00:05:09.120and then there are signs all over the property saying just silence, not like, hey, keep it down
00:05:15.000or please be mindful, just silence. And you don't stay in like dormitory style, it's not that kind
00:05:21.640of a monastery. You stay in these little hermitages or they actually call them cells, like prison
00:05:26.760cells and these little kind of, you know, 10 by 10 cabins. And you take all of your meals totally
00:05:33.560alone, in silence, back in your room. The only sound you hear is three times a day. There's like
00:05:39.320a 30-minute moment of prayer with the monks that you can sit in on. So I would always go to evening
00:05:45.380prayer, which is at like five. And after evening prayer, they do this 30-minute silent meditation
00:05:51.040where you just kind of sit there. They have this gorgeous old octagon kind of chapel,
00:05:57.100just natural light as the sun is going down and it's this beautiful blissfully quiet kind of zone
00:06:05.740and they just do totally silent 30 minute meditation so i'm sitting in on this and you
00:06:12.280know naturally it's hard to pay attention to anything for 30 minutes straight without your
00:06:16.760mind wandering so my mind wanders like it does for all people or maybe a little bit more than
00:06:21.620the average joe and at some point i like realized that i've you know gone off thinking about this
00:06:26.980out of the other. And I kind of open my eyes to like refocus on my breath or whatever. And I
00:06:32.760noticed this like blue glow out of the left hand corner of my eye. And I look over and I'm not
00:06:39.540making this up. The monk that is leading this 30 minute meditation. And this is like straight up
00:06:44.900hardcore Catholic. He's wearing full head to toe white robes. There is like Latin and candles and
00:06:51.300like all the monk stuff, he is over sitting against the wall, leaning back against it
00:06:56.920with his iPhone out, scrolling on his phone, doing God knows what. And that's the blue glow
00:07:02.900that I see. And in that moment, I just realized the world is doomed. Like if you can't escape it
00:07:12.520here, I mean, this is about as far off the map as you can get in a car, then man. And so as I
00:07:19.300write in the book, we're not the first people to live and attempt to have a soul, but we live as
00:07:24.540the first generation in human history for whom it is now possible to go through your entire life
00:07:30.240and never actually be alone. Because anytime we may be the only person in the room or we may shut
00:07:37.880up and not talk for 30 minutes, we're never really alone anymore because our devices keep us tethered
00:07:44.140to the world of noise. And that, in many ways, was an inciting incident to go deeper into this
00:07:50.240subject. You start off the book talking about how a lot of people have this desire for silence and
00:07:56.200solitude, because we do live in a world of noise. And I like how you define noise, because I think
00:08:01.800when most people think of it, and even how scientists define it, it's like unwanted sound.
00:08:07.640So, you know, car horns and sirens, things like that. But you say there can also be soundless
00:08:13.080noise. What is soundless noise? So, okay. So Cal Newport has a beautiful book on digital minimalism
00:08:20.180and he has a chapter in there on solitude. Now he's not writing about it as a spiritual
00:08:24.480discipline as I am more, you know, through the perspective of deep work, but still he's a
00:08:30.020wonderful working definition of solitude as a place that is free from other inputs. And I like
00:08:37.440that definition. And by that definition, you know, one form of input is auditory. So if you're in an
00:08:43.820open plan office and people are talking to you constantly, it's hard to kind of clear your brain
00:08:48.260to open it up to work or creativity or self-reflection. But there's a whole other, like
00:08:54.060inputs do not require volume anymore. They can come through our web browser or through our phones.
00:09:00.580And this is where, you know, to extrapolate out of like physical noise, there is now a digital noise that we are assaulted by constantly.
00:09:10.920The 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.
00:09:22.660the noise of just trivia and drivel and brain rot and distraction on TikTok or whatever,
00:09:30.220the noise of constant opinion and anger and outrage and anxiety, this noise, even if it
00:09:38.360is technically silent, assaults us through our phones and our laptops and our web browsers.
00:09:44.240Anytime that we're actually alone, as long as we have a device, we're still receiving
00:09:49.560input from other places. And that's where the world now is noisier than it has ever been before.
