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Silent retreats’ rising popularity poses a challenge: How to handle the quiet

By Michelle Boorstein,December 12, 2012

View Photo Gallery - : Getting away from everything, everybody: The brothers of the Franciscan…

The headline in the monthly Ward 5 newspaper described what sounded like an antidote to the nonstop iPhone-checking, list-making, ladder-climbing, goal-setting, Washington mind-set: “Refuge for the Metropolitan Hermit.”

The article described a postage stamp of a cabin, urbanely designed and gloriously sunlit, standing alone amid four acres of maples and white oaks on a protected hilltop you’ve probably never seen, although it’s in the middle of the city. Dubbed “the hermitage” by the brothers of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Northeast Washington, the space has no WiFi, TV or radio, and its occupancy limit is one.

It’s been booked nearly solid since it opened in October.

What do we complain about more these days than the tyranny of constant stimulation? Our attempts to tune out the outside world — the occasional radio-less drive to work, the concerted decision to leave the phone at home for a few hours — are often ineffectual. It has come to this: True solitude is such a rarity in our modern lives that we have to buy it — or, in this case, rent it for $70 a night.

But it turns out solitude isn’t that simple. Although participation in silent retreats is on the rise, many of those preparing to spend time at the hermitage said they were so unaccustomed to unstructured time alone that they made to-do lists — then feared they were doing “solitude” wrong and scrapped them. They agonized over what to bring and wear and eat, as if they were traveling to an exotic land.

Michelle Harris-Love, a neuroscience researcher, wife and mother who lives near the monastery, was happy to pay $140 for two nights at the hermitage. But as the days drew closer, a stressful question surfaced. “I thought: ‘How am I going to fill my time?’ ”

This is a serious question.

The Catholic University architecture students who designed the RV-size space worked to envision the needs and rhythms of tenants who were unplugged. They were asked to turn off all their own devices and spend an hour alone and silent. Of the 12, only three were able to do it.

“Everyone tried, but it started to seem like a waste of time” to them, said William Jelen, the professor who oversaw the project.

“It’s not easy to find silence.”

The biggest U.S. retreat centers, including the Insight Meditation Society in central Massachusetts and Spirit Rock in Northern California, anticipate the roadblocks to achieving an inner focus and discourage — in some cases, forbid — participants from bringing books or journals, even for weeks-long silent retreats. Retreat staffers say such rules are necessary to help participants focus on their interior lives, because many people would rather do just about anything else.

Yet the number of Americans going to silent retreats has been climbing, particularly in the past five years, as more data emerge on the value of meditation and meditation-derived practices such as mindfulness. Despite tough economic times, it seems, people are willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a few weeks or months of . . . what?

Even those heading for such retreats aren’t sure. What is silence? The absence of noise? Achieving inner peace? Knowing yourself? Being able to hover above your own thoughts and observe them without judgment? Halting the constant hunger for accomplishment in a society absorbed with getting ahead in measurable ways, with doing rather than being?

Silence isn’t the end; it’s the means, experts say. And its absence from our culture isn’t a small thing.

“It’s the crisis of our age, the loss of the interior of our lives,” said James Finley, who lived in silence for six years as a Trappist monk before becoming a clinical psychologist who leads silent retreats. For most people, “it’s like trying to make a U-turn at rush hour. We’re caught up in the momentum of the perceived urgency of the next thing.”

Emphasizing solitude

The 350-square-foot hermitage was the idea of brothers whose order is named for Saint Francis, the legendary Catholic preacher who ditched his wealthy upbringing in pursuit of a material-free life of contemplation. Typically hermitages — the word means a place for someone who wants to live in seclusion, usually for spiritual reasons — are in remote areas, but the Franciscans wanted to create one in the middle of the city.