Nan Merrill: Friends of Silence

An interview by Rod MacIver

A few years ago, a subscriber purchased a gift subscription for Nan Merrill. Within a couple of weeks, Nan’s newsletter Friends of Silence began showing up in our mailbox. There is something very special about this little publication. Each month it offers a dozen or so quotes on spiritual life, on solitude, meditation, prayer, silence and living gently. Since Nan lives only a short distance away, I contacted her and we got together for tea. We’ve kept in touch by mail. Recently I called her and asked for an interview.

We began by talking about her origins and about the origins of Friends of Silence. Nan told me she grew up spending a lot of time alone in nature. After college she got married to a Navy doctor and they had five children. Then, in the 1960s while living in Florida, Nan had an experience that had a profound effect on her.

Nan: For no apparent reason, I started getting up about 3 o’clock in the morning…I mean, it wasn’t something I thought up …. I would just go to one window, the same window, for months and stare at one particular star. I began to feel like that was my star. I had never heard the word ‘meditation’ before, but that, in essence, was what I was doing. I had no thoughts.

During the period of months I was doing this, I had a particularly profound experience. I woke up one morning totally enveloped in Love. In retrospect, I now know what it was. This was the way we were intended to live. It was what I had been yearning for. At that time I didn’t connect it to looking at the star; it was so natural, I never questioned it. I lived that way for ten days, and there was nothing but harmony in the house.

One of my memories from those days is of taking the children to the beach for the day, when we were coming home in the station wagon, the five kids, who were usually cranky at that hour, were happily singing. I kept thinking, “Gosh, I must be doing something right.” But it was centered around this whole sense of being enveloped in Love.

Another experience from that time that I remember was of driving down the street and seeing an old, somewhat disheveled man standing on a wooden bridge at a stoplight. Our eyes met and it was zing! It was the first time I knew what it was to Meet another soul, soul-to-soul. And so it went on for ten days. Then I woke up one morning and it was back to the life I had been living. I couldn’t’ stand it. It took me a long time to adjust being back in a world that is too busy, too noisy, and in some ways too humdrum.

Little by little, with the help of an amazing counselor who focused on helping me to unravel the myriad of fears within, I began to untangle this web that probably lives in most of us. It really turned my life around. As the fear diminished, the capacity to love increased. And I came to know that it’s fear, not hate, that keeps us from loving. I began to meditate, and to enjoy silence.

When the children were out of the nest, I opened a spiritual bookstore, The New Spirit. Little by little it became one of the popular meeting places in the town. It began to do well, but I went to Detroit on a retreat in an urban Catholic Church and in less than a year, the bookstore was in someone else’s hands and I was in Detroit, loving it. And that’s where Friends of Silence was birthed. The church was in an area with a high crime rate, and the priest invited people once a month to come and to be in silence. We would pray over the city. A wonderful community began to grow.

One Sunday someone said, “I can’t be here next month. Do you think someone could take notes?” Father Ed asked me to write up something up for the group. About forty people came pretty regularly. I wondered, “How do you take notes on silence?” It seemed a little strange to me, but I put together little quotations on silence so others could use it during the month as meditation or prayer starters. I sent it out to the addresses I had. Well, they responded. That was in 1987, and Friends of Silence has been going for 16 years now, growing from about 40 people to over 5500. Almost 100 go out internationally each month. In some real sense, Friends of Silence has become my community. I mean, the letters I receive from people sharing their experience of silence and solitude – people expressing gratitude to be reminded once a month of the power of silence. Simple things. That’s what it is: simple.

Every once in a while I get a suggestion of how I can gloss it up a bit or make it a little more, I don ‘t know, the American Way: “If it’s good, you can always make it better.” I’m not going to fall for that.

Q: Does the donation-only policy support the publication?

