by Stephanie Piper

I went to Kentucky in search of the desert. It's the metaphorical desert I was after, the one I long for each December as catalogs jam the mailbox and canned carols threaten my sanity. At the mall, I develop physical symptoms of some nameless disease. The world is too much with me, and the only place I can think of that it's not is a Trappist monastery an hour south of Louisville.

I've been there before, sometimes spending as long as five days in the resonant silence. This time, a weekend is all I can manage. The guest house stays booked a year in advance. People come from Washington, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, blocking out a stretch of wilderness and circling it on their calendars. The month they circle most often, it seems, is December.

It's not a good month to be absent from the world, at least not by worldly standards. The retail machine, gearing up since Halloween, is at full throttle. There are 800 numbers to dial, sausage balls and crab dip and star-shaped cookies to make. There are parties to give and parties to attend, red dresses to pick up at the cleaners, white tablecloths to iron. It's not a good time to stop, which is why I feel urgently that I must.

I drive north on a winter Friday, my mind scanning endless to-do lists. By Lexington, I've negotiated a tentative truce. When I get home, I will still have four days to obsess over Christmas. For now, all bets are off.

My room overlooks the cloister garden, bare in the December dusk. There is a single bed and a desk and a chair. On the wall hangs an icon of Mary. Tolling bells mark the periods of prayer throughout the day and night, but no one questions me if I trade an hour in the woods for an hour in church. Everything here is optional, except the silence.

There is a depth to this stillness, a texture. It's more than the absence of noise. When people are silent in the world, they are waiting to speak. Here, they are simply listening.

The monks' day begins at 3 a.m. with Vigils, chanted psalms and prayers in the austere stone church. I do not plan to go, but I wake with a start at 2:45 and find myself following the sound of the bells.

Slumped in the choir loft, I wonder who in the world is awake at this hour. And then it comes over me in a kind of wave: the world is here. Mothers tending sick children; insomniacs; the dying who slip away in these vacant hours before dawn. Prostitutes and drug dealers. Police. Nurses. Night watchmen. The graveyard shift. They're all here, invisible but present, and we're lifting them up, bearing them up with words like mercy and power and light. In the middle of December, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, this white church feels like the center of the universe.

Later, I hike up the back road for a look at Thomas Merton's hermitage. The spiritual writer and anti-war activist took a dim view of retreat-inspired platitudes. If you see Jesus in the cloister, he once told a group of novices, tell Him to scram.

I have not come expecting visions. Still, packing my bag, I am tempted to measure, to add up. Is it enough? Am I enough? Will it last?

I drive home through freezing rain and find my husband pacing the kitchen. Our sons, homeward bound in a notoriously unreliable car, are three hours overdue. I close my eyes and think of the carved legend on the monastery gate. Pax Intrantibus, it says, peace to all who enter, and I cradle the tiny flame I carried away with me, willