The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life, by Sarah Sands Nicola Shulman
NICOLA SHULMAN
The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life By Sarah Sands Short Books £12.99
Here is a book of ten chapters, each describing time spent in a different monastic institution.
It’s not one to read at a single sitting because its art is in making small differences in atmosphere, pace, light, sound and, indeed, silence, settle and grow in the mind.
And anyway – a whole book, in one go? Who has time for that? What with the breaking news, the Zoom meeting and the constant checking to see if the COVID-19 stats have been updated as, obviously, it is of the highest importance that I be informed at once.
Few people have led more urgent
and frantic lives than Sarah Sands. At the time of writing this book, she was the editor of the BBC’S Today programme, which kick-starts the daily onslaught of information.
For her, there was a genuine imperative, not only to stand right in the middle of the particle storm of news but to channel it through Today’s main line of enquiry: ‘How worried should we be?’
None of this conduces to serenity. Hence, perhaps, the contrary impulse was beginning to brew in 2019, when she carved a couple of days out of a G20 economic summit to visit the Koyasan monastery in Japan. After this, she set herself the task of ‘enfolding monastic moments into my life’.
She read deeply into the lives of saints and mystics, visited monasteries, attended a gathering of Coptic monks in the Egyptian desert and joined a Buddhist retreat in Thimphu, Bhutan. Before she was halfway through the project, she decided to quit her job.
The short chapters pack in a lot of thought and history, but they always feel rich, not dense. It’s a surprise when you remember she doesn’t spend more than two nights, and sometimes just a few hours, in one place.
She can give us only first impressions. While this has obvious disadvantages with regard to the realities of a monastic vocation, it makes her account a good tourist guide. You get a fair idea of what it might be like to go there yourself: the unaccustomed pillow, the difficulty of sitting still and the perpetual impingement of one’s phone.
Sands’s phone is a kind of devilish spirit companion on these trips, constantly drawing attention to itself and all it represents, with its pings and buzzes, sulking conspicuously when it has no signal.
At the Cistercian abbey of NotreDame de Sénanque, she opens her bag to discover her phone’s got company, in the form of her husband’s – her highly scheduled and elsewhere and now phoneless husband’s – phone. At Kyosan, it leads her into the temptation to steal the charger the kind monks have lent.
The brevity of these visits makes her stretch her eyes and ears. Monks build in beautiful places and Sands writes beautifully about them, with the startled senses of one opening a window on the first morning.
And what about the interior vision? There are small gains: a quieting of the mind; a new intentness in her capacity to notice things, such as birdsong, of which we are the beneficiaries. At the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory in East Ayrshire, she goes to look at the darkness, in order to see the light.
Inevitably, the writing gets metaphorical. Platitudes muster – but she is equal to the threat.
She also talks to the monks and nuns, to try and learn from them. These are conversations, yet it’s hard not to see them as just a different kind of interview: how worried should we be?
The answer she gets is the same in Egypt as in Norfolk or Catalonia; the same in the 21st century as in the ninth. We are worrying about the wrong things. We look for pleasure in all the wrong places.
What we should be thinking about is death. ‘Life is best led as an antechamber to death,’ she writes. ‘This existence of ours is as transient as the clouds.’
By the time you get to St Bernard of Clairvaux, who lived by the precept ‘Why not cease to love what will soon cease to exist?’, you begin to wonder whether monastics have always been drawn from a subset of humanity with an unusually acute suspicion of change, and fear of death. Not unlike journalists on Today.
But what if, as Winston Churchill wrote to his wife, ‘Death is just a moment in life’? What if transient things are all there is, and this is why we love them?
Sands has decided to silence her inner critic. ‘Do not judge,’ she reminds herself. ‘Accept.’ A bit more pushback against that acceptance might have been welcome.