A Gift of Silence

Every single time that I've been back to Virginia in the last 20 years, I've made a pilgrimage to Vesuvius. I've walked to Table Rock and Buttermilk Springs and stopped in the chapel....fall, winter, spring. Even now at age 45 I still dream occasionally that the summer has finally come
when I'm free again to pack my old footlocker and go to work in that shady valley. Because it was there, along Mary's Creek, that I learned to love the silence - and it is the silence that has led me through all the rich and wrenching moments of my life to this one (also rich and wrenching) - and that I hope will lead me the rest of the way as well.

You know, there's a silence there that's tremendous. And sometimes small sounds make the silence steeper. I think of the sound of cicadas in the hot noon-time, when the dry hush of dust and the heavy stillness of sunlight hold every creature earthbound. And I think of the distant croaking of ravens on high rocks, and the rich repetition of a whippoorwill in the middle of a moonlit night. And young bodies breathing, snoring, sighing in the rustle of sweet straw. And the rush of water over rocks, and the still coolness where water striders skim. Even, from a high ridge the echoed shouts of playing children down below. An incredible silence, not broken but accentuated by the small sounds of small creatures.

Galactic silences invade that valley, the deep silence of primordial rock creeps up through
the soil. The quiet wind steals, touchs, troubles water, pine-needles, dead leaves, faded candy wrappers.

We had then what we called the Great Silence. Do they have it still? Strange to impose a monastic rule on hyper-active kids. But somehow, even with the giggles and guffaws at bed-time, and the poorly-whispered partying of the staff, there was something sacred about that Great Silence. It got into my blood.

It was there at Camp I learned to love it, and to love the voices, both human and other, that hid within it like crickets in high summer. That silence was pregnant with a presence - of One who can sing with words and notes and melodies, but can sing as well, maybe better, without them.

As you can see, I don't need the "Afterglow" to remind me of it all. It's still there, somehow, in the silence that has kept me company since those days. Don't forget this, put it on the record once and for all: I am thankful and have not forgotten the friends and fellowship of those years, and am not likely to, until the silence that conquers even crickets conquers me and teaches me too, I hope, to sing without words.

God bless you. I'm with you.
Ben Harrison

Ben attended camp in the late 1950's, and is now a lay brother at St. Malachy's in Manchester, England. He came to the 1988 reunion that led to the creation of the NCF. This letter was written in 1990.