and it’s this beautiful, blissfully quiet kind of zone and they just do totally silent 30 minute meditation. So I’m sitting in on this and naturally it’s hard to pay attention to anything for 30 minutes straight without your mind wandering.
So my mind wanders like it does for all people or maybe a little bit more than the average Joe. And at some point I realize that I’ve gone off thinking about this, that or the other and I kind of open my eyes to refocus on my breath or whatever. And I noticed this blue glow out of the left hand corner of my eye. And I look over and I am not making this up, the monk that is leading this 30 minute meditation. And this is like straight up hardcore Catholic. He’s wearing full head to toe white robes. There is Latin and candles and all the monk stuff. He is over sitting against the wall, leaning back against it with his iPhone out scrolling on his phone doing God knows what. And that’s the blue glow that I see. And in that moment, I just realized the world is doomed.
If you can’t escape it here, this is about as far off the map as you can get in a car, then man. And so as I write in the book, we’re not the first people to live and attempt to have a soul, but we live as the first generation in human history for whom it is now possible to go through your entire life and never actually be alone because anytime we may be the only person in a room or we may shut up and not talk for 30 minutes, we’re never really alone anymore because our devices keep us tethered to the world of noise. And that in many ways was an inciting incident to go deeper into this subject.
Brett McKay:
You started the book talking about how a lot of people have this desire for silence and solitude because we do live in a world of noise. And I like how you define noise because I think when most people think of it and even how scientists define it, it’s like unwanted sound. So car horns and sirens, things like that. But you say there can also be soundless noise. What is soundless noise?
John Mark Comer:
Okay. So Cal Newport has a beautiful book on digital minimalism and he has a chapter in there on solitude. Now he’s not writing about it as a spiritual discipline as I am, but more through the perspective of deep work. But still, he has a wonderful working definition of solitude as a place that is free from other inputs. And I like that definition. And by that definition, one form of input is auditory. So if you’re in an open plan office and people are talking to you constantly, it’s hard to kind of clear your brain to open it up to work or creativity or self-reflection. But there’s a whole other… Inputs do not require volume anymore. They can come through our web browser or through our phones. And this is where to extrapolate out of physical noise, there is now a digital noise that we are assaulted by constantly.
The noise of constant news alerts, the noise of constant predictions of doom for everything from the environment to politics, to AI, to et cetera, et cetera, the next pandemic, the noise of just trivia and drivel and brain rot and distraction on TikTok or whatever, the noise of constant opinion and anger and outrage and anxiety. This noise, even if it is technically silent, assaults us through our phones and our laptops and our web browsers. Any time that we’re actually alone, as long as we have a device, we’re still receiving input from other places. And that’s where the world now is noisier than it has ever been before.
Brett McKay:
There’s been lots of research about the negative effects noise with sound can have on our body. So it spikes our cortisol, it’s linked to anxiety, Alzheimer’s, dementia, but you’re focused on what noise, including soundless noise, all the inputs we’re bombarded with, has on the soul. What do you think noise is doing to us spiritually?
John Mark Comer:
Yeah. Well, I think at the end of the day, it blocks or it sabotages or it at least diminishes our capacity for love, which in my paradigm is what life is all about, receiving love from God and others and then giving that love back to God and others and becoming a loving person. I think that is the meaning and purpose of life, not moving the needle up to the right, not money, sex, and power, not whatever image management, but becoming people that are deeply forbaded by love and by joy and by peace. I come at that as a avid Christian, but I think there’s a common desire for that across the spectrum of the world. I don’t think I have to convince you that the noisier our environment, the more stressed our body, the less loving we are likely going to be. So this is an embarrassing analogy and I’m not going to come out looking good in this one, but my wife and I, we’re laughing because we just read about this new couple’s fad called a airport divorce, which made us actually feel better.
We have a lot of tension when we try to travel together, we kind of move through the universe very differently. And so just the stress of an airport, even if you’re there early, which is rare, but even if you’re there and you’re not in a hurry, still just that level of people and noise and stimulation and chaos, it’s hard to just be loving and present and relax with each other. So this new trend is basically you get to the airport and you get dropped off by your Uber or you park or whatever, and then you’re just like, “Honey, I’ll see you either on the plane or I’ll see you at our destination.” And you just have an airport divorce and you go through security separately and you do your stuff separately and then you get on the plane and you travel and then you meet there just to minimize conflict.