Nan: Yes….I think it’s because it’s simple. I let it be known, kind of quietly, that there are many, many people in urban areas, in nursing homes, in prisons that can’t afford a financial gift. It wasn’t sustaining itself until I let it be known that I could no longer keep it going on my own. I offer that “hint” every November when I send out an envelope. Since then the publication has been self-sustaining. I’ve even been able to save some money. And I’ve had a bequest from a reader that may mean that we can have a house for Friends of Silence. In fact, two weeks after I had a stroke last Christmas, I woke up at about 3 a.m. I sat bolt upright and heard the words, “Friends of Silence Center for Peace and Prayer.” It was like a promise. The money we’ve been left might well be the seed money for a Center to emerge. Silence is a part of the Great Mystery.… .I love the Mystery. I don’t have to know. I trust the process. And if it’s meant to be, it will unfold.

Q: Do readers ask you how much to send?

Nan: I just say, “Whatever is good for you.” Sometimes if they can’t pay monetarily, they will tell me they’re praying for Friends of Silence. That’s a beautiful contribution.

Q: Is Friends of Silence able to pay you a salary?

Nan: I don’t take a salary because I don’t need one. I feel that Friends of Silence is a labor of love. You know? I try to keep my life simple. If I needed it, of course, I would take a salary. At this point, I’d rather any extra money go toward a Center, which ultimately would benefit me as well as others.

Q: I wonder if there’s anything else that you’d be willing to share, about why you’ve stuck with it. Perhaps it should be self-evident from your words. It’s very rewarding to you spiritually and in terms of the community that has sprung up around it. But could you talk a little bit about that, maybe about the community that has sprung up?

Nan: I’ve always felt that I was called to be of service to others. And I don’t mean that in an ego, do-good kind of way. I simply felt a call to serve in some way. And I knew it would have something to do with writing. But I had a huge fear of going public because much of my life my parents and even my husband thought I was “a little off”, as they put it. Also I had some traumatic experiences with my writing in school. So for me putting my writing out public was scary, but ghosted several books for others. I could share other people’s quotations through Friends of Silence. In meditation, when I was writing the Psalms for Praying, I heard that it was for more than myself. And because I was reticent to go public, I heard, “a publisher will come to you.” That’s what happened with Continuum.

Q: Please talk about the books you’ve written.

Nan: Well, I have three books out with a fourth, a book on peace as a response to 9/11, on the way. My first book was Psalms for Praying, a re-visioning of the 150 Old Testament psalms. I loved the psalms growing up, but I didn’t like their often patriarchal tone, or even sometimes what they said. I eventually gave up on the Old Testament psalms for a long time.

And then, in the 70’s, after this experience in Florida, where I was Awakened – and that’s what I would call it – I began to read them again. All of a sudden new words started to come. When I had fifty of them done, I heard in meditation “these aren’t just for you.” So I had them printed and gave them to people I was counseling. I think the greatest bit of confidence I got was when I sent one to my former therapist. I wouldn’t be who I was if I hadn’t had those eight years of therapy! He ordered a copy for all of his counselors.

The second book, Meditations and Mandalas: Simple Songs for the Spiritual Life grew out of meditations I began to write for my grandchildren. Then, during a desert season, when I couldn’t pray I got up one morning and drew a mandala. When I finished over an hour later, I felt like I had been praying. So every morning for a whole season, I drew a mandala and that was my prayer discipline. Continuum called at one point and asked what I was doing, if I had another book. I laughingly responded, “Oh, I’ve been writing meditations for my grandchildren, and I’ve been drawing these little mandalas.” And they said, “Would they go together?” I replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t do them together.” But I agreed to pray about it. I took all the meditations and all the mandalas out and I discovered I had something like 94 meditations and 97 mandalas, so I prayed them together and it was as if they were meant to be united.

The third book, Lumen Christi, Holy Wisdom, is a book of spiritual meditations and brief contemplative thoughts. The photographs on the cover played an important role as I wrote the book.

The next book will be called something like Peace Planet: A New Atlas of Love or something like that, if it gets published. After 9/11 happened, I was numb for about two weeks. Paced the floor, couldn’t pray. When I went to an overnight retreat at the Guild for Spiritual Guidance that I helped found back in the 70’s, one of the participants gave us a meditation on hospitality. She said that it was a strange subject given what had just happened. But it just kept coming to her – to get in touch with a place where people have been hospitable to us or we’ve been hospitable.

