The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons From Monastic Life
Sarah Sands Short Books £12.99
Who, in their right mind, would want to be the editor of Radio 4’s Today programme? Sarah Sands occupied the post from 2017 to September of last year. Just imagine it: first Brexit, then Covid, and every morning for three years being obliged to deal with a kindergarten of politicians – Iain Duncan Smith, Diane Abbott, Gavin Williamson – determined to make their nagging voices heard.
Every day she would have to get in to the office by 4.30am, ready to choreograph the nation’s latest frets and fears. It should come as no surprise that she spent most of her time worrying.
‘I worry about not getting to sleep and then not waking up on time for work, I worry about logistics, travel arrangements, about professional mishaps. I worry in dreams and reality about losing my phone with all its paralysing consequences…’
Before being the editor of the Today programme, Sarah Sands (above) was a well-known figure in the world of journalism, having edited the Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard
She reckons she spent 11 hours a day looking at a screen of some kind, chasing after reactions to the latest news. ‘The iPhone mind is a condition of our age. We scroll rather than settle. And we have no way of ordering the mass of information invading our minds. It is just piles of stuff, everywhere.’
Her head felt like a bees’ nest. Hers was ‘a mind filled with noise, chaos and anxiety. The modern condition’.
Small wonder, then, that she began to yearn for a little peace and quiet. Whenever she could, she would escape to her house in Norfolk, next to the ruins of an abbey founded in 1249, destroyed by Henry VIII in 1536.
In those ruins she would glimpse the alternative universe of the soul, ‘the still small voice that provides a contrast to the needy, WhatsApping, power-conscious world of politics’.
The last remaining wall of the abbey was, she came to feel, ‘a monument to mortality and the futility of secular ambition’.
Before being the editor of the Today programme, Sands was a well-known figure in the world of journalism, having edited the Sunday Telegraph, the Evening Standard and Reader’s Digest.
I used to write for her when she was deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph. She was quick-witted, unflappable, funny, gossipy and mischievous.
If you had told me then that she would one day write a book called The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons From The Monastic Life, I would have thought you were playing a game of Batty Book Titles.
Whatever next? Liam Gallagher’s 10 Steps To Inner Calm? Watching The World Go By With Lord Sugar? Katie Price’s My Life In A Wimple?
The book is a chronicle of visits to monasteries around the world. Sands is, in short, in search of the part of herself she lost in the jungle of current affairs. ‘I want to unclutter my mind. I am looking for order, harmony and ceremony to counter the chaotic, unsifted news cycle of my life.’
Her first pilgrimage is to the hilltop monasteries of Koyasan in Japan. It soon becomes clear that her book is far from solemn: she is almost at her best when describing her own fidgetiness, her inability to stay tranquil for more than a minute.
Travelling on the train to Koyasan with her 24-year-old daughter, she can’t sit still. ‘I am feeling neither calm nor selfless, fretting about having bought the wrong kind of phone charger, passively aggressively blaming my daughter for not noticing that I had, anxious that the train connections are too tight.’
Like so many people, she treats her mobile phone as a child treats its comfort blanket, and goes into meltdown if ever she loses it. At times while reading this book, it struck me that the mobile phone might one day replace the crucifix as the centrepiece of a new religion.
Checking in to the spartan guest room at Koyasan, empty but for a low table, a mattress on the floor and two chairs, she looks in her stuffed handbag and realises that it mirrors the disorder of her mind.
Her first night is a disaster. ‘I sleep terribly, mostly because of the time difference, but also because my mind races with looped worries that I am low on Japanese currency and I have not yet found a charger and what must we do tomorrow, and what on earth is happening in the office and emails and Twitter.’
This inner turmoil makes her yearn all the more for peace and calm. That beautiful passage from the Gospel Of St Matthew runs through her head. ‘Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.’
By the end of the night she has decided to leave her job on the Today programme.
By breakfast, her daughter has found her a new phone charger. She immediately thinks of looking at Twitter but decides against. The decision makes her feels less fretful.
On one of the monastery walls she spots this advice: ‘Do not talk about the failings of others or your own virtues.’ This aim is, she notes, ‘about as conceptually distanced from the world of media as possible’.
At the moment there’s a fad for publishing book titles containing the words ‘Lessons’ or ‘Rules’. Presumably they hope to piggyback on the success of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life and Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons For The 21st Century.
Though Sands’ book is subtitled ‘10 Lessons From Monastic Life’, it actually avoids anything so simplistic or prescriptive. Instead, across ten chapters, the author beetles around the world, spending a night or two in this or that spiritual retreat.
Oddly enough, though she counts herself an Anglican, she rarely mentions religious faith: she is really just in search of peace and quiet.
The end result represents something of a paradox: a whistlestop tour of calm, a hectic search for tranquillity. But, along the way, Sands encounters a fascinating variety of monks and nuns, all of whom speak with wisdom about the unfashionably quiet, contemplative lives they have chosen to lead, cut off from the hurly-burly of the modern world.
I was particularly struck by how many joined the monastic life from fast-moving careers in business and science. Father Daniel joined the Franciscan monastery in Assisi back in 1981, after working as a chemical engineer in New York.
He believes that the secular world does not lead to contentment, as it offers no sense of profundity. Science without a sense of divinity is, he thinks, a danger zone. ‘See what happens to science when we lose our sense of the sacred – it leads to the atomic bomb.’
In Montserrat, home of the Black Madonna, Sands meets the Benedictine monk Father Xavier, who used to be a computer scientist. He now looks on the outside world with bewilderment.
‘I think it is crazy. I don’t have money, I don’t have a car, I don’t have a house. I have what I need. I am so much richer. I can walk in the mountains, and I can think.’
Sister Stephanie, 51, entered the Carmelite convent in Norfolk nearly 20 years ago, after working in human resources at Aviva. She has never left the convent, other than for medical appointments, but misses nothing.
Most of her life is spent in silence. ‘I have never been bored here,’ she says. ‘If I think about being a Carmelite I think of the veil being drawn back between eternity and time. It is learning to be joyful – and unafraid. Unafraid to be human.’
My own grandmother used to go to Mass every Sunday in a Carmelite convent in Cornwall. In the mid-1970s, an elderly nun fell ill and had to be taken to hospital. Strange though it may seem, it was not just the first time she had ever been in a car, but the first time she had ever seen one.
From speaking to Sister Stephanie, and visiting her convent, Sands concludes that ‘the less we have around us, the less we need’. This suggests that Kris Kristofferson was on the right track when he sang: ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’
The same idea is echoed by virtually everyone who talks to Sands, from the Buddhists of Bhutan, to the nuns of Norfolk, to the desert monks of Egypt.
The most magical moments in this bright, captivating book are when Sands herself feels the pull of the spiritual. At an abbey in France, she sits listening to Gregorian chants.
‘It is the sound of eternity.’ Afterwards she sits by herself in the darkness. ‘I, who have never been able to sit through meetings and have a shockingly short concentration span, want nothing more than this. Sitting in shadows and stillness, looking at a limestone wall, and the wooden image of the cross. Simplicity and silence.’