And so I’m aware that does not speak flattering of me, but we are playfully giving it a try. And I think the reality is just in an environment like that, it’s hard to be a loving person. It’s hard to be present to another. It’s hard to have compassion for another. It’s hard to listen deeply. It’s hard to even notice your own anxiety and the way your own internal anxiety and the systems of anxiety you inherited from your family of origin may be discoloring a conversation and causing you to behave in ways that are controlling or domineering or passive or withdrawing. In short, it blocks our ability to love people.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I agree. I’m with you on traveling just makes me terrible. My family jokes, I turn into nervous travel dad whenever we travel, especially when we’re flying. So I’m like, we got to make the plane.
John Mark Comer:
Okay, so I’m not alone.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And I’ll just yell randomly and it’s because it’s all the noise. It’s just that you’re thinking about you’re checking your phone. Okay, has the flight changed? Does everyone have their papers? Everyone have their license? Yeah, it’s the noise. It makes it really hard to be loving. And you mentioned that silence is connected to solitude. Our lack of solitude today contributes to the amount of noise because as you said, we’re just connected all the time via our devices. But what’s interesting is people have been talking a lot about this loneliness crisis. People feel alone.
John Mark Comer:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
So I mean, how is it that we can feel alone, but we’re still not experiencing solitude like we think we should?
John Mark Comer:
Yes. Well, first off, I think it’s really important to clarify that loneliness is not the same thing as solitude. One of the primary differences is loneliness is unchosen. Solitude has to be chosen. What we call solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments known to mankind short of death because it’s an unchosen form of solitude, i.e. It’s extreme loneliness. Loneliness is when your ache for not just people or a social interaction, but your ache for love and acceptance to know and to be known for belonging is not sated or satisfied by your relational experience. That’s why you can be sitting in a crowd of people and be totally lonely. You can be sitting around the table with your family and be lonely. You can be on a date with your wife and feel lonely. Solitude, on the other hand, is a chosen foray into the quiet to be alone with yourself, your own heart, your own mind and with God.
And it’s profoundly different. I often feel less lonely in solitude than almost anywhere else. Now for me as a Christian, that’s because I often experience just the unfolding of God’s presence in love, but many people find a deep peacefulness and integration that comes to them in this place of silence.
Brett McKay:
Alright. So solitude is chosen, being alone as an act of free will.
John Mark Comer:
Chosen withdrawal from other people. Loneliness is when your ache for love is unsatisfied by your relational experience.
Brett McKay:
Okay. So that’s solitude. That’s the spiritual practice of solitude. Silence is just the absence of noise. It’s pretty simple to define, I think.
John Mark Comer:
It’s pretty simple. Yeah. I mean, in the book I talk about two layers of noise. One would be literal external noise, and that’s the easiest one to silence. You find a cabin or you get up early before your kids are awake and sit in your living room or whatever, you go out hiking or go backpacking. You get away from literal external noise. But then there’s this whole other dimension of internal noise, which is the constant chatter in our own head, the negative rumination, the anxiety, the anger, the grudges and resentment that come up and that we carry and make themselves felt in the quiet, which is why in the book I write about not two, but three kind of interlinked disciplines of solitude, silence and stillness, which is kind of the end goal of coming to this place of inner tranquility.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Talk about stillness a little bit more. So you do the spiritual practice of silence and solitude so you can experience stillness. How would you describe stillness?
John Mark Comer:
I went camping with my family this summer on a lake and it’s a lake we’ve gone camping to for many years. And most people have experienced a lake early in the morning before the wind of the day, or in this case we were out doing a bunch of wake surfing on the lake before the boats get out going, just that when the lake is like glass, that’s what stillness is. But if you can imagine a lake that is the inside of your heart or your spirit or your mind or inner person. And as our day goes on, as life comes at us and email and children and a flight we have to catch and this crazy thing happened in the news today and we’re upset about this political thing and we’re scared about this financial whatever, all of these things chop up the waters of our inner life and our inner life just gets more and more tumultuous and bumpy and rough.
And stillness is creating and cultivating a time and place where the inner waters of your life, and sometimes just a metaphor is the most helpful way to get your head around it, come to stillness. And that’s going to look like a quieter mind, less jumpy, less distractible. That’s going to look like peacefulness over anxiety. It’s going to look like love and compassion over anger. It’s going to look like freedom, surrender, healthy detachment over a grasping and controlling for a particular outcome in life. And this stillness, which all of us just crave a heart that is still, you see it. When you meet somebody, an older person or often books and movies artificially create this kind of person where there’s somebody who’s just totally peaceful, even though everything around them is anxious or crazy or wild, and they artificially create it through this fictional character because our hearts are so drawn to these people that are just still, no matter what is swirling around them, the practice to index our life toward becoming that archetype of a person that most of us know in life and they’re almost all very old by the time they reach this point or we know from movies is through practices like solitude, silence and stillness.
