Silence lets you ask the big questions

The room is beautiful, simple and clean. A bed and a sink, a mirror and a desk.

My window looks out on a walled garden in the village of Taize, France.

Less than 500 metres away, the Taize community’s at its summer height. Nearly ten thousand young people from all over the world mix in the Australian-grade sunshine, eating, swapping stories and email addresses. This week I’m not with them. I’m past the bell-tower, down around the corner in a house concealed behind a crumbling wall.

Six weeks I’ve been on the road now, winding my way home after a year in Europe. I’m exhausted, having crammed in as much life and culture as a body can.

I lay myself down and all the faces of people I’ve been with in the last weeks appear, like the after-image of a light bulb when you shut your eyes. Most vivid are friends I made in the Taize community last week.

I told them I was staying on to do a week in silence. “I could never do that,” said Savannah, a peppy Californian. “I’d go mental.” So said a lot of my friends: Spending a week in silence was a voyage into a strange and dangerous country.

They wished me well.

Why am I doing this? The blurred line between faith and spiritual tourism? A feeling that, given my normal mental state’s resemblance to a bagful of over-caffeinated monkeys, it might do me good? Or as Brother Emile suggests during one meeting, to do as Psalm 42 says — to taste and see?

At 7 pm we gather for dinner. Fifteen men stand silently by white tables garlanded with leaves (women in silence live elsewhere). Our host sings a simple grace and we join him falteringly. He motions for us to sit and begins distributing food.

I hand the pasta to the Nordic gent beside me. Without the usual conversational staples — “What’s your name, what’s your job, where do you live?” — we fall back on simple gestures to express our needs and personalities.

There’s an eloquence to this I love; a sense of community at its most basic and, over the coming week, people’s personalities voice themselves clearly. When you smile and when you don’t. How much food you take for yourself. More disturbing is the chap who giggles quietly to himself: the very definition of an in-joke.

We file to the church for evening song with the rest of Taize. After a day of being stripped back, I’m surrounded by thousands of voices. Some nights I stay to think, pray and be in the candlelight; other nights I walk back, breaking the membrane of noise and activity as I pass under the bell tower.

This time is a gift and I can do with it as I choose.

In the morning, after morning prayer and breakfast (I developed an avid devotion to fresh French bread), Brother Luke leads us in a Bible study. We read the story of Elijah and are invited to meditate on the story’s resonance for our own lives. What are our desert times? How are we fed? Then, with a sanguine air, he advises us of the weather forecast.

Some afternoons I meet with Brother Emile, a twinkling Canadian, to debrief. Away from the familiar territory of the gospels, I find this Old Testament God alien. I share my bemusement — here I was thinking that I could schedule time with God like a trip to Paris and where is the enlightenment?

Brother Emile gently encourages me to recognise my dependency; my inability to control things, least of all God. I ask him the really big questions: are Brother’s allowed to watch TV? (Yes).

Some afternoons, I go for walks, ranging wide in the fields, eating grain from the stalk, photographing riots of roadside flowers. Sometimes I go to the bridge over the transcontinental train line and wait for the express to rocket beneath me, shaking me to the guts and deafening me with its arrival.

Matt Fenwick lives between Newcastle and Sydney, with luggage spread around the globe. He is a member of Christian Students Uniting.