I heard two children talking recently and realized what children need from us. I also realized that we are giving them just the opposite. In these two children I heard a microcosm of a world at war. I was talking to children, to innocents, and discovered that they were not innocent of our wars at all. Children are, in fact, their carriers. These two children knew just whom to hate. They were Irish children, and they resented Americans for their money and they hated the English for their history.

“I hate them,” the one child said simply.

“Me, too,” the other child agreed. And it was final. Schooled in someone else’s attitudes, they were impervious to any other one.

I saw in their faces all the children of the world. Hutu children and Serbian children and Palestinian children—children who were learning to hate Tutsi children and Bosnian children and Jewish children. They had all been born into a world of adult enemies, which they inherited along with the land under their feet. They had inherited the sins of their ancestors, and these sins festered like time-bombs within them, until years later those same weapons would surely go off in them, too.

Clearly, it is the lack of peace within ourselves that we are passing on to our children. If we do not have a rich inner life, we will want the tinsel and glitter of the world around us, and someone else’s money to get it, too. If we are insecure, we want to control others. If we are not at peace
with our own life, we will make combat with the people around us. And if we do not learn to face our own struggles, we will never have compassion for the struggles of others.

Peace comes then when we learn what the Spirit is trying to teach us. When we feel rejected, we learn to seek the love above all loves in life. The Spirit is trying to teach us that when we are threatened by differences, we must come to realize that otherness is what stretches us beyond the narrowness of sameness. Instead, the desire for conquest comes when I try to shape the world to my own limited ideas of it. Then differences begin to be a threat rather than a promise of inspiring new possibilities or daring new experiences in life. Then, we set out to mold the rest of the world to our own small selves.
 
We rape the planet and make war against strangers and build our private little walls higher and higher and higher. To feel good about ourselves, we measure ourselves against other races and sexes, religions and cultures and call them lesser, call them enemy. We entomb ourselves in ourselves. So brown people remain the enemy for generation after generation, and white people stay a menace to us all our lives, and strong women threaten our world view, and the children of this generation become the adversaries of the next one.

The question is, then, what is the way to peace? Blaise Pascal wrote once, “The unhappiness of a person resides in one thing, to be unable to remain peacefully in a room.” It is silence and solitude, in other words, that brings us face to face with ourselves and the inner wars we must win to become truly peaceful people. Then, understanding myself I can understand everyone else as well.

There is a major social obstacle, however, to a development of a spirituality of peace in this time, in our time. The fear of silence and solitude loom like cliffs in the modern human psyche. And noise becomes what protects us from confronting ourselves. Quiet is only a phantom memory in this culture. Some generations among us have had no experience of silence at all.

Spiritual peace has been driven out by noise pollution, endemic and invasive. There is Muzak in the elevators and PA systems in the halls and people talking loudly on cellular phones everywhere—in offices and restaurants and kitchens and bedrooms—while the ubiquitous television spews talk devoid of thought and people shout above it about other things. There are loudspeakers in boats now so lakes are not safe. There are rock concerts in the countryside so the mountains are now not safe. There are telephones in bathrooms now so the shower is not safe. We don’t think anymore; we are wired for sound. Indeed, silence is the lost spiritual art of this society. Clamor and struggle have replaced it. But the great spiritual traditions are all clear about the role of silence in the spiritual life.

“Elder, give me a word,” a seeker begged the Desert Monastic.

And the holy one said, “My word to you is to go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

That point is clear and simple:  All your answers are within you. And so are the questions. The questions no one can ask of you but you. Everything else in the spiritual life is mere formula, mere exercise. It is the questions and the answers that are ranting within each of us that, in the end, will grow our souls. Then we will get to know ourselves. Then we will blush at what we see.  Then we will lose our self-righteousness. And come to peace.

Silence does more than confront us with ourselves, however. Silence makes us wise. Knowing our own struggles, we come to reverence the struggles of others. Knowing our own failures, we are in awe of their successes, less quick to condemn, less intent on punishing, less certain of all our damaging certainties. Make no doubt about it, to listen for the voice of God, and to wrestle with the self is the nucleus of the spirituality of peace. It may, in fact, be what is most missing in a century saturated with information, sated with noise, smothered in struggle, but short on reflection, and aching for peace.

Once upon a time a disciple asked,  “How shall I experience my oneness with creation?”

And the elder answered, “By listening.”
 
“But how am I to listen?” the disciples asked.

And the elder taught, “Become an ear that pays attention to every thing the universe is saying. The moment you hear something you yourself are saying, stop.”

Peace will come when we expand our minds to listen to the noise within us that needs quieting and the wisdom from outside ourselves that needs to be learned. Then we will have something to leave the children besides hate, besides war, besides turmoil. Then peace will come.

