Providence by Daniel Quinn Read Free Book Online

that the silence saved me. I assume you know that, among the Trappists, you speak only to your spiritual director or confessor. There’s a rudimentary sign language—deliberately rudimentary—but this is for necessary communications, not for idle chitchat, at least in theory.
    I say that silence saved me, because, growing up, from age ten to age twenty, language had been my weapon, virtually my only weapon. I wasn’t strong or fast or big, wasn’t physically aggressive, so I fought with my tongue. Made enemies with my tongue. This was all right too, because being shunned for viciousness is much easier to take than being shunned for queerness. But I walked into Gethsemani without a weapon of any kind, having denied myself speech. And, having denied myself speech, I was unable to make enemies—and, for the first time in a long, long time,
didn’t
make enemies.
    People without much imagination will say things like, “Oh, it must have been terrible for someone as verbal as you not to be able to talk!” Believe me, it was
heavenly
not to be able to talk—to have no one
expect
you to talk. To be honest, I didn’t even much want to learn the sign language. I was perfectly content not to know what people around me were saying with their hands. It was none of my affair. If someone came up and told me the abbotwanted to see me, that was fine, I could make that out, what more did I need?
    Merton lent me a copy of Max Picard’s
The World of Silence,
a wonderful book, a whole book on silence, and nothing I could say in praise of silence could begin to equal it. Father Louis—that was Merton’s name in religion—was a marvelous person, full of humor and charm, not in the least austere or self-important or solemn. What my guardian angel was to me, Father Louis was to the novices as a group, and he brought us along rather like a good-natured football coach. Not all the novices were youngsters. Two were ordained priests from other orders, one in his thirties, the other in his forties. He treated the rest of us—the ten or twelve youngsters—the same way he treated them, as if we were grown-ups worthy of his respect. Obviously he knew things about the contemplative life that we didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess, but he was just there to enlighten us and that was that.
    I was far from being the only one who had arrived with romantic fantasies. One day Father Louis said—we had classes with him every day—“Look, you’ve got to understand that what we have here is a very
ordinary
life.” Well, I think that drew a lot of smiles. Not many of us little saints were ready to believe that. He told us there were a lot of zombies walking around behind those beatific smiles we saw in the halls, and this certainly gave us something to think about, but no one imagined that something like that could ever happen to
us.
    Of course, it was all new and exciting to us, but whatFather Louis wanted us to see was that it wasn’t always going to be new and exciting. It is, after all, a life of absolute regularity and unalterable, deadening routine, day after day, year after year, decade after decade—life utterly (and by design) without novelty. No vacations, no visits home, no days off, no cocktail hours, no parties, no scratch football games, no chess tournaments. In spite of that, a delightful merriment and glee flourished there that I’ve never encountered elsewhere. Holiness and reverence didn’t preclude gaiety and humor.
    Lightheartedness. That’s what I found there: something almost unknown in today’s world, crushed under leaden burdens of crime, crisis, hatred, and anguish. You should see the letters I receive every week from despairing teenagers. Who can live with a light heart while participating in a global slaughter that makes the Nazi holocaust look like a limbering-up exercise? We look back in horror at the millions of Germans who knew more or less exactly what was happening in the death camps and wonder what