00:09:57.320There's been lots of research about the negative effects noise with sound can have on our body.
00:10:01.020So it spikes our cortisol, it's linked to anxiety, Alzheimer's, dementia, but you're focused on what
00:10:08.060noise, including soundless noise, all the inputs we're bombarded with, has on the soul. What do
00:10:15.080you think noise is doing to us spiritually? Yeah, well, I think at the end of the day,
00:10:21.020it blocks or it sabotages or it at least diminishes our capacity for love, which in my paradigm is
00:10:31.660what life is all about, receiving love from God and others and then giving that love back to God
00:10:37.560and others and becoming a loving person. I think that is the meaning and purpose of life, not
00:10:42.920moving the needle up to the right, not money, sex, and power, not whatever image management,
00:10:48.200but becoming people that are deeply pervaded by love and by joy and by peace. And I come at that
00:10:54.920as a avid Christian, but I think there's a common desire for that across the spectrum of the world.
00:11:02.540And I don't think I have to convince you that the noisier our environment, the more stressed our
00:11:08.140body, the less loving we are likely going to be. So this is an embarrassing analogy and I'm not
00:11:13.380going to come out looking good in this one, but my wife and I are lap. We're laughing because we
00:11:18.380just read about this new couples fad called a airport divorce, which made us actually feel1.00
00:11:24.640better. We have a lot of tension when we try to travel together, we kind of move through the
00:11:28.280universe very differently. And so just the stress of an airport, even if you're there early, which
00:11:33.760is rare. But even if you're there and you're not in a hurry, still just that level of people and
00:11:38.280noise and stimulation and chaos. It's hard to like just be loving and present and relax with each
00:11:44.280other. So this new trend is basically you get to the airport and you get dropped off by your Uber
00:11:49.640or your park or whatever. And then you're just like, honey, I'll see you either on the plane or
00:11:54.140I'll see you at our destination. And you just have an airport divorce and you go through security
00:11:58.720separately and you do your stuff separately and you get on the plane and you travel and then you
00:12:02.560meet there just to minimize conflict. And so I'm aware that does not speak flattering of me,
00:12:08.200but we are playfully giving it a try. And I think the reality is just in an environment like that,
00:12:13.960it's hard to be a loving person. It's hard to be present to another. It's hard to have
00:12:20.220compassion for another. It's hard to listen deeply. It's hard to even notice your own
00:12:24.660anxiety and the way your own internal anxiety and the systems of anxiety you inherited from
00:12:31.200your family of origin may be discoloring a conversation and causing you to behave in ways
00:12:36.820that are controlling or domineering or passive or withdrawing. In short, it blocks our ability0.99
00:12:42.480to love people. Yeah, I agree. I'm with you on traveling just makes me terrible. My family jokes,
00:12:49.240I turn into nervous travel dad whenever we travel, especially when we're flying. So I'm like,
00:12:53.800we got to make the plan. Okay, so I'm not alone. Yeah. And I just get angry. I'll just yell
00:12:58.040randomly. And it's because it's all the noise. It's just that you're thinking about that. You're
00:13:01.600checking your phone. Okay. Has the flight changed? Does everyone have their papers? Everyone have
00:13:05.140their license? Yeah. It's the noise. It makes it really hard to be loving. And you mentioned
00:13:10.000that silence is connected to solitude. Our lack of solitude today contributes to the amount of
00:13:16.500noise. Cause as you said, we're just connected all the time via our devices. But what's interesting
00:13:20.840is people have been talking a lot about this loneliness crisis. People feel alone.
00:13:50.420Like 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.
