I don’t slow down easily. So I’ve always been baffled by the urgency of the discipline of silence. I’ve never resonated with spirituality books that trumpet spiritual retreats. They always sound a bit feminine. Only women with no or grown kids, and pastors and monks have such luxury.

I once visited an Orthodox “skete” in southwestern Wisconsin. It’s a live monastary for Orthodox monks, tucked away in shadows of rolling hills covered with pine trees. You can tour the monk cells once a year in August. A friend and I were there in early May. We stepped inside one of the buildings, a small trailer house with an Orthodox cross on top—it was the church. As we left, I spied a young, lanky monk in black, wrapping up a yard hose next to the church. He waved to me with a big smile. As part of his vow, he doesn’t speak. His silence reminded me of Thomas Merton’s silent Trappist community in Kentucky.

When I’ve spoken on the topic of one of the toxins from my book Death by Suburb—and thus on the practice of silence—the women often nod their heads. Perhaps that’s because silence seems like such a luxury to some of them with children. My wife says she’d simply like a few moments alone in the bathroom without one of our three calling out for her or trying to barge in.

Silence really doesn’t make sense in life’s adolescent phase (which starts around 11 and these days runs, uh, into one’s 40s). I just finished reading German philosopher Max Picard’s arcane book called “The World of Silence,” a tough read, at least for me. But near the end of the book, he writes,

“God became man for the sake of man. This event is so utterly extraordinary and so much against the experience of reason and against everything the eye has seen, that man is not able to make response to it in words. A layer of silence lies between this event and man, and in this silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself.”

Okay, I’m not sure if that is a really deep thought or just a bunch of whooey. But then Picard writes this: “It is a sign of the love of God that a mystery is always separated from man by a layer of silence.”

Now I’m going to make a huge leap: after the adolescent phase of life when we seek to love God by making all sorts of promises to make a difference with our lives and weep at our besetting sins, promising to try harder next time, we come to the hope of a more adult spirituality. It’s the hope not of loving God but of being loved by God.

This has great potential for life after 40 and into our later years. But it requires us to approach the mystery of God with silence. To enter into the silence. To practice silence. Even if only 5 minutes a day for three days a week. Something. Nothing grand or heroic. Just a regular break from the noise. A break from the doing. A break from the anxiety of trying to control my life.

And the promise of experiencing both the mystery and love of God.