Conversation with Joan Chittister

Daniel Pawlus: Sister Joan, wonderful to have you back as always!

Joan Chittister: It’s nice to be with you, too, and you know it.

Pawlus: A beautiful message. What struck me so deeply were your thoughts about children in particular, and I wondered if this is the greatest gift we could perhaps teach our kids: the value of silence in this day and age.

Chittister: When I began to work on this piece for the very first time, I sat back in my chair and I said to myself, “Joan, does anybody teach silence anymore?” When I was a young teacher, teaching grade school years ago, maybe we imposed too much silence on our children. I’m sure we would all argue that and be happy to agree. But they did learn silence. They learned to sit at their desks. They learned to think. They learned to put their heads down. They learned to take their own time out. I have come to believe, certainly as an adult, definitely as a monastic, that if somehow or other we do not teach what I implied here, a rich inner life to our children, how can we ever expect them to grapple with their own growth questions? We need a little more introspection. We are a tough and pragmatic and effective and wonderful people, but sometimes it’s important to ask whether what we’re about to do is worth doing.

Lillian Daniel: My husband had a softball team associated with his work, and there was one softball game where I observed them and they were out in the field and about three of them were on their cell phones taking calls. I thought, “Oh, for goodness sake!” But it occurs to me that even in our worship in the Christian tradition there’s a lot of words, there’s a lot of noise. I know you have the gift of interfaith cooperation. Have you experienced religious traditions that use silence in worship perhaps better than we do?

Chittister: I’m not sure that it’s better, but I do experience this. The deeper you get into the spiritual life in any tradition the more silence you will find there. There isn’t any doubt. I know in my own monastic community we pray the Psalms three times a day. After every single Psalm there is a silent period for the sake of integrating, of refreshing, of nurturing one idea from that Psalm into your own life. I think it’s far more important than to say you know the words.

Daniel: Well, we had an experience in our congregation where our governing board was discussing a contentious issue. And one of the things we did is that we went to a practice of discernment where after everybody spoke. Instead of having another person jump in there was just silence while we waited. And often you realize you didn’t have to say something after that.

Chittister: I really think you’ve touched it. You’re right on the nerve. We’re busy making our arguments. We’re busy getting our points in. We’re busy taking the votes. We really want to know we’ve got the power there. We have a power oriented culture and it starts right here. When I heard those two children—one was eleven and the other was eight, “I hate Americans. I hate the English.” “I hate them, too!” the second said—it was absolutely shocking to me to realize that that was what they had inherited from my generation. And if we don’t face that, because it’s in here. If you look at the headlines of today’s paper and if you stop on the headlines alone and say, “What do I think about that? Why do I think about that? Why are these people a threat to me? Why is that group a concern to me?” I’m not saying that there might not be reason for concern, but a rational concern as opposed to a show of force are two different things. They make you different people in the world.

Pawlus: I always love to talk about your writing and silence must inform that. The more I read of what you produce there is a specific perspective that you come from and I feel like it’s probably a spiritual practice or space that you get into. Would you share that with us?

Chittister: Well, sure. If this is what you mean, Dan. Stop me if it isn’t. I go away alone for three months out of the year to write. Alone 24 hours a day for three straight months. Then I go away for another five weeks, alone, to redo that entire manuscript weeks later. Why? Is this a matter of rhetorical practice? Definitely not. This is a matter of reflection. I ask myself on every sentence, “Is that true for you, Joan, and what makes it your truth? Can you possibly talk to anybody else about that truth?” That space, that solitude is what I use to make every word authentic. They may be wrong. They may need a great deal more. They may need to be challenged at every turn of the line. I’m open to that challenge. I’m very willing to have that challenge because they’re not just words slapped on paper, they are the inside of me.

Daniel: So you wouldn’t get that without the silence?

Chittister: I can’t. No.

Daniel: I’m struck by when we speak about peace and our hopes, for example, of peace in the Middle East, we say, “They’ve begun peace talks.” I wonder what would happen if everyone got together and spent some time in silence.

Chittister: We saw when we went to the Middle East and brought both Jewish and Palestinian women together at first there was phenomenal turmoil. And then people told very meaningful, personal stories softly, almost musingly. Suddenly we were all involved in somebody else’s space and this woman could no longer be enemy. Why? Because I felt in her, her pain. When you watched those Jewish women and Palestinian women, each of whom had lost children or relatives through this senseless carnage of decades, you saw the same pain in both their eyes. Then the great moment was when they looked at one another.

Daniel: Thank you so much for encouraging us to take some time to be silent and to really listen to one another.