|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
There is a kind of silence that unsettles—the awkward hush of a crowded room when the music stops. And then there is the silence I encountered at Clear Creek Abbey: a silence so full it seemed to hum with the voice of God. My four-day retreat there, nestled in the hills of eastern Oklahoma, was not a retreat in the modern sense—a break from stress or a spiritual spa treatment. It was an immersion into a different rhythm, a different world. One that continues on, undisturbed, while the rest of us spin our wheels in the noise.
I arrived in early September, just as the heavy heat of summer was giving way to the promise of autumn. The days were warm, the nights cool, and the first hints of woodsmoke hung in the air. The Abbey itself rises from the countryside like something outside of time—its stone walls and arches a visible rebuttal to the disposable age we live in. Entering its grounds felt like crossing a threshold into something ordered, rooted, and quietly radiant.
The day began before the sun. At six in the morning, the bell called us to Prime, the first full hour of the Divine Office. The chapel was cool and dim, echoing slightly under its high arches. As the monks chanted the psalms in Latin, each syllable seemed to float up and linger in the sacred space. There was no rush, no performance—only prayer, offered steadily and without self-consciousness, as it had been for centuries. This was not prayer as therapy; this was prayer as the heartbeat of life.
After Prime, we gathered for breakfast. Milk from the Abbey’s own cows, fruit from local farms, fresh bread. It was simple, nourishing, and deeply satisfying. One monk read aloud from a spiritual classic while we ate in silence. Even meals were ordered toward contemplation. In a world where dinner is often consumed before a glowing screen or on the run, this meal felt like an act of reverence.
We joined the monks every three hours for the Divine Office, the sacred rhythm of psalms and prayers that structured each day like the steady tolling of a bell across eternity. In between, we participated in daily Mass — not in the main chapel, but in the crypt beneath it, where the Holy Sacrifice was offered according to the 1962 rubrics of the Roman Missal. It was a scene out of a lost age: five or more priests, vested in silence, each offering his own private Low Mass simultaneously at separate altars. There were no microphones, no announcements, no haste — only the gentle murmur of Latin, the quiet ring of the Sanctus bell, and the occasional creak of wood as retreatants moved from kneeler to kneeler. This was not theatrical worship, but liturgy in its purest form: reverent, intimate, and multiplied like loaves and fishes for the good of souls.
The rest of the day followed a pattern as old as Benedict himself: ora et labora. We attended spiritual conferences, enjoyed private prayer, and, most strikingly, worked.
One afternoon we were invited to the vineyard. The task was straightforward: pick grapes, prune the vines, clear the brush. But the experience was something more. The monks worked in total silence—no talking, no background noise. Just the sounds of birds in the trees, wind in the branches, and the rustle of leaves as we moved through the rows. The sun hung high over us, golden and generous, as we bent to the work. It was there, in that quiet labor, that I encountered the core of monastic wisdom: the unity of soul and body, contemplation and action.
At first, I was self-conscious—used to multitasking, to filling silence with commentary. But within minutes, that old urge faded. The work itself began to speak. Every motion, every pruning of a wayward branch, became symbolic. Some vines bore fruit. Others needed correction. Others still had to be stripped entirely. There, under that clear sky, I saw my own soul in the vineyard. Fruitful in places, wild in others, in need of pruning.
That was the moment the retreat broke through my defenses. I hadn’t come with a crisis in hand, no dramatic conversion moment. I had come tired. Spiritually scattered. The vineyard gave me back a sense of integration. Not by words, but through the sacrament of silence and honest labor.
The monks themselves were a quiet witness. They weren’t recruiting. They weren’t performing. They simply lived. Some were young, clearly in formation. Others older, seasoned. A few were priests. Others were content to be monks without ordination—servants of the altar, the vineyard, and the divine liturgy. Their faces bore the mark of peace, not detachment. Their joy wasn’t emotionalism; it was steadiness. There was no need to impress. They had given their lives to something eternal—and you could feel the weight of it, like gravity for the soul.
The Abbey’s physical beauty was not cosmetic—it was theological. During the day, sunlight poured through the chapel’s tall windows, painting the floor in brilliant blues and reds, like shards from heaven itself. At night, the only light came from the altar candles, casting golden halos across the stone. The darkness didn’t smother—it sanctified. It reminded you that prayer doesn’t depend on clarity, but on constancy.
We ended each night with Compline, the final hour of the Office. The chant was slower, gentler, as if the monks themselves were winding the world down with their prayers. I remember one night in particular, standing outside afterward, the stars above like a cathedral roof. It was utterly silent. No traffic. No sirens. No distant buzz of the modern world. Just the chirp of crickets, the creak of wood, and the knowledge that within those walls, men were still praying—long after the rest of us had forgotten to.
Leaving Clear Creek wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to go back to screens and schedules. But I knew I had to. The grace of the retreat wasn’t meant to remain within the monastery. It was meant to go back with me, like embers carried from a sacred fire.
Clear Creek Abbey is not a nostalgic refuge for liturgical romantics. It is a living monastery, part of the real solution. It is a place where the order of God—not the chaos of man—dictates the schedule. It is where the sacred is not hidden but manifest: in chant, in labor, in milk and bread and stone.
In a world of perpetual crisis, such a place offers more than beauty. It offers sanity. And, more than that, it offers hope.
Editor’s note: please donate to help the monks in their building project HERE.