00:14:05.680Loneliness is when your ache for not just people or a social interaction, but your ache
00:14:13.320for love and acceptance to know and to be known for belonging is not sated or satisfied
00:22:27.660is another translation. And it doesn't mean desert as in like Sahara desert, hot and sandy and no
00:22:34.440grass. It means desert as in like deserted. So we would call it wilderness or back country. And
00:22:39.960the world we live in, you have to drive for six hours to get to a national park or to get to the
00:22:45.880back country. But in Jesus' world, far less populated, places like that were a short walk
00:22:51.720outside of every village. And what you see in Jesus is he begins kind of, the story of Jesus
00:22:57.200begins with him in this kind of 40 day foray out into the Ramos. And 40 days is just a Hebrew idiom,
00:23:04.580not an exact unit of measurement. It means just a very long time. And then he goes back to this
00:23:10.380place over and over and over again in the four gospel stories. Luke chapter five, there's a
00:23:16.800telling line from the biographer Luke, where he says, Jesus often withdrew, and in the English
00:23:22.720translation I have, it says, to lonely places. In Greek, it's to the aremos, to pray. And he says
00:23:28.940to his disciples, come us after an especially busy time. There's a beautiful line that we can
00:23:33.160all relate to when it says they were so busy coming and going that they did not so much have
00:23:37.000time to eat. Every parent can relate to that or somebody who's hustling in their business.
00:23:42.500And 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 aremos in Greek, to get some rest.
00:23:55.320And 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 Eremos, 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.
00:24:24.020there's clear examples of that. And this is the pattern that you see in the life of Christ
00:24:29.700that many of us as followers of Christ seek to emulate.
00:24:34.500Yeah. Last time I read the New Testament, that's something I noticed was how often
00:24:38.080Jesus was getting away from people. Because I think when we think of Jesus, we think he's
00:24:41.720constantly ministering and healing. Yes. Yeah. He does that. But there's also these instances
00:24:46.780where he's like, all right, guys, we got to get on a boat because there's so many people trying
00:24:50.220to get to me. I need to, we're going to hightail it out here across the Sea of Galilee. We need to
00:24:54.560break. There are stories where the disciples, like there's a, there's a couple of stories where he
00:24:59.660gets up early in the morning and just disappears, slips out the front door of the house where
00:25:03.960they're all staying. And the disciples have to send out essentially search parties to go out
00:25:08.200and find him. They have no idea where he is. There are other stories where he sends everybody away
00:25:13.740and the language there is forceful. Like he forces everybody to leave and he goes up to the top of a
00:25:19.780mountain. He literally climbs to the top of a mountain just to be alone with God. And there's
00:25:24.580all of these stories where he very intentionally, very regularly goes away. But they're not stories
00:25:31.720of him becoming a monk or a hermit or a recluse. Most of these retreats are measured in hours,
00:25:37.600not even in days. They're just these stories of him regularly sneaking away from the noise and
00:25:44.120busyness and hurry and stimulation and demands of life in the world to come to quiet and find
00:25:51.500stillness. Yeah. I always think about that. It's like, well, if even God incarnate needs time by
00:25:56.120himself, I need to do that too for myself. Yeah. I always laugh when people come up
00:26:01.720understandably with a thousand excuses of why this would never work for them. And I just always want
00:26:06.500to gently say, you know, I'm pretty sure Jesus was more in demand than you are. And he not only
00:26:13.380found time, but he considered it essential. Yeah. So Jesus sets the pattern for silence
00:26:20.400and solitude, this practice of him going to the Aramos or the lonely place. What you see later on
00:26:25.700in Christianity is you see the desert fathers. This is a couple hundred years after Christ's0.98
00:26:33.560death. They start imitating, I'm sure they're reading the Bible, the New Testament thing,
00:26:39.020wow, Jesus went off by himself. We should do that too. So like, when did that start happening
00:26:43.620where they're like, I'm going to leave the city and I'm just going to go live in the desert by
00:26:46.940myself? It started happening in the 300s. So in the fourth century, and it was a response to
00:26:53.540ironically, the legalization, they would not have called it Christianity. They would have just called
00:26:58.580it the Christian community, but to the legalization of the Christian faith for the first, you know,
00:27:04.060several hundred years of the church, Christians were violently persecuted, not constantly,
00:27:08.640but in waves all through the Roman Empire and around the Mediterranean and other places as well.