Brett McKay:
I would love to be more of that still person more often. So yeah, stillness is you’re not the angry or nervous travel dad.
John Mark Comer:
Exactly. Which we all know that archetype too. They’re also in the movies.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And I think you’re right. I think we all know those people who have that stillness with them all the time. And when you’re around them, they calm you down. You can’t help it. It rubs off on you. And I’m like, I want to be like this guy where instead of people getting more angry and upset or anxious, when they’re around me, they feel calmer and better.
John Mark Comer:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
I haven’t gotten there yet.
John Mark Comer:
Neither have I, but the ultimate architect, well, and it fits and starts, I’m sure for both of us. The ultimate archetype of this in the Christian imagination is Christ on the first Sunday after the resurrection. The disciples in this story are hiding in this upper room for fear of the Jewish leaders, meaning their master, their teacher was just crucified by the Roman authorities. They’re terrified the same thing’s going to happen to them. They’re hiding behind this locked door. They’re anxious and afraid. Jesus comes in and the first thing he says to them is, “Peace be with you.” And he says it twice to them and he just radiates this atmosphere of peace and tranquility around him and it changes the whole dynamic of the room. And that’s the ultimate archetype. And we know people like that, that they set the emotional atmosphere of the room and where other people are carrying anxiety, just like certain people come into a room where we can just see they’re carrying anxiety and they’re just radiating stress and anxiety outward from them.
There are other people that carry peace, the peace of heaven and radiate that out. And our mirror neurons do their thing. And if their peace is stronger than our anxiety, we actually feel ourself calm down in their presence. That’s the kind of person I want to become.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And so these spiritual practices of silence and solitude can do that. And you explore this from the Christian perspective, but you talk about this in the book, other religious practices have a similar idea. Buddhism is about that as well, and they have practices to develop this stillness through silence and solitude. So let’s explore it from a Christian perspective, because I think it often gets overlooked because I think people, when they think about, I want to become more tranquil, more still, well, they think Zen meditation, which yeah, that can happen.
John Mark Comer:
Or the secular analog of this is mindfulness.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, mindfulness.
John Mark Comer:
Just like a secularized version of Christian contemplative prayer or Buddhist meditation. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
And I think people often overlook that there is a deep rich history of contemplation and meditation within Christianity. One of the big ideas you talk about in this book in practicing silence and solitude from the Christian perspective is this idea of the Aramos. Is that how you pronounce it? I’m really bad at Greek words.
John Mark Comer:
Hey, you know what? That is not a skill you need to be successful in the modern world, so you’re just fine. All right. Yeah, it’s aramos. The Americanization of the Greek. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
So tell us about aramos. What is that and what role does it play in silence and solitude in the Christian contemplative practice?
John Mark Comer:
So one of the most famous stories about Jesus in the gospels is early on in his kind of life, and when we start reading stories about him as an adult, he goes into the aramos or the wilderness or the desert for 40 days to “be tempted by the devil.” It’s one of the wildest stories in the gospels. And the Greek word there is aramos. It’s interesting. It’s slippery to translate into English. So there’s lots of different translations of it that show up in our English Bibles. Wilderness, wild place, desert, deserted place, solitary place, quiet place, lonely place is another translation. And it doesn’t mean desert as in Sahara desert, hot and sandy and no grass. It means desert as in deserted. So we would call it wilderness or back country. And the world we live in, you have to drive for six hours to get to a national park or to get to the back country.
But in Jesus’ world, far less populated, places like that were a short walk outside of every village. And what you see in Jesus is the story of Jesus begins with him in this kind of 40-day foray out into the ramos, and 40 days is just a Hebrew idiom, not an exact unit of measurement. It means just a very long time. And then he goes back to this place over and over and over again in the four gospel stories. Luke chapter five, there’s a telling line from the biographer Luke where he says, “Jesus often withdrew,” and in the English translation I have, it says, “To lonely places.” In Greek, it’s to the Aramos to pray. And he says to his disciples, “Come us after an especially busy time.” There’s a beautiful line that we can all relate to when it says, “They were so busy coming and going that they did not so much have time to eat.” Every parent can relate to that or somebody who’s hustling in their business.