What came to me was the time I spent in Massachusetts General Hospital at the age of five. I had just been diagnosed with polio, and was isolated in a room that I later learned was next to the morgue in the basement. I was in a crib and could reach out and touch the clammy wall; there was one light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and I was left alone. I had this scream in me that couldn’t come.

When 9/11 hit, it was like that scream came about up to my chin but it wouldn’t come out. I’m not a screamer. It felt like I didn’t have a voice. And suddenly within this meditation, I thought, “I have a voice now. I’m not that little girl.” But I could feel that scream in me. So I had to find a way to express what I was feeling.

Q: How much of the material that makes it into Friends of Silence comes from your readers?

Nan: I get maybe two or three suggestions a month. Not a lot. And I can’t use all of them. I really try to be very selective. I do answer every letter; this is like family.

Q: That’s part of the beauty of the whole thing, I think. The community that you’ve created.

Nan: It is my community.

Q: How many people do you know personally of the 5,500 subscribers?

Nan: Gosh, I can’t tell you….I might know a quarter of them in terms of who they are. Yet each one truly feels like a friend. I get to know their names over the years as I affix their labels.

Q: Do you know most of those you’ve gotten to know primarily through correspondence?

Nan: Yes. There is a large prison correspondence that I take very seriously. I consider them my friends, and offer counseling now and then. They send in their own writings, which sometimes are just incredible. Many are artists and many writers. Maybe that comes from having little to do. They live like they would in a hermitage. That helps them get in touch with their gifts. I like to affirm that.

Q: What books are important to you Nan?

Nan: One book I’ve read recently that I really like is The Way of The Dreamcatcher. It is about the life of Robert Lax, a poet who lived on a remote Greek island. Scripture, of course, the Bhagavad Gita and Meditation’s on the Tarot. I read those books over and over again. Meditations on Tarot was written by a Christian mystic. The book takes each part of the Tarot and explores its deeper meaning. It’s not for everyone, but it’s been a blessing for me.

Q: Do you have any thoughts you have on the principles by which you’ve tried to live your life and the rewards and the difficulties of that set of values or principles? Obviously you have a set of values that are different from those of our dominant culture.

Nan: That’s a good way to put it. I think that our challenge in a capitalistic society is to use what the culture offers with wisdom and integrity….with gentleness and peace. Balance and harmony have always been values I aspire to. And silence. You find everything in the silence.

Lauren Van Der Post, when once asked what this world needs most responded “A year of complete silence.” While that isn’t practical, it certainly would enable us to rethink and to get in touch. Silence is where we’re interconnected with every living being and every part of nature. I look at America’s actions in the world and I don’t think silence played any part of the deliberations.

Q: No. It’s amazing how people can use Christianity to do just about anything that they may possibly want.

Nan: Well, I have a theory about that which may or may not be valid but someone was asking me that very question the other day.

I think there are different levels of energy and that each one of us is drawn to certain energy levels that coincide with a particular Chakra. The lower Chakra energies would be related to fear and survival modes. Some people are drawn to those energy levels. I think fundamentalism is a certain energy that is very narrow and very severe and very judgmental. Some people vibrate to that, are comfortable with that.

And the saints probably vibrate to the seventh Chakra. You can sometimes tell what church a person is drawn to by their energy and values. It’s a nightmare to think that we have so little understanding of what Islam is, its beauty, the faith of its people. Do we really know the Christian or Jewish religions? We certainly don’t seem to be living those values. The silence of every religion is where the mystics, the true holders or containers, for that religion, live. Silence connects us to the highest, most profound truth of every religion. It is where we are all united.

Q: The thing that disturbs me most and that I struggle with most is how unwilling the average human being is to deal with the truths about how they live and what they believe. I sometimes find myself wondering about the general lack of integrity in normal human interaction, and lack of interest in living a life of integrity and meaning.

Nan: That’s why people are afraid of silence, because in the silence you confront yourself, your fears and your demons as well as your potential. What I found in silence was that what had been my deepest wounds became the gifts. And you have to go deep to realize that.

