I Return Here to Listen

By George Pence–

There is no town more perfectly named than Echo, Utah.

A century ago it had a population numbered in hundreds. Now its residual population is perhaps twenty – maybe fewer. Locals know that a “For Sale” sign in anyone’s front yard is wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, I occasionally find myself driving to Echo, and I often make that trip alone.

I have no agenda. I inspect a closed cafe and gas station. I walk among the tombstones of a small cemetery, look in the windows of an abandoned church and then I get back in my car and return to Salt Lake City. Round trip it’s a distance of one hundred miles, covering the same roads in both directions.

Why do I go there? Much of the answer lies in Echo’s one small distinction. For a century it was the narrow point in a funnel that filled the American West. The Donner Party went through there. So did the California gold rush, the Mormon pioneers, the Pony Express, the first transcontinental railroad, and finally the Lincoln Highway.

But with the advent of diesel locomotives a depot in Echo became unnecessary and soon thereafter Interstate 80 missed it by a mile or two. So the die was cast. Echo was destined to become a place without traffic and without people.

Yet this destiny of absence has never registered with me.

For it is here that a history of shared human belief courses though me like a radio wave. Somewhere in me is a receiver tuned to a frequency transmitted long before I was born, and I return here to listen – to hear something I can hear in no other place with the same power and clarity.

In a spot characterized mostly by silence there exists a powerful sense of presence. The outsized hope and faith of so many persists in a way that transcends matter and time.

________________

Years ago I lived in Illinois and each January I made a silent religious retreat at a place called Bellarmine. I would check in by 6 PM on Friday, and check out after lunch on Sunday. Between those two times there was a regimen of silence and prayer punctuated only by meals, daily mass and a series of presentations made by a retreat director.

Initially, this discipline of silence seemed so unnatural as to be almost contrived. I’d pass good friends in the hallway and the need to say “hello” would rise up inside me, but instead of doing what habit demanded I’d offer only a smile. By Saturday afternoon the need to engage in small talk began to ebb away. The only time silence seemed awkward was when I wanted to communicate something brief and trivial like, “Pass the salt.”

To say, however, that silence equated to isolation would not be true. In fact, in an unexpected way silence only increased my sense of others, even as that increased awareness became more diffuse. The habit of narrowing my attention to accommodate one specific person began to widen. Instead of looking past people, or ignoring people, because they were not the specific person I was looking for, everyone achieved a sense of importance.

This was a way of experiencing others that can happen only independent of language. A gesture, a gait or a posture became the script of personality. Our awareness of each other became like a finite pool that all of us shared. Its depth and temperature was affected by each individual presence regardless of where we stood. The “Who” of us existed outside the exchange of language.

The one great variable of those weekends was the retreat director whose message became the theme to a particular retreat.

Some retreat directors reworked my soul in a fundamental way. But frankly their quality could vary widely. Some of that variability came from charisma and preparation, but more of it came from how a retreat director connected to my particular life experience.

So, you might conclude I could grade those retreats based on those quite different presentations. After all, year-to-year, everything else remained the same: the same structure, the same duration, the same place, the same me.

And yet one year I wondered why this definitely was not the case.

I was sitting toward the back of the chapel as a young Jesuit priest scanned the lyrics of love songs and suggested these were the modern day equivalent of sacred hymns. His presentation might have had meaning for someone else, but not for me. And yet, to be honest, the heightened sense of spiritual conviction that motivated every beat of my heart was no different that year, from the previous year, or from five years before that.

Just like every year, this new iteration of spiritual renewal was working its magic, bringing me back to life and breaking the fever of a selfish sickness.

I was whole again. I was healthy again, but why?

Then my gaze drifted across the aisle toward a man that I did not know outside these annual retreats. He was wearing argyle socks and slippers. His head was bald and his expression was blank. He could have been an insurance salesman or an actuary – the kind of person I would have routinely avoided at social get-togethers. And yet, in that moment, I realized he was the reason for my sense of renewed vitality and health.

He, and four score other men in attendance, were carrying me on their shoulders, just as I was carrying them on mine. Yet our common weight seemed like helium; an awesome burden that carried us upward unfettered by the gravity of normal existence.

It was this mutual company of faith and hope that explained why we came back here year after year.

For it was here that a history of shared human belief coursed though us like a radio wave. Somewhere in each of us was a receiver tuned to a frequency transmitted long before we were born, and we returned here to listen – to hear something we could hear in no other place with the same power and clarity.

In a spot characterized mostly by silence there existed a powerful sense of presence. The outsized hope and faith of so many persisted in a way that transcended matter and time.