My own father was a great walker too; and though he was no poet, I think that for him, as for Wordsworth, the silence and solitude he built for himself were good for his soul. He did his interior work inside the space of those walks. He was a man of volatile temper, as I sometimes am; I have seen embers of that same quick anger in my sister. Especially when I was very young, and my father freshly back from World War II, his anger, compounded with the trauma of four unfurloughed years in the South Pacific, regularly leaked over into nightmares that he screamed through, waking the whole house. In part, I think his volatility was the lingering effect of post-traumatic stress syndrome, which hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans suffered, undiagnosed and untreated. At the same time, my father was also deeply pious, attending daily Mass all his life and doing all he could to build the habit of church-going into his children.

Wasn't there something contradictory about the magnitude of his temper, the palpable weight of his anger and repressed fear as we cowered in the back seat of the car after one of his rages -- ironically enough, they often occurred on Sunday morning, on the way to church -- and the calm depths of his religious practice? Wasn't he exactly the type my students would call a hypocrite, professing the religion of the Lamb while acting out the fury of the Tiger?

No. It was exactly because of his fearful anger that his spirituality arose. I think he probably saw in himself the one and so turned, in repentance, to the other. He was not a man trained in apology or adept at touching, whether in joy or forgiveness. There was little physical contact in our family; I do not remember ever seeing him kiss his own father.

But he could apologize to God -- there was the mantralike act of confession learned by every Catholic school child, and there were, with God, no eyes to meet or avoid, no hand to touch. My father could ask God for forgiveness; there was no voice to censure him or to make him feel even worse. Precisely because of his anger, and the magnitude of the guilt he must have felt over it, my father plumbed unusual spiritual depths, and later in his life, during long weeks alone in the woods, he accomplished what I have to believe were remarkable, sustained, Trappist-like silences.

That is why I am afraid for some of my students. By all appearances, they do not seem to have built within themselves the little booths, like those we read of in the Gospel of Mark, prepared on the mountaintop for Elijah and Moses to occupy. There appears to be within many of them no safe dwelling for their best thoughts, no monk's pensive cell nor convent's narrow room in which to pursue the pure, plain work of listening to themselves and then going on, more gracefully, with their lives. There appears to be within many of them no place for the Word -- and equally important -- for the Silence in which might dwell "kairos" -- God's time -- for longer than the three days given to it currently in my school's retreat program.

We have forgotten that what the famous Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard observed early in the last century is still true: "The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create Silence."

My father, as he grew older, found "kairos" in his long weeks alone in the country, eating simply, walking, doing important nothings, and welcoming into his soul what Wordsworth encountered in his "pleasant lea" -- the spirit that runs through all things, that informs the water, hills, woods, birds, stars. It is a spirit whose essence is silence. For hours, my father, at last free of the shrieking banzai attacks that racked his memory and psyche for decades, sat wordless and still, the mute world green around him in its calming presence. And he heard its silence, and it was good.