And so Jesus says to his disciples, “Come aside with me, come away with me to a quiet place in my English translation,” again, to the Aramos in Greek to get some rest. And so Jesus would regularly kind of disappear and retreat from his busy in demand life full of praise and criticism and work and constant need and activity and people and community and calling into the Aramas, these quiet, beautiful, natural places to rest, to pray, to gather his soul, to gather power and strength for what was ahead, to discern a decision that he had to make. There’s clear examples of that. And this is the pattern that you see in the life of Christ that many of us as followers of Christ seek to emulate.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Last time I read the New Testament, that’s something I noticed was how often Jesus was getting away from people. Because I think when we think of Jesus, we think he’s constantly ministering and healing.
John Mark Comer:
Yes, it’s right.
Brett McKay:
And he does that, but there’s also these instances where he’s like, “All right guys, we got to get on a boat because there’s so many people trying to get to me. We’re going to hightail it out here across the Sea of Galilee. We need to break.”
John Mark Comer:
There are stories where the disciples, there’s a couple of stories where he gets up early in the morning and just disappears, slips out the front door of the house where they’re all staying, and the disciples have to send out essentially search parties to go out and find him. They have no idea where he is. There are other stories where he sends everybody away and the language there is forceful. He forces everybody to leave and he goes up to the top of a mountain. He literally climbs to a top of a mountain just to be alone with God. And there’s all of these stories where he very intentionally, very regularly goes away, but they’re not stories of him becoming a monk or a hermit or a recluse. Most of these retreats are measured in hours, not even in days. They’re just these stories of him regularly sneaking away from the noise and busyness and hurry and stimulation and demands of life in the world to come to quiet and find stillness.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I always think about that. It’s like, well, if even God incarnate needs time by himself, I need to do that too for myself.
John Mark Comer:
Yeah. I always laugh when people come up, understandably, with a thousand excuses of why this would never work for them. And I just always want to gently say, I’m pretty sure Jesus was more in demand than you are. And he not only found time, but he considered it essential.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So Jesus sets the pattern for silence and solitude, this practice of him going to the Aramas or the lonely place. What you see later on in Christianity is you see the desert fathers, this is a couple hundred years after Christ’s death, they start imitating. I’m sure they’re reading the Bible, the New Testament thinking, wow, Jesus went off by himself. We should do that too. So when did that start happening where they’re like, I’m going to leave the city and I’m just going to go live in the desert by myself?
John Mark Comer:
It started happening in the 300s, so in the fourth century, and it was a response to ironically, the legalization. They would not have called it Christianity. They would’ve just called it the Christian community, but to the legalization of the Christian faith. For the first several hundred years of the church, Christians were violently persecuted, not constantly, but in waves all through the Roman Empire and around the Mediterranean and other places as well. And in the 330s, Constantine, the emperor has this pseudo conversion, may or may not be real, historians debate. Either way, the way of Jesus is legalized. And for the first time, the church goes from a persecuted minority to a political majority. And this you would think would be the best thing to ever happen. And a lot of it’s fantastic. I mean, women and children are no longer being eaten alive in the arena by lions just because they believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
But it actually turns out to have a pretty horrible effect on the health and life of the church and of Christians. So there’s a few different kind of responses to this widespread kind of corruption and collusion with the empire. And one is a whole bunch of people that straight up just leave it behind and they go out into the desert, mostly of North Africa, but also in parts of Syria. And this movement continues to spread. It eventually gets all the way to Celtic Ireland, if you know about some of those stories. It goes all over the world and it becomes what we now think of as the monastic orders or monasteries and monks and nuns. But early on, it just started as people intentionally getting away, just choosing, opting for a radically different life rather than trying to just fit a little life with God or spiritual life into the Roman empire of their time.
Brett McKay:
And monasteries didn’t exist yet, so there wasn’t a place where they could go and be isolated. They would just go off into… They’d literally go live in a cave basically.
John Mark Comer:
Yeah. Normally what would happen is somebody would go live in a cave or live in a little hut and weave just enough baskets to buy themselves some literal daily bread. And often they would become these people over time, not quickly, of extraordinary peace and wisdom and power and healing power. And people would begin to seek them out for wisdom, for teaching, for mentorship, for prayer, for healing and for advice. And then inevitably little clusters of students or disciples would form around these men and women that were all just trying to get away from people. And eventually from that came monastic communities.
Brett McKay:
And then I guess these practices of silence and solitude, there’s other spiritual practices, they became institutionalized. Benedict came up with this sort of rules of benedict that
John Mark Comer:
Institutionalized order their time because they weren’t really trying to escape community or a relationality in life. They were trying to escape from the corruption and the complicity of the church and the culture. And so they would often preserve these just incredibly deep concentrated expressions of both community where they would live in a monastery together, live by shared rhythms, live by a set schedule they would all live by, share their possessions with each other, give up all ownership, commit to stay there, many of them for life and just work out all of their interpersonal drama. And they had this concentrated forms of quiet, of silence, solitude, stillness, prayer, contemplative practice. And even though a lot of their expressions of both community and prayer or silence are a bit too intense for any of us just kind of living in suburban, whatever, with a job we have to be at at eight or kindergarten drop off at 7:45, still they preserve these vital practices and strands of spirituality.
