All About Reclaiming Quiet

A little about the book, an invitation, and a few gifts...

The clouds shift and shimmer as I write. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and Thomas has swept in to amuse the children so that I can flit up here to my reading corner for just a few moments to finish this letter. I should be working. With concentration and speed. But instead, I watch.

The days end earlier as autumn grows older, and even now the light is tinged with dusk. The wild cherry tree out my window is a welter of red and gold, the black tangle of its branches shifting beneath the bright leaves like sinuous dark water. Rain gathers on the horizon and the sun sets its chin atop the purple clouds for just a moment; the world is dazzled. I stop. My senses gather in. The silence grows taut.

What is it that we come to when we seek and enter a space of quiet?

I’ve been trying to answer that in the book I’ve been writing for the last three years and I think of it as I sit tonight. We come, perhaps after many hours of noise, to quiet: the hush grows around us, still taut with the thrum of all the activity we’ve just left. Our minds clatter with restless thoughts that seem impossible to still. Silence grows but so does a sense of unease, a bewildered feeling that we ought to do something. Sometimes the quiet feels more like pressure than peace as we struggle to pull something from it, make it perform. Sometimes it just feels vacant. We speak of a holy quiet, but that feels a profoundly abstract idea, like saying “white vanilla,” implying more an absence of color and taste rather than presence, the removal of sound and movement, rather than a place where action, word, and imagination root themselves afresh in love. 

What is quiet?

I believe that one of the first steps we must take in reclaiming our quiet is simply to discover afresh the answer to this question, and it is this: quiet is divine invitation. Quiet is a kind of homecoming, a return to the foundational place of our being as we, like Adam and Eve in Eden, listen daily for the word and breath of the One who called us into being simply to share his life and bear the image of His love. 

On November 5th, I’m releasing Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention. This book, this record of my struggle and yearning and stubbornness, is an invitation to discover the profound, daily joy of turning away from frenzy and rush to cultivate a life of holy attention instead. My hope is that this book will help my readers to walk back to the homeland that is quiet. With that in mind, do join me for a bit of book launch celebration as we near the book’s date of release into the wild of the bookstore world!

FIRST: Pre-Order Gifts! 

Reclaiming Quiet launches on 5th November and if you pre-order before then, you will have access to a special seven-day guide meant to accompany readers of the book. Seven Days to Reclaiming Quiet includes exercises each day that will shepherd you through an idea to ponder or a simple assignment by which you can begin to reclaim quiet and shape your own days by its nourishing cadence. There are quotes, questions, and “remaking” ideas intended to help you, in your own context and story, step more deeply into the health and calm of a richly quiet life. 

Everyone who pre-orders the book will also be given access to the audiobook, narrated by me, once the book is launched! You can pre-order at the first button below, and go to my website to claim your pre-order gifts at the second button once you do:

SECOND: A Launch Celebration!

My lovely alma mater, Wycliffe Hall here in Oxford, is hosting a book launch reception for me on the day of the book’s release: 5:15pm, at Wycliffe Hall. And you are very cordially invited! Go HERE to find out more. If you plan to join, would you please comment below so I can get a general headcount?

THIRD: 40 Days to Reclaiming Quiet on Instagram

Over at Instagram I’m hosting a 40-day read-aloud event in honour of the book’s release. Every day (well, almost every day and as long as my children cooperate), I’m reading aloud from the books (poetry, essay, novel, theology) that shaped my thinking in wildly diverse ways about the topic and practise of quiet.
Please JOIN ME!

Finally, I’ll be writing a little more about the strangeness of realising my book is releasing on Election Day in the States, and Guy Fawkes Day in the UK, two rather unquiet days in the grand scheme of things. Which has made me do even more wrestling with what it is quiet asks of us in the first place.

More soon, friends.

It’s dusk, and dinner begs to be made, and children roar and wrestle on the other side of my door. Quiet… sometimes it’s brief! But what we find, even in a snatched moment of hush, bears something eternal to us even here in our harried, wild days. Join me in reclaiming it…