Q: It is interesting that whenever I spend a week or two alone in the woods, I spend a lot of the first two or three days dealing with my demons.

Nan: There you are.

Q: The things I’m least proud of that I’ve done in my life. I obsess over them. After the first couple days, they pretty much seem dealt with until the next time I’m alone.

Nan: Exactly. That’s a perfect illustration of how being in the silence works. That is also part of the blessing of being in nature.

Q: Would it be fair to say that you’ve come to accept or be at peace with the general flow of our culture and its potential for violence and potential for dishonesty? You’ve found a peace that you don’t obsess over Israel or Iraq or Afghanistan or the World Trade Center?

Nan: Whoa! I don’t want to say I’m at peace with that in any sense of the word. No, I’m not at peace with that. I am overwhelmed. I mean, just to talk about it and I get teary. I care about it. You can’t help but feel interconnected. I mean, those are my brothers and sisters on both sides over there being killed and maimed. Children. How could I be at peace with that? But I don’t obsess about it. I pray over it. I do everything that comes to me to do for peace.

I think that the anger sometimes expressed by those who oppose the war actually puts more anger out into the world. So when those feelings come up in me, I pray. If I’m watching the news, I pray over it. If I feel an anger welling up – and I regret it’s often when someone from this administration comes on the news -- I mute the television. I have one vote when it comes to the next election, but my prayer…. one of my deep hopes is that the energy that people are offering for peace will be turned into caring and action about who we next invite to represent us. That’s one reason I love Vermont. I’m in harmony with many of the values of here. I think it’s a…it’s really a light. But you really found my tender spot.

Q: That’s another thing that happens to me in the first two or three days alone in the woods. I obsess over the brutality of people in power. I surprise myself how upset I get, and then after a few days I’m walking along in the woods, and paying attention to the trees and plants and not to children being burned or shot.

Nan: That’s a gift for the world when you do that. Every person who becomes peaceful radiates it out. But the other side of that is that everyone who is violent or in anger is radiating that emotion, and that is the grotesqueness of our media. If you surf the media, it’s sex and violence. You really have to look to find a peaceful, gentle, or informative television show….Thank goodness for PBS.

Q: Do you ever wonder why Friends of Silence or Heron Dance doesn’t have fifty million subscribers, and Time magazine have fifty-five hundred. I mean, to what extent does a human soul crave silence and peace and yet shun it?

Nan: Since 9/11 Friends of Silence has been getting about five new subscribers a week because people are hearing it – people are sharing it because it speaks to them. It softens what’s going on in a very harsh world. And, you know, I tell people about Heron Dance, and it grows that way but it hasn’t reached the 100th monkey stage where it just suddenly wells up.

I helped found The Guild of Spiritual Guidance. Douglas Steer, a prominent Quaker, was another founder. He had been at Vatican II and was very ecumenical. I had never really sat down with Douglas. When I went to the house where he was staying, he greeted me, we sat down and he closed his eyes. So I closed mine. We just sat in silence for about 25 minutes. This was an entirely new experience for me, being invited to see someone and sitting in silence. And then, after about 25 minutes, we spoke for 10 minutes. He gave me a hug afterwards and said, “What a wonderful Meeting.” It was just such a gift. And he said, “Oh, you learn so much about a person in the silence.”

Q: I lived for a while in my teens on a couple different Indian reserves. Old Indians will often walk in to one another’s house without knocking, sit at the table, drink tea or coffee, and leave with almost no words.

Nan: Beautiful.

Q: They’re friends. They’ve known each other since they were babies. I guess they just feel that at a certain point, there’s nothing really to say. You know, you just enjoy the other’s company.

Nan: A lot goes on in the silence. I mean, we speak soul to soul in the silence, and it’s so much deeper than when we verbalize unless we do it out of the silence. When we talk, it comes from the head. But when you can speak out of the silence it brings you into the heart of things, to appropriate action, appropriate talk, because it comes from a deep place.

