Saturday, May 10, 2008

The First Year, Part I

I was a young bride, barely three months married, when my husband told me that I must be silent for a month. He meant, I think, to chastise my tendency to speak my mind at all costs. He only intended, I think, to teach me to hold my tongue when things were better left unsaid. But he is a wise man and his spirituality was far more mature than mine in those days, so perhaps he knew more than I realize. I have never asked him.

At first I anticipated only an inconvenience, but he quickly dispelled that idea. There would be no passing of notes and exchange of emails—he meant not only to punish my refusal to curb my tongue, but to break me of the drive to express myself at all costs. That meant not only literal silence but no notes, no email, no writing: not even journaling, which was my lifeline. I used to fill journals, write pages every night. Giving that up seemed as if it would be more painful, less possible, than a month of silence. But he allowed no argument. In fact, he allowed no response. The first thing he said to me that night was that I was to be silent for a month, beginning right at that moment.

Of course, I opened my mouth more than once to interrupt, to protest, to question. He was firm. He said that my resistance was only more evidence that I needed this discipline. He knew me well, though, and offered the explanations I would have demanded. I know now that he should not have had to, that I should simply have obeyed him, but on that night he was just beginning to teach me.

We must, he said, quell my drive to spill every thought that I had, to constantly pour out rather than hearing and receiving. Journaling, he said, was no different from speech in that regard—my unguarded comments might not harm anyone else in my little notebook, but my focus was still on the outflow, on the importance of my own views. Until I shifted that focus, he said, I would never learn to hold my tongue.

I certainly had trouble holding it then. I felt as if my arguments and protests would burst physically from my body, as if they were solid objects bouncing around inside me with nowhere to go. That feeling would become very familiar over the next few weeks; I often felt as if I were physically wrestling with something, or fighting a straightjacket.

He made me sit down that night and send out an email to everyone in my address book. Dear Friends and Family, it said, I am embarking on a sort of spiritual retreat. I plan to maintain silence for the next month, so I will not be responding to email or answering the telephone. Please keep me in your prayers during this time.

I smile now to think of how my hands trembled as I typed those words. I was awash in equal parts fear, humiliation, and gratitude that he had not required me to explain the reason for my “retreat”. When I stood up, knowing that I wouldn’t sit down at the keyboard that was nearly an extension of my fingers for a month, my legs were shaking. I stepped forward uncertainly, as if I couldn’t see the ground. I could not speak. I could not write. What was I to do? Aaron was gentle. He saw the concerns I was not free to speak.

Continue to Part II


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