Ruth Holgate and the spirituality of silence

This month’s podcast is a little different as rather than simply an interview you’ll hear me reflecting my daily experiences of a five day silent retreat before discussing it with our interviewee Ruth Holegate.

The BBC documentaries The Monastery and The Big Silence really impacted Hannah and me (follow the links to check them out on YouTube). We’ve had a fair amount of teaching and encouragement in the spiritual disciplines, but silence had never been mentioned. We then saw Ruth Holgate speak on the subject at Greenbelt and we both felt a prompting to give it a go. So we signed up for a five day silent retreat at the Jesuit Spirituality Centre Loyola Hall. We were slightly anxious that we couldn’t really afford it, but then lo-and-behold we got a tax rebate that paid for it exactly!

It was a remarkable five days. To our surprise neither of us found the silence itself especially challenging (apart from the one hour corporate silence in the evenings!). Instead the challenge came from what God was doing in us as a result of us committing ourselves to finding him in the silence.

The sense of stillness, peace and God’s consistent presence with us was profound, and something that neither of us expected. In fact we both felt quite low when we had to leave, I think fearing that we’d lose this sense of closeness when we got back to the busyness of our lives.

We were both challenged in deep ways as God put his finger on a number of personal issues and as he clarified the mission he was calling us to. But perhaps the biggest challenge was committing to this contemplative lifestyle back in the ‘real world’. Life is pretty frantic, and is only going to get more so with a baby on the way! But we feel God is calling us to model this lifestyle for the increasingly pressured, stretched, drained and fractured community in which we live.