By Christina Capecchi
Twenty Something
If you’re trying to write a book about quiet and you’re a mom of four, you might need a few extensions on your deadline.
Such was the reality for writer Sarah Clarkson, 40, daughter of the acclaimed Christian author Sally Clarkson.
It all started — as did so many creative pursuits — during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sarah began “deep, convicted work” about quiet: why it’s threatened, why it’s needed, how to cultivate it. She sensed its ramifications were profound, and ultimately, a spiritual matter. She believed the topic warranted a book.
“Then I promptly entered three of the least quiet years of my life,” Sarah said. Two babies, three moves, numerous health issues and family deaths.
She kept trying to resume her book, hoping another extension would ignite that “deadline fire,” but she was simply too overwhelmed.
Finally, Sarah reached an impasse. Her family had just moved to Oxford, England, where her husband would be the shepherd of two little Anglican churches. They were settling into an old brick vicarage. She knew her options: isolate herself for six weeks to complete the book (and neglect her family) or ask for one more extension.
They were vacationing in Devon, a historic county in England’s South West Peninsula. Sarah retreated to the coast. Gazing at the water, praying furiously, her heart cried out with the gulls overhead. She ended up in a café, writing an impassioned letter to her publisher from Baker Books requesting another year.
Rebekah said yes — “a decision,” Sarah later wrote, “that brought the gift of quiet to my own life in a healing way.” In total, her deadline was pushed back 18 months, which allowed a very different (and better) book to be written.
“Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention” is now in bookstores and book clubs, homes and hands across the globe. And now Sarah gets to hear from readers who are also thirsting for more quiet in a noisy world.
“I’m delighted by the enthusiasm and have a growing sense of the communal nature of this quest, the urgency of it for all of us, the way we can help each other to grit and courage by articulating our own work in this realm,” Sarah said.
Specifically, the book acknowledges the “clutches” of technology. She reflects on her first smartphone, which “slipped into spaces that used to be sacred” and stole moments of solitude.
The quiet, Sarah realized, was vital for creativity and imagination, for clarity and attention, for rest and for faith.
“That quiet,” she writes. “It was a living, benevolent thing, and in its presence, I felt myself waken, felt my skin and senses sharpen, felt something like grief stir in the deep places of my heart, a yearning that had not wakened in me for many days. I hungered for quiet, not just the cessation of noise but that deep inward hush in which the kindness of God is the light burning at the back of our eyes so that we look upon the world in the brightness of his companionship.”
As we set new habits for 2025, seek quiet. “If there is a season that summons us to attend, it’s winter in her bare-souled grace,” Sarah said. “I am learning to embrace the slowness, the impulse to draw inward, to rest, to shelter. And snow, ah! Anytime we have even a drop, I’m outside with the children to soak it in.”
In silence, Sarah writes, we can listen to Jesus. “Faith rests not primarily on gritted will or savvy choice but on response, on a honed and holy capacity to hear.”
What is He asking of you?
Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.