And it’s interesting, what do we most long for? We long for a deep relational space of love, acceptance, belonging, family, community, friendship, and we long for deep peacefulness, for a rich spiritual life, for a tranquility of heart no matter what comes. And yet many of us, we’re very social, but we don’t have deep relationality and we might have lots of downtime, but we don’t have true stillness of heart. And that’s what these traditions preserve so beautifully for us.
Brett McKay:
Let’s dig into what the silence and solitude practices look like or what they feel like. You spend this section in the book talking about what we can learn about ourselves when we practice silence and solitude in a disciplined way. So what can we learn about ourselves if we make time for silence and solitude?
John Mark Comer:
Brett, one of the things I did when I was researching this book was I got on a plane and I went up to Seattle at the Microsoft headquarters outside of Seattle. They have this annecholic chamber that is purportedly the quietest place on earth, and you can Google it and look it up. And it’s this crazy designed kind of chamber and they do it to test all sorts of things. If you buy a dishwasher and it tells you how loud that dishwasher is, they have to take it to a chamber. Like this to test it and get the actual decibel levels. They test all sorts of computers and technology and stuff in these chambers. And basically it’s crazy. If you’ve ever been at a, I don’t know, a concert venue or a warehouse where they have those big metal soundproof doors that are hard to open and close and they’re in a concrete wall, you go through three of those and then you get into this inner third round of concrete walls and they’ve built this concrete box essentially that hangs suspended.
And in this box, you walk in through the door and there’s an artificial floor that you can see right through that’s made of this steel netting material. It’s the same material they use on aircraft carriers to stop fighter jets midair on an aircraft carrier. And then it’s surrounded by all four sides by like four feet thick of the soundproofing material. And so they put me in there, they set the timer, they close the door, they turn off the lights. And what’s fascinating is in the quietest place on earth, what you think you would hear is absolute silence, but it’s not silent. What you actually hear is your internal self. So you can hear your heart pumping. I could hear my eyelids. Anytime I would blink, I could hear them close and open almost like a click. Anytime I would move, this sounds gross and it kind of was, I could hear my vertebrae grinding against each other.
I could literally feel my bones rubbing against each other. Some people claim they can hear the blood flowing through their veins. I did not, but other people claim. And the point there is that when we go into solitude, we’re often expecting to hear nothing, but what we actually hear is the sound of ourselves, the sound of whatever’s inside of us that we’re often drowning out through constant stimulation and noise and distraction from our devices or this, that or the other, work, business, family. And all of this stuff that’s in us comes up. And with that comes healing, comes pain, but comes wisdom, comes insight, comes direction, comes intuition, comes creativity, comes spirituality, comes in this place where our inner life that is often just suppressed brutally by the noisiness of the modern world, it’s set free to breathe and to live in these spaces.
Brett McKay:
Another experiment you did in radical silence and solitude besides going to this soundless room in Seattle is you went to a 21 day solitude retreat in Puget Sound.
John Mark Comer:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
And you talk about how you thought, oh, that’d be great. This is fantastic. But you said the first couple of days – it was brutal.
John Mark Comer:
Brutal. I barely survived.
Brett McKay:
What did you learn about yourself during that retreat?
John Mark Comer:
I learned just how dependent I am on distraction to be emotionally okay and just how much damage that had done to my soul, my marriage, my family and my life.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I thought it was interesting you talked about how one of the things you experienced was exhaustion.
John Mark Comer:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
Like just pure, you were just so tired and you’re like, why? I’m not doing anything. Why do I want to sleep all the time? What’s going on there?
John Mark Comer:
Well, you know that feeling when you get to the end of a stressful work week and finally you have a day off and you’re just exhausted all day on Saturday or whatever. And it’s because your body’s finally coming off of adrenaline and it’s able to actually relax. And so instead of feeling all refreshed and energized on your day off, you just feel extra tired because of the stress load you’ve been carrying. It was just like that, but multiply by 10 or a hundred or something like that. I’d been in a job as a pastor of a church for 20 years and I stepped down to start a new venture and in between I took a sabbatical and that’s when I did this extended retreat. And it was like the accumulated exhaustion of the whole first half of my life just all caught up to me.
