Where Is Goodness To Be Found?

“If you keep your eyes out, you might see a kingfisher,” Sarah Clarkson’s friend Mark told her. Clarkson received these wise words on one of the first Sundays that she and her husband, Thomas, spent at the parish where Thomas had recently become the priest. In those early months, Clarkson writes, each day felt like an exploration. Their new surroundings, from the Victorian vicarage they called home to the lake that led to the woods, offered constant surprise. A kingfisher, though, that was “a grace beyond expectation.”

Clarkson asked Mark where he had seen one in the past. He responded in detail, sharing that he had, in fact, seen three. The thing was, though, “You have to be in a certain state of heart,” he explained. “And then, you just see them.” 

It’s this state of heart that Clarkson explores throughout her new book, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention. She describes a pursuit that does not merely seek the absence of sound but, instead, “an openness to the presence of God.” Clarkson spoke with Common Good about attention, wonder, and the gifts to be found in the quiet.

Early in the book, you invite readers to consider their relationship to quiet. How would you encourage those who prefer to avoid it to take a first step toward making friends with quiet? 

One of the great obstacles to the claiming of quiet in the modern world is, I think, our incapacity to actually articulate the quiet we seek in a concrete, attractive way. We often describe quiet in terms of negation: noise and movement to be subtracted, desires to be ignored. But if we think of quiet primarily as a discipline to perform or a feat to accomplish, another task to add to minds and bodies already weary, we may well never seek it. 

Quiet is … our native ground. A sacred inward room. A shape of living radically different to the mechanistic modern world. Our worship. The habit of attention. A place of safety. A space of creative possibility. If we can name the thing for which we hunger, and recognize quiet as the place we may take that yearning, admit and find succor for the deepest hungers of our hearts, it becomes a place of invitation rather than of performance or threat. 

You observe that when angels visit people in Scripture, they begin by saying, “Do not be afraid!” How might this command provide assurance and encouragement to those who fear what they may hear in the quiet?

Fear is the natural condition of people who live in a grieved and broken world. So is suspicion, sown by Satan in Eden, so is a pervasive sense of guilt at our frailty. All of this can often set us in a posture of defensiveness or even terror when we contemplate the idea of being quiet, of actually entering a space where we can feel the eyes of God upon us. The angel’s words speak directly to that dread. To come into God’s presence is to discover the end of fear, is to stand in the light of a perfect love that “casts out fear.” When we truly wait for him in the quiet, when we dare to lift our eyes, still our hearts, we will discover, not condemnation but a gracious and loving king, whose hands are, in Tolkien’s lovely and symbolic image, the “hands of a healer.”

I, too, have always wanted “more than the ordinary can give me.” How can accepting that desire — acknowledging our hunger — help us in our journey of faith?

I believe we are all pilgrims at our core, because we were made for a beauty, a health, a joy we have only yet tasted in small doses. I believe we must not only acknowledge, but cherish, our hunger for something more than the ordinary as the signpost of an extraordinary goodness by which we will one day be sated. Throughout Scripture, we are given images of godly people who wait, who watch, who look for the coming of the morning, who yearn. There is a deep holiness in embracing this identity because we can allow it to drive us forward into hope. To be restless for the kingdom of heaven is to reach forward in virtuous action, in holy imagination, in love, in the quiet where we can glimpse the world we yearn for on the horizons of prayer and imagination.

We live in a world that continually tells us we can be and have whatever we want, but, as you explain, it’s just not true. How can accepting our inherent boundaries cultivate greater peace in our lives?

To accept boundaries, to embrace the fact that we are fragile, tempted, prone to weariness, full of need, is simply to accept the contours of what it means to be human. Too often in the modern world, we live increasingly by the rhythms and expectations of the technologies we employ and the screens we own. The internet never sleeps. Machines never stop. And we begin to think that means we shouldn’t either. But we are embodied, finite, time-bound creatures. To embrace this in conversation with the Holy Spirit is to understand ourselves as the precious, finite creatures of an infinitely capable God. Creatures who need rest, relationship, nourishment, and joy in order to flourish, things we cannot cultivate without the healthy keeping of limit. 

You write, “Our identity is driven by our listening.” How so?

We are a people deeply formed by language. From childhood, people narrate the world to us. I do this with my children: “Look at the beautiful flower,” I tell them. “Be kind.” “God loves you.” Language forms the way we experience and see the world and ourselves. I think this is because we are beings formed in the image of a living Word. 

We are meant to be deeply formed by the stories we tell and the words we use to describe ourselves and the world. But in a fallen world, there are thousands of voices contending with each other to tell us our story. The only way we can come to a deep knowledge of who we were truly, blessedly created to be is by cultivating the capacity to listen for the Word who spoke us into being. I think listening is integral to discipleship because we bear God’s Spirit within us and are called to be shaped and driven by what he speaks about the story of our lives.

Many readers of Common Good are pastors or ministry leaders. What would you like to tell them about the importance of quiet and holy attention — whether in their own lives or the lives of those they shepherd?

One of my spiritual heroes is Evelyn Underhill, a British lay Christian who spent her life studying spiritual formation, prayer, and contemplation. She mentored quite a number of priests and pastors in England, and in a series of addresses, which can be found in her 1926 book, Concerning the Inner Life, she reminded them that what they are like as ministers “is going to depend on your secret life of prayer; on the steady orientation of your souls to the Reality of God.” I think she spoke a profound truth. The quality of an interior life is what will shape and drive the ministries of one who cares for the souls of others. 

Speaking as the wife of an Anglican priest, I am deeply aware of the demands placed upon those in ministry. But I also know the power, the sustenance, the calm that comes from a life rooted in a place of attentive wonder, in the soul of a leader who acts and moves by the endless strength and mercy of God rather than just by their own. We have to live from the “inside,” outward, rooting ourselves afresh in God’s goodness as the source of all flourishing, or teaching, or ministry. Without this attention and the vision it gives and the love it kindles, what will we have to offer a broken world? 

This interview has been edited for clarity. Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention is available from Baker Books.