DURING MY SECOND YEAR OF SEMINARY, the spiritual moorings of my life came loose. I had been studying about God but had grown distant from God. I decided to go on a five-day silent retreat at an Episcopalian monastery in the Northeast to try to reclaim the spiritual warmth I had somehow lost.

Upon arrival I was assigned a monk who would be my spiritual director for one hour each day. He walked into our meeting room with jogging clothes underneath his cowl. I was disappointed. I had been expecting an elderly man, bearded to his knees, who would penetrate my soul with searing blue eyes. Instead, I got “the jogging monk.”

My director gave me only one task for the day: meditate on the story of the Annunciation in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. I walked back to my room wondering how I would occupy my time with only this one assignment. After all, I thought to myself, I could exegete this entire text in a few hours.

What was I to do for the rest of the day—in silence?

Back at my room I opened my Bible to the passage and began reading. “Birth narrative,” I muttered to myself. For the next hour I spliced and diced the verses as any good exegete would do, ending up with a few hypotheses and several hours to sit in silence. As the hours passed the room seemed to get smaller. There was no view to the outside through the window of my room. Other rooms, I would come to find, had a beautiful view of the river that flowed adjacent to the monastery. Without any view to the outer world, I was forced to look within. Despite my hopes of finding spiritual bliss, I had never felt more alone.

The next day I met with the monk again to discuss my spiritual life. He asked what had happened with the assigned text. I told him it was just shy of disaster in terms of profound spiritual revelations, but that I had come up with a few exegetical insights. I thought my discoveries might impress him.

They didn’t.

“What was your aim in reading this passage?” he asked.

“My aim? To arrive at an understanding of the meaning of the text, I suppose.”

“Anything else?”

I paused. “No. What else is there?”

“Well, there’s more than just finding out what it says and what it means. There are also questions like, What did it teach you? What did it say to you? Were you struck by anything? And most important, Did you experience God in your reading?”

He assigned the same text for the next day, asking me to begin reading it not so much with my head but more with my heart.

I had no idea how to do this. For the first three hours I tried and failed repeatedly. I practically had the passage memorized, and still it was lifeless and I was bored. The room seemed even smaller, and by nightfall, I thought I would go deaf from the silence.

The next day we met again. In despair I told him that I simply could not do what he was asking me to do. It was then that the wisdom beneath the jogging clothes became evident.

“You’re trying too hard, Jim. You’re trying to control God. You’re running the show. Go back and read this passage again.

“But this time, be open to receive whatever God has for you. Don’t manipulate God; just receive. Communion with him isn’t something you institute. It’s like sleep. You can’t make yourself sleep, but you can create the conditions that allow sleep to happen. All I want you to do is create the conditions: open your Bible, read it slowly, listen to it, and reflect on it.”

I went back to my room (it had a prisonlike feel by now) and began to read. I found utter silence. After an hour I finally shouted, “I give up! You win!” (though I am not certain who I was shouting at). I slumped over in my chair and began to weep. I suspect that God had been waiting for me to let go.

A short time later I picked up the Bible and read the passage again. The words looked different, despite their familiarity. My mind and heart were supple as I read. I was no longer trying to figure out the meaning or the main point of the passage. I was simply hearing it.

My eyes fell upon the well-loved words of Mary, “Let it be with me according to your word,” her response to God’s stunning promise that she would give birth to his Son. Let it be with me. The words rang in my head. And then God spoke to me. Some might say it was “all in my head” or “just my imagination,” but how else does God speak?

It was as if a window had been thrown open and God was suddenly present, like a friend who wanted to talk. What followed was a dialogue about the story in Luke, about God, about Mary, and about me. I wondered about Mary—her feelings, her doubts, her fears, and her incredible willingness to respond to God’s request.

This prompted me to ask (or the Spirit moved me to ask) about the limits of my obedience, which seemed meager in comparison to Mary’s. “Do not be afraid,” said the angel to Mary. We talked about fear. What was I afraid of? What held me back?

“You have found favor with God,” the angel told Mary. Had I found favor with God? I sensed that I had, but not because of anything I had done (humility had become my companion in that room). I had found favor because I was his child.

I wondered too about the future, about my calling. What did God want of me? Mary had just been informed of her destiny. What was mine? We talked about what might be—what, in fact, could be if I were willing. If I were willing. Like Augustine, who turned to the Scriptures after hearing a voice say, “Take up and read,” I had reached the end of my rope and was, for the first time in a long time, in a position to hear. There is much to be said for desperation, as desperation led me to begin praying. My prayer was really a plea: Help me. After an hour of reflecting and listening, Mary’s “Let it be with me according to your word” eventually became my prayer. The struggle had ended. I had a feeling that I had just lost control of my life but in that same moment had finally found my life.

The room that had seemed small now seemed spacious. The fact that there was no view no longer mattered. The view was wonderful from my vantage point. The silence no longer mattered, no longer made me anxious. Now it seemed peaceful. And the terrible feeling of being alone was replaced by a sense of closeness with a God who was, in the words of St. Augustine, “nearer to me than I was to myself.”