And that’s why I think a lot of people avoid these spaces because when you first arrive in solitude, there’s no formula. Everybody has their own experience and a lot of it depends on what you bring in with you. It’s like the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke is like, “What’s in that cave on Degeba?” And Yoda says, “Only what you bring with you.” So whatever you’re carrying, you carry that into solitude. So that’s going to shape what you experience in solitude. But a lot of times people avoid it because when you first get there, you experience what we would consider to be negative feelings that may be exhaustion, it may be anxiety, it may be anger, it may be grief, it may be shame. Thomas Keating, who’s a monk that wrote extensively about the experience of silence and of contemplative prayer, he said the first thing we often experience in the silence is what he called the unloading of the unconscious, meaning anything down there that we’ve been kind of pushing down through busyness, distraction, it comes up.
And at first you may feel some stuff that’s less than pleasant. What people don’t realize, because then they often just drop tail and run back to noise and distraction in their phone, is that those feelings all get worked then through and out of your body. And you often on the other side experience union, healing, life, peace, freedom, discernment, clarity, but you just have to let this wave kind of roll over you and it’s not super fast. It takes a while, but this is one of the gifts of the quiet.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. This reminds me of some British travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor. He wrote a book called A Time to Keep Silence and it’s about him staying in monasteries.
John Mark Comer:
Oh yes. I read that.
Brett McKay:
In the early 1950s. Yeah. And he didn’t go there for religious reasons. He just wanted a quiet place to write a book. And he talked about how at first it just made him miserable. He got depressed, he was lonely, he couldn’t write. He also had insomnia, but when he went to these monasteries, it’s like his system just shut down and reset and he began sleeping all the time.
John Mark Comer:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
And he interpreted it as you were saying, it was just sort of this release of this accumulated exhaustion and anxiety that he’d been hiding with work and all those other things. And it finally just was released. And I had that same experience. I stayed in a monastery a long time ago here in Oklahoma.
John Mark Comer:
Tell me about that.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, it’s at Clear Creek Abbey. It’s here in Northeast Oklahoma. And I went there with some friends. We were reading Thomas Aquinas and we’ll do our discussion one weekend at this monastery. What better place to discuss Aquinas than at a Catholic monastery?
John Mark Comer:
That makes sense.
Brett McKay:
And we’d get there. And one thing I noticed is I just started sleeping all the time. I slept all the… When we weren’t discussing and we weren’t eating and we weren’t at vigils or anything like that, I just slept. All I wanted to do was sleep. And I think it was the same thing I guess that Patrick Leigh Fermor experienced. My body was just like, “Yeah, you can just chill out now. You’re actually more tired than you think you are.” And then he talks about when he got out of the monasteries and back to normal life, he just noticed that things that he didn’t think were a problem like advertisements or traffic or conversation, those things he enjoyed before the monastery, after that he was like, “Oh, this is too much. This is too abrasive.”
John Mark Comer:
It really changes how you decide to move. It’s like once you see what this stuff’s doing to you, it’s like certain people that wake up to certain foods and what they do to the body and then they get free of it and they realize, “Oh my gosh, I feel so much better. I’m not going to ever eat that again or put that in my body again.” It’s similar like that. I’m not going to put TikTok into my mind again or whatever it may be. So I mean, there’s a growing number of medical health professionals and therapists, and you can find analogs to this all through the Christian tradition and the Desert Fathers that would talk to one phrase that’s used right now is the wisdom of the body. And I think what you’re experiencing, Brett, in that moment is your body in a way that your prefrontal cortex or your mind doesn’t quite understand is just intuiting you need rest, you need to calm down from the stress, you need peace.
You don’t need to read 14 books by Thomas Aquinas. You need to take a nap. And this is the gift of what happens in these places and these times. If we actually slow down long enough, we get access to a deeper, quieter, gentler form of wisdom that just doesn’t speak at the volume of the internet or the volume of politicians or the volume of bookstores or the volume of podcasting. It speaks in this quiet, quiet voice and it offers us such deep wisdom.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So through silence and solitude, you can learn maybe how messed up you are that you’ve been ignoring it because… And then you can actually start doing something about it now that you confront in the silence and solitude. The desert fathers and monks who practice silence and solitude, they often found that when Jesus was in the desert alone for 40 days, that when you’re in solitude, you may have to confront some sort of spiritual enemy. And from a Christian perspective, they would think that the enemy is supernatural or as the demonic. But what else could be an enemy that we might have to confront whenever we experience silence and solitude?
