Sara Maitland: A Book of Silence. Granta, 2009. ISBN: 9781847081513. Online
Silence, according to Sara Maitland, starkly reveals the truth that Christianity is more about emptying oneself and opening the self to God than it is about fulfilling the self.
Maitland feels compelled to live in greater silence, and this book details her journey to learn what silence is through reading about it and experiencing it in different settings. Her reading covers not only traditional Christian accounts of silence, but also the secular accounts of extreme isolation and silence, for example, Richard Byrd alone in a tent in the Arctic winter, or Alexander Selkirk frantically building fences on his desert island.
Maitland's overview of the Christian desert tradition and the traditions of silence in Buddhism is comprehensive, and sometimes wry. Why did the wily Bishop Athanasius put so many words into the mouth of the nearly always silent Anthony in writing his history of the hermit? Answer: because Athanasius needed a mouthpiece for orthodoxy, and he pressed even those who didn't talk into service.
Maitland feels that our culture devalues silence. Our individualism and consumerist need to fulfil ourselves has crowded silence out. So resistance of friends to her plans has itself to be resisted with deeper understanding and the careful explanations in this book.
Maitland worries that we no longer respond to appalling tragedy with silence. We chatter and make busy work when loved ones die. We even applaud in funerals.
She spends six weeks on Skye, a bleak island off the Scottish coast, noting the principal experiences that silence brings: greater intensity of seeing, hearing, smelling; a breaking down of the boundaries of the self; a joy she names 'jouissance'; and hearing sounds and voices.
Maitland then travels to Israel for a desert experience of silence, where she discovers the lassitude and undoing of a sense of time, both of which open her out to an experience of God.
Her third planned experience of silence was in the high country near her childhood home in southwest Scotland. These walks give Sara Maitland a different experience of solitude, because high country below the snow-line is noisy and the scenery sharp and spectacular. All this stimulates clear memories, which she polishes into anecdotes. This experience of silence actually reinforces the sense of ego.
She reflects on these two contrasting experiences: the desert