Friends of Silence

Interview with Nan Merrill by Heron Dance

Nan Merrill: Friends of Silence

An interview by Rod MacIver

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.

{Rest of the interview here}