John Mark Comer:
So here’s the common experience. You go into solitude. If you don’t have something for your brain to quickly focus on, a book, a device, a task, your brain will go quickly into what the psychologist Cheek Sent Mihai called psychic entropy. It will spiral toward the negative often more than the positive. Now, early Christians would understand this as demons assaulting the mind, and we can chuckle at that and think of how pre-modern and how silly. But if you think about it, most of us have had some experience in solitude or just away from our phone died wherever we are, and we’ve had reoccurring thoughts that were evil or malevolent, and it’s almost like they came from outside of our brain. We didn’t want to think these thoughts. They didn’t make us feel happy or peaceful. It’s almost like they had this malicious edge to them, almost like they wished us harm, like they wanted to drive our heart to fear, worry, shame, hate, loathing of other people, contempt, division to our lower demons.
So one explanation for that is that there are spiritual beings of evil intent that are pressing against your mind. Another explanation, if you want to go secular Darwinian neuroscience, is what’s called the default mode network in the brain, which is when your brain doesn’t have something to occupy its attention, it often defaults to this other setting that is more prone toward negative rumination. And so hurts, fears, anxieties, all of this start to rise in the heart. Phil Stutz, who’s not a Christian, who’s kind of making waves right now for his therapeutic approach. He talks about psychic demons and evil spirits within, and he kind of metaphorizes it into these kind of… It’s like a psychic beast in your mind, but even he can’t talk about the experience of what’s in your mind without liking it to a demon. So the reality is whether these are real spiritual beings, as many Christians believe, or just an evolutionary brain that’s overaddled by the digital age doing what your brain does to stay alive, either way, you are going to have to confront negative thoughts that are going to drive you away from love and peace and joy toward fear, hate, shame, contempt, division, acrimony, self-preservation.
And again, you think, why would I possibly do that? Because all of these forces are in you and some of the most dangerous people in the world, from leaders of nations to dads and moms, are people who are driven by powerful forces they’re too scared to face or name. And these forces at a subconscious level work powerfully to dictate our behavior and human beings are some of the most easily self-deceived creatures in reality in that we can come up with our left brain for all sorts of quasi-rational explanations for what really are deep fear or shame-based, deep, unhealed motivations in our heart. And if we never go into the quiet, we’re never actually able to face down and confront these powerful forces and we end up driven by them often into the ground or into ruin rather than set free from them or able to harness them for good ends.
Brett McKay:
Well what do you do about them? How do you battle these negative emotions that you might experience in the silence and solitude?
John Mark Comer:
Well, honestly, Brett, it’s a little hard for me to answer to a general audience. I mean, I don’t go into solitude alone. I go there to more deeply commune with God. So what I do is I offer them up to God and I let go of them there under his healing gaze and the love in his eyes toward me and toward the world. I’m able to realize that I don’t need these things to be safe, that I am perfectly safe in God’s love. So you have to get to some place of letting go. I get there through surrender to God. Stoics get there a different way. Buddhists get there through detachment. You have to get there somehow. I get there through releasing my life and my future into the loving hands of God.
Brett McKay:
Well speaking of just releasing yourself and surrendering yourself to God, people practice solitude and silence so that they can encounter the transcendent, so they can encounter God. What does that experience feel like for you and then how does it change you?
John Mark Comer:
It’s profoundly soft and gentle. It’s not usually an emotional high, very, very rarely. It often takes me a while to even feel it because my brain is so addled and overstimulated and numbed and tired. But when I touch it, it feels like it’s coming from within and yet it’s enfolding me. It feels not just like an energy or a warm feeling. It feels like a loving presence is profoundly peaceful, profoundly compassionate, far more compassionate toward me than I am toward me and toward others than I am toward others. It’s all encompassing that love seems to go out into the whole world and even toward the people that are currently driving me baddy. It feels like it just sees all, like there’s absolutely nothing that can be hidden from its eyes and it feels quiet but profoundly real and it is the most blissful experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Brett McKay:
So that sounds really wonderful and people might be thinking, “Okay, I want that for myself.” But something you point out in the book is that you don’t always get that. I think the idea that I got from this section when I was reading it is that I think oftentimes we treat spiritual practices like a technology and they are kind of like a technology, but it’s not like you press button A and you get output B. You could do these practices and not always get the outcome you want and you’re not always going to have a transcendent experience and you can’t control it. Sometimes you’re going to get those negative feelings, sometimes you won’t hear anything and sometimes it’ll just be boring.
John Mark Comer:
It will be boring a lot of the time.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, but engaging in the practices opens you up to the possibility of experiencing the transcendent. So if you don’t do them, you don’t have that opportunity. Every now and then something happens. It’s a grace. It’s like a gift. All right, boom, here you go. You’re given that grace. And then the next time you do it, it might be boring and frustrating, but I guess you just got to keep doing it.
