How a Season of Silence Restored My Faith

For two years I chose quiet over commentary. I stepped away from podcasts during my commute, left the television dark in the evenings, and let phone notifications wait until I was ready to look. Friends in Melbourne's inner north, where I live among the terrace houses of Fitzroy and Carlton, told me I had become impossible to find. They were right. I had decided that the noise of ordinary life had buried something essential, and that only a season of silence could dig it out again.

Looking back, the pull toward quiet began during a long illness that kept me indoors during a Sydney winter. I had been reading the Psalms at the recommendation of a counsellor, and the verse about being still kept surfacing in my mind. I mistook stillness for absence at first, and assumed the absence meant God had withdrawn. It took months of empty mornings, long walks along the Yarra, and many pages of unfinished journaling before I understood that the quiet itself was the teacher.

Why I Stepped Back

The decision did not arrive in a single moment. It accumulated, the way sediment collects at the bottom of a water tank. I had spent years on autopilot, moving between the office in the city, the gym in the early evenings, and a screen at home until sleep pulled me under. My prayers had become shopping lists. My Bible reading had become background music. I remember sitting through a service one Sunday in a church in Surry Hills and realising I could not remember a single sentence of the sermon afterwards.

I had also grown weary of the public noise. The arguments online, the political shouting, the round-the-clock commentary that follows every news cycle. Australia has always been a country that talks to itself loudly, and I had joined in too readily. So I made a quiet decision one autumn morning. I would not announce it. I would simply stop filling every gap with words. The first gap was the train ride from my local station into the loop. Instead of scrolling, I watched the suburbs pass. Instead of listening, I let the carriages settle into their own rhythm. By the second week I had stopped wearing earphones altogether.

The First Quiet Mornings

I had been waking at the same time for years, but I had never listened. The first morning I set the alarm for five and refused to reach for my phone, the street outside my Brunswick flat was already stirring. A baker near the tram stop unloaded trays. Someone walked a small dog past the milk bar. These sounds had always been there, but the smartphone had drowned them. Within a week I could tell when the local primary school opened its gates from the chorus of small voices. Within a month I could feel my own breathing again.

I made a small rule for those first months. No news before noon. No opinions before breakfast. No arguments of any kind before I had sat with a cup of tea for twenty minutes. It sounds monastic, and in a way it was, although the only monastery I knew was the tiny chapel attached to the church near Lygon Street where I would sometimes slip in for the eight o'clock eucharist. The discipline was less about piety than about reclaiming the inner room the noise had occupied. I began to notice that the questions I carried were not new. They had been there since university, since a difficult friendship in my twenties, since a stretch of years when the Sunday sermons felt like lectures rather than encounters.

The Desert in the Middle

The hardest stretch came around the eighth month. I had expected clarity to arrive in tidy increments, like weather forecasts on the evening news. Instead I found long afternoons where nothing seemed to register at all. I walked the trail along the Merri Creek for hours and felt nothing. I sat in my study with the Bible open and felt worse than nothing. I remember one Tuesday in particular, when I drove to a Bunnings warehouse in the outer suburbs for a garden hose and ended up sitting in the car park for forty minutes, unable to explain to myself why I had bothered to leave the house.

This is the middle of any genuine retreat, the part no one writes about in magazine features. The Australian landscape itself seemed to mirror my interior. I thought of our poets who have written about the dryness of this continent, of Dorothea Mackellar's sunburnt country lines, of the inland stations where people pray for rain that does not come. Faith felt like that. I stopped going to church for almost three months. I told no one, because there was nothing to tell. Yet I kept the discipline of the morning quiet, and I kept walking. Those empty months may have been the most fertile part of the whole season.

The Voices That Returned

The first thing that came back was gratitude. Not the polite kind I had been performing at the dinner table for years, but the raw, startled kind that wells up in a hospital corridor when a relative is suddenly out of danger. I felt it one afternoon in the Royal Botanic Gardens, sitting on a bench beneath a Moreton Bay fig and watching four cockatoos argue over a branch. Nothing had changed in my circumstances. I had not received a diagnosis or a promotion. The gratitude simply arrived, and with it a strange certainty that Someone had been in the room all along, waiting for me to stop performing.

Reading came alive again as well. I read Marilynne Robinson's novels and felt the prose act almost like a homily. I read the Australian poet Kevin Hart, who happens to be a Catholic priest, and recognised in his work a quietness I had been chasing without naming it. I read the gospels from beginning to end for the first time since I was a teenager, and found that the Sermon on the Mount read differently when you have walked through a desert of your own. I also rediscovered the hymns I had grown up with in a small Anglican congregation, and sang them badly in the kitchen while the kettle boiled. The point was not the singing. The point was that I could sing again.

What the Quiet Carried Forward

I am not the same person who walked into this season. I read the news now, including the political shifts of recent years such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage in late 2017, with a steadier gaze. I am less frightened by arguments on social media, partly because I rarely enter them, and partly because I have learned that most of my loudest convictions are half-formed. I attend church again, although I no longer expect every sermon to meet me where I am. I have begun a small group in my home that meets for prayer and a meal once a fortnight, and several of those friends have started their own quiet mornings.

The habits remain. I still wake early and refuse the phone for the first hour. I still walk the creek most days, weather permitting. I still drive past the footy oval on Saturdays and feel a small pang of longing for the team I followed as a boy, before I remember that longing is not the same as belonging. The point of the silence, I have come to believe, was never to silence the world but to teach me where my own small voice fit within a much larger one.

If there is anything worth carrying from this story, it is that seasons of silence rarely feel holy at the time. They feel like absence. They feel like the long dry stretches the country itself knows between rains, when the paddocks crack and the dams shrink and the wind carries dust across the verandah. Yet beneath the surface, roots are quietly finding their way to deeper water. The quiet is not the opposite of faith. For me, and perhaps for many readers, it has been the soil in which faith has finally taken hold.