How to Be Ambitious About Living a Quiet Life

“Make it your ambition to live a quiet life,” Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:11 (NIV). That’s an unusual phrase, isn’t it? To be ambitious about living quietly? In my early church experiences, we’d sometimes have very energetic revival services when the preacher would command the people in the altar to “press into” what God was doing one moment and “let go” the next. I’m always confused—am I pressing in, or am I letting go? Am I trying harder or trusting the process?

Leon Morris, in his book, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, rev. ed., who similarly wrestles with Paul’s riddle, frames the paradox in two striking ways:

“Be ambitious to be unambitious.”

and

“Seek strenuously to be still.”

Herein lies a secret to a simple life, a good life grounded in rich and fertile soil.

According to Reidar Aasgaard, in his book, My Beloved Brothers and Sisters!, said that among the moral teachers in Paul’s time, the call to live quietly was generally a call for “living a peaceful, harmonious life, or for the inner tranquility of the individual.” So in encouraging his readers to be ambitious about quiet living, Paul was calling each of them to pursue a target far different from the culture’s goals and aspirations: to appear different from the chaos around them, to rigorously focus on pursuing a life immersed in reflection and contemplation. A life that seasoned the culture with simple, Christ-centered compassion. A life in which every action and motive was reframed and reshaped, from their talk to their treatment of others.

In the Philokalia: The Complete Text, an ancient text on Christian living, Evagrios the Solitary teaches: “Make stillness your criteria for testing the value of everything, and choose always what contributes to it.”

This assertion to let stillness test the value of everything can lead to some powerful personal reflection:

• Does this technology, purchase, or entertainment add to my soul’s peace and tranquility?
• Does it contribute tranquility to my friends’ and family’s lives?

Living quietly is not some legalistic housekeeping effort where we eliminate anything that isn’t explicitly Christian (only Christian music, Christian T- shirts, Christian freerange eggs, and so on). You can have a house that’s full of Christian everything yet overflows with emotional and spiritual clutter. Rather, pursuing quiet requires a clear-eyed look at whether the stuff of your life contributes to the peace of your home and relationships.

Quiet living offers an antidote to exhaustion, a promise of sustainability, presence and wholeness. According to Henri J. M. Nouwen, in his book, The Way of the Heart, when we live quietly, we live differently. We live with the volume of life dialed down, the pace of life slowed, the desires of life restrained. We show up differently to work and relationships. We foster friendships that are edifying and sustainable. We speak simple, clear, powerful words born of silence. We deny senseless whims to seek the good, true, and beautiful for others as well as ourselves. We are formed into people who understand the times and know what to do because we are paying attention (1 Chronicles 12:32). We gain ears to hear the Spirit’s whispers over incessant chatter.

We need to cultivate interior silence by paying attention to the external noise we allow into our lives. Quiet living cannot eliminate all the static in our lives—but it certainly reduces the static in us. Quiet living calls us out of a life of paying attention to everything into one in which we pay attention to what matters. Quiet living is not about withdrawal; it is about greater, clearer, calmer presence.

Paul knew that quiet living would extend beyond the Christian community. Instead of competing for status, honor, and wealth, Jesus’ followers would foster sibling love among the community of faith. Because of its winsomeness, warmth, and peculiarity, that quiet living would attract the attention of outsiders (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). A group of people ambitious about quietness, and fierce about prioritizing loving service, would certainly stand out—then as now—in an agitated, frenetic, fearful, disconnected world.

But how do we do this? How do we cultivate and curate this quiet perspective, this quiet living that is instrumental to our flourishing and health—a call that Paul wants us to seek ambitiously? To whom can we look to guide the way?

We stand in a long line of strugglers seeking liberation from inward and outward noise. Since we are not the first to wrestle with quietness, we can learn from those who came before: namely, those monks called the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who withdrew to the wilderness to meet with God.

When you think of a monk, you may imagine someone living in total isolation—perhaps awakening at all hours of the night to pray, dressed in sparse brown robes, and having no fun. There’s some truth in this. But we don’t need to flee to the desert or withdraw to a monastery to essentially become monks.

Interestingly, during the medieval period, the pursuit of quiet living was probably more prevalent among people like us—people working jobs in cities, perhaps married, people living normal lives—than among isolated or communal monks.

We need not leave where we are to find the quiet life we seek.

We can “fashion our own desert” wherever we are. Rather than being constrained by the various aspects of our lives—marriage, work, parenting, school, and so on—we can make these places where we focus our energies on quiet living. Our perspective can transform frustrations into invitations.

Where do we begin? Well, where did the monks begin? In all their writings, one theme surfaces repeatedly—a practice that is precisely where we should begin our search for a quiet life, for it unlocks all other progress in this pursuit. If we want to live quietly, we must begin with silence.