So I got into my car and followed a road north along the California coast from my mother’s house, and then drove up an even narrower path to a Benedictine retreat house a friend had told me about. When I got out of my worn and dust-streaked white Plymouth Horizon, it was to step into a thrumming, crystal silence.
And when I walked into the little room where I was to spend three nights, I couldn’t begin to remember any of the arguments I’d been thrashing out in my head on the way up, the phone calls that had seemed so urgent when I left home.
Instead, I was nowhere in this room, with long windows looking out upon the sea.
And when I walked into the little room where I was to spend three nights, I couldn’t begin to remember any of the arguments I’d been thrashing out in my head on the way up, the phone calls that had seemed so urgent when I left home.
Instead, I was nowhere in this room, with long windows looking out upon the sea.
A fox alighted on the splintered fence outside, and I couldn’t stop watching, transfixed. A deer began grazing just outside my window, and it felt like a small miracle stepping into my life. Bells tolled far above, and I thought I was listening to the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
I’d have laughed at such sentiments even a day before. And as soon as I went to vigils in the chapel, the spell was broken; the silence was much more tonic than any words could be. But what I discovered, almost instantly, was that as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up….
Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.
Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.
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