I have an image that I’ve been playing with lately. The soul of each of us is like a garden and it starts out as fertile soil. We either keep it fertile or it gets filled with weeds or stones or sometimes rocks and brush. And so we’re called -- and it’s usually in the later part of life -- to start noticing that garden within us. All that soil has been planted with seeds by the Spirit. I call ‘em spirit seeds. To nourish them, we need to water it, which is to be nourished by the silence and by the Word, whatever our Word is, with a capital ‘W’. Whether it’s from scripture or from spiritual readings, but we need to keep nourishing that. And it also needs light….in the soil. And so our light is the Light within us, and we have to tend to that Light, to keep the fire of Spirit alive within us by being mindful and living in the Now Light. The warmth of companionship, the warmth of home, the warmth of good nutrition, all are important to that.

You have to nourish the soul within and weed it. It’s not going to happen without personal attention. That comes with being with yourself in solitude and silence. Then those seeds that are your true potential have the room and the nourishment to grow. Finally there is action in the world. You offer your gifts to the world, which you’re doing so beautifully in Heron Dance. You nourish yourself by going out into nature. That’s one our greatest nourishments. And what are we doing to it? We’re ruining it.

Q: Phrases like “letting it go” or “letting go” of whatever, ambition, ego, fear, and accepting – acceptance – those to me are like the big hurdles of my personal journey. On one level I understand all this stuff. On another, I struggle to live it, you know? I operate with the bias that Heron Dance is not going to fail because of a lack of hard work or imagination or creativity. It could well fail. I’m not going to let it fail because of something I should have done that I didn’t do. And that can take me into a frenetic way of living and working that is contrary to wisdom. But on the other hand, I can’t be too critical because I started Heron Dance completely broke with cancer. Things like that dedication to a work can be our greatest asset, and our greatest liability at the same time. We have to work really hard because we make so many mistakes. We’ve got to not only do things right, but also have to overcome all the mistakes.

Nan: That’s a challenge. Life’s challenge. My greatest fear growing up was of abandonment. My father was a traveling salesman. He was gone maybe 3 weeks out of the month. My mother was a very, very fearful person. Both of them had grown up with either various parents or no parents. And so I got this abandonment thing. A big part of my therapy was dealing with the fear of abandonment. And when I went to Detroit, I was introduced to the Prayer of Abandonment from Charles De Foucauld:

Beloved. I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever You may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and all your creatures.
I wish no more from this, my friend.
Into your hands I abandon my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
For I love you and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve, not without boundless confidence.
For you are the heart of my heart.

It’s been the prayer of my heart for over 20 years. It delights me that I have changed from fearing abandonment to choosing to abandon myself. So that liability has been turned into one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Q: Did you ever think that there’s something about the way Friends of Silence is done or has gone out in the world, or is there any connection between like a childhood fear like that and what you’ve created with your life?

Nan: Well, I can remember being maybe 6 or 7 years old and knowing that I was going to write. That was what I wanted to do. And my whole life has been surrounded by books. My father was in the book business so I grew up around books. Not that my parents encouraged me to read but I could walk to the library and I would take out stacks of books.

And so it just seems natural…it’s my way of sharing. I think that we’re all called to share our gifts and one of my ways of sharing is through offering Friends of Silence, it’s what I believe in. And my other writing. I finally have come to admit that, yes, I’m meant to write books if they come.

Q: I hope and believe that Heron Dance is done in a spirit similar to Friends of Silence. What you do is full of goodwill and a feeling of peace. Those things may be more evident in Heron Dance’s art than in its words. I’m very curious about life and I explore life from a lot of different angles in Heron Dance. Without dogma, I hope. That may mean that the words sometimes lack consistency. But I feel good about them.

Nan: You should. I’m 71 now. Age makes a difference. Trust me, Rod, it just gets better. It gets better and better. But Heron Dance, for me, is the little journal that invites me to silence. It was always an invitation for me. I mean, I do Friends of Silence and I can read it but Heron Dance, for me, is a time to sit down and read something new and it always invites me to silence. It’s just such a gift.

Related Resources:

* Thomas Berry

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