John Mark Comer:
Yep. That’s interesting. You just use probably unknowingly a very common word in the Catholic tradition. When they talk about prayer, they will talk about graces in prayer. And what they mean is it’s almost like… I’m not a fisherman, but if you’re out fishing, you might be out fishing for a day, just three times that day you catch something, but there’s just these moments of graces. Something comes up, you get something. And so it’s almost like in those places, you might get nothing, you might get a lot, but there’ll just be these moments of graces, just these gifts that come from outside of yourself deep into you and you can’t control it. All you can do is go there and wait and see what happens.
Brett McKay:
You can’t catch fish if you don’t put your line into the water.
John Mark Comer:
Exactly.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. So we’ve been talking about this idea of silence and solitude very abstractly, what we can get out of it, what we learn about ourselves, but what does this look like? Brass tacks. What are some things that people can start doing today to start practicing silence and solitude as spiritual disciplines?
John Mark Comer:
Well, the good news is you don’t need to go on a 21-day retreat. You can start very small, right where you’re at. In fact, you should likely start very small depending on what your starting line is and just take the next step. This can be a couple easy wins are buy an old school alarm clock and stick your phone in another room when you go to bed at night. When you first wake up, take that very first part of your day, whether it’s for 30 seconds or 30 minutes and just be quiet. I get up, I make coffee and I just sit on the floor. I read a psalm and I just breathe in the silence before God. Francis de Sales, who was a French church leader, an amazing writer, he had this little quip. We’d said, “Everybody should spend 30 minutes a day in silent meditation, except for when they’re really busy, then they need a full hour and a full hour might be way too big of a step for you.
30 minutes might be way too big of a step for you. Maybe it’s three minutes, but just begin your day phone free. Another simple, silly thing I write about in the book is there’s a new TikTok trend among Gen Z called silent walking, which is just where you go walking, but with no headphones, no phone, no podcasts.
Brett McKay:
How we used to do it.
John Mark Comer:
Also known as just walking. So just go for a walk. Just walk your dog down to the park and back and leave your phone behind. I do this if I can every day at noon, I’ll just walk to the end of my street and back. It takes, I don’t know, seven minutes, eight minutes, and I just go without my phone. Sometimes I encounter God and have revelation and sometimes I just walk and I come back and it’s just this little gift of quiet in the middle of my day. So again, you don’t have to go jump ahead to a 21 day retreat or drive to Big Sur and go to the monastery and do contemplative prayer three times a day for a week. You can just start by going for a seven minute walk, by not sleeping next to your phone, by watching the sunset, by et cetera, et cetera, and working your way up from there.
Brett McKay:
You’re talking about just getting out to your own Eromas. It could just be in your backyard. Get out into nature
John Mark Comer:
Basically. Get out into nature. I mean, you always want to be careful not to just let your personal bias bleed through and everything, but man, I do not believe modern humans were designed by God or nature to live in these urban and suburban environments that we now call home so far removed from quiet and creation or nature. And so whether you get into backpacking or camping or just hiking or just frequent the park by your house in Manhattan, the more we can expose ourselves to natural beauty and natural quiet, the healthier our souls will be. And that’s just not my opinion. There’s reams of science behind that now.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I would recommend if you have a monastery nearby, go visit it. You don’t have to be a believer to… They’re all about hospitality there.
John Mark Comer:
Absolutely. You can go. Yeah, absolutely. You can be hardcore, not Christian, and they will welcome you.
Brett McKay:
And they make some great food. I eat really well at this monastery and it’s all grown on their land. And then you’ll get to experience silence and solitude for a couple of days and you’ll probably sleep all the time. And
John Mark Comer:
There’s something too, it’s special. It’s a place that is… Very few people have this experience, but if you go into a bar concert venue in the morning and nobody’s in there, it might be quiet, but there’s a feeling in the room that it’s not where you want to go meditate, as opposed to if you’re at a monastery and the soil has been soaked in silence and prayer and community love for decades or centuries, there’s just something different in that place. And so whatever your religious or not beliefs are, they are great places to go try this.
Brett McKay:
Well, John Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
John Mark Comer:
Yeah. I mean, you’re welcome to just Google my name, johnmarkcomer.com. We’ll take you in the right direction.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Well, John Mark Comer, thanks for time. It’s been a pleasure.
John Mark Comer:
Thank you for having me on.
Brett McKay:
My guest there is John Mark Comer. He’s the author of the book, Into the Quiet. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, johnmarkcomer.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/silence. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