00:27:14.260And in the 330s, Constantine, the emperor, has this pseudo-conversion, may or may not be real,
00:27:21.600historians debate. Either way, the way of Jesus is legalized. And for the first time,
00:27:27.480the church goes from a persecuted minority to a political majority. And this, you would think,
00:27:33.740would be the best thing to ever happen. And a lot of it's fantastic. I mean, women and children are
00:27:37.600no longer being eaten alive in the arena by lions just because they believe in the resurrection of
00:27:43.140Jesus. But it actually turns out to have a pretty horrible effect on the health and life of the
00:27:50.580church and of Christians. So there's a few different kind of responses to this widespread
00:27:55.780kind of corruption and collusion with the empire. And one is a whole bunch of people that straight
00:28:01.640up just leave it behind. And they go out into the desert, mostly of North Africa, but also in parts
00:28:07.500of Syria. And this movement continues to spread. It eventually gets all the way to like Celtic
00:28:12.160Ireland. If you know about some of those stories, it goes all over the world. And it becomes what
00:28:17.420we now think of as the monastic orders or monasteries and monks and nuns. But early on,
00:28:22.960it just started as people intentionally getting away, just choosing, opting for a radically
00:28:29.380different life rather than trying to just fit a little life with God or spiritual life into the
00:28:35.960Roman empire of their time. And monasteries didn't exist yet. So there wasn't like a place
00:28:40.440where they could go and be isolated. They would just go off into the, like, they'd literally go
00:28:44.740live in a cave, basically. Yeah. Normally what would happen is somebody would go live in a cave
00:28:50.200or live in a little hut and weave just enough baskets to buy himself some daily, literal daily
00:28:55.700bread. And often they would become these people of extraordinary, over time, not quickly, of
00:29:02.080extraordinary peace and wisdom and power and healing power. And people would begin to seek
00:29:08.680them out for wisdom, for teaching, for mentorship, for prayer, for healing, and for advice. And then
00:29:16.400inevitably little like clusters of kind of students or disciples would form around these
00:29:23.060men and women that were all just trying to get away from people. And eventually from that came
00:29:28.520monastic communities and then i guess these practices of silence and solitude there's other
00:29:33.220spiritual practices they became institutionalized like benedict came up with this sort of rules of
00:29:37.960benedict that yes and they would order their time yeah because they weren't really trying to escape
00:29:43.060community or a relationality in life they were trying to escape from the corruption and the
00:29:49.440complicity of the church and the culture and so they would often preserve these just incredibly
00:29:57.800deep, concentrated expressions of both community, where they would live in a monastery together,
00:30:04.160live by shared rhythms, live by a set schedule they would all live by, share their possessions
00:30:09.320with each other, give up all ownership, commit to stay there, many of them for life, and just
00:30:14.760work out all of their interpersonal drama, you know. And they had this concentrated forms of
00:30:22.340quiet, of silence, solitude, stillness, prayer, contemplative practice. And, you know, even though
00:30:28.380a lot of their expressions of both community and prayer or silence are a bit too intense for any of
00:30:35.760us just kind of living in suburban whatever with, you know, a job we have to be at at eight or
00:30:40.660kindergarten drop off at, you know, 745, still they preserve these vital practices and strands
00:30:48.440of spirituality. And it's interesting, what do we most long for? We long for a deep relational
00:30:54.520space of love, acceptance, belonging, family, community, friendship. And we long for deep
00:31:02.240peacefulness, for a rich spiritual life, for a tranquility of heart no matter what comes.
00:31:08.880And yet many of us, we're very social, but we don't have deep relationality. And we might have
00:31:13.980lots of downtime, but we don't have true stillness of heart. And that's what these traditions
00:31:21.020preserve so beautifully for us. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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00:54:04.240So we've been talking about this idea of silence and solitude, you know, very abstractly,
00:54:09.240what we can get out of it, what we learn about ourselves. But what does this look like? You know,
00:54:14.380brass tacks. What are some things that people can start doing today to start practicing
00:54:18.840silence and solitude as spiritual disciplines? Well, the good news is you don't need to go on
00:54:24.220a 21-day retreat. You can start very small, right where you're at. In fact, you should
00:54:29.680likely start very small, depending on what your starting line is, and just take the next step.
