Finding A Refuge Silent Enough to Hear God’s Whisper

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Samuel G. Freedman

Visitors can spend the night at Saint John the Evangelist,
a monastery in Cambridge, Mass., where Brother Kevin Hackett, 56, lives.

MASSACHUSETTS---Saint John the Evangelist is not on a mountaintop, not in a desert sanctuary, not in a medieval stone village, but in that bastion of secular modernity known as Cambridge, Mass., home to both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People are drowning in words and drowning in information,” said Brother Geoffrey Tristram, 58, the superior of the monastery’s order, who used to lead a congregation as a priest. “Words are bombarding us from every side — to buy things, to believe things, to subscribe to things. We are trying to build a place to be still and silent. So many voices around us are shouting. God tends not to shout.” [link]