00:54:35.140This can be, you know, a couple of easy wins are buy an old school alarm clock and stick your phone in another room when you go to bed at night.
00:54:44.680And 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.
00:54:54.080I get up, I make coffee and I just sit on the floor.
00:54:56.940I read a psalm and I just breathe in the silence before God.
00:55:00.280you know, Francis de Sales, who was a French church leader, an amazing writer. You know,
00:55:05.420he had this little quip where he'd said, everybody should spend 30 minutes a day in silent meditation,
00:55:10.480except for when they're really busy, then they need a full hour. And a full hour might be way
00:55:16.880too big of a step for you. 30 minutes might be way too big of a step for you. Maybe it's three
00:55:20.480minutes, but just begin your day phone free. Another simple, silly thing I write about in the
00:55:26.560is, you know, there's a new TikTok trend among Gen Z called silent walking, which is just where
00:55:32.120you go walking, but with no headphones, no phone, no podcast. So we used to do it also known as just
00:55:38.600walking. Right. Yeah. So just like go for a walk, just walk your dog down to the parking back and
00:55:44.400leave your phone behind. I do this, you know, if I can every day at noon, I'll just walk to the end
00:55:49.880of my street and back. It takes, I don't know, seven minutes, eight minutes. And I just go without
00:55:55.320my phone. And sometimes I encounter God and have revelation. And sometimes I just walk and I come
00:56:02.240back and it's just this little gift of quiet in the middle of my day. So again, you don't have to
00:56:08.120go jump ahead to a 21 day retreat or drive to Big Sur and go to the monastery and do contemplative
00:56:13.460prayer three times a day for a week. You can just start by going for a seven minute walk, by not
00:56:19.920sleeping next to your phone, by watching the sunset, by et cetera, et cetera, and working
00:56:26.220your way up from there. Yeah, you talk about just getting out to your own Eremos. It could just be
00:56:30.280in your backyard. Get out into nature. Get out into nature. I mean, you always want to be careful
00:56:35.000not to just let your personal bias bleed through and everything. But man, I do not believe modern
00:56:40.940humans were designed by God or nature to live in these urban and suburban environments that we now
00:56:48.980call home so far removed from quiet and creation or nature. And so whether you get into backpacking
00:56:56.280or camping or just hiking or just frequent the park by your house in Manhattan, the more we can
00:57:01.660expose ourselves to natural beauty and natural quiet, the healthier our souls will be. And that's
00:57:07.200just not my opinion. There's reams of science behind that now. Yeah. And I would recommend if
00:57:12.180you have a monastery nearby, go visit it. You don't have to be a believer. They're all about
00:57:18.460hospitality there absolutely you can go yeah absolutely you can be hardcore not christian
00:57:23.660and they will welcome you and they make some great food i ate really well at this monastery
00:57:28.300and it's all you know grown on their land and then you'll get to experience silence and solitude
00:57:32.960for a couple of days and you'll probably sleep all the time and and and there's something too
00:57:38.360it's special it's a place that you know is like very good people have this experience but if you
00:57:43.700go into like a bar concert venue in the morning and nobody's in there, it might be quiet, but
00:57:49.840there's a feeling in the room that is, it's not where you want to go meditate as opposed to if
00:57:55.680you're at a monastery and the soil has been soaked in silence and prayer and community love for
00:58:02.280decades or centuries, there's just something different in that place. And so whatever your
00:58:08.160religious or not, beliefs are, they are great places to go try this. Well, John Mark, this has
00:58:15.640been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:58:19.160Yeah. I mean, you're welcome to just Google my name, johnmarkcomer.com. We'll take you in the
00:58:23.580right direction. Fantastic. Well, John Mark Comer, thanks for time. It's been a pleasure.
00:58:27.360Thank you for having me on. My guest there is John Mark Comer. He's the author of the book
00:58:31.400Into the Quiet. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more
00:58:35.140information about his work at his website, johnmarkcomber.com. Also check out our show
00:58:39.160notes at aom.is slash silence. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:58:50.740Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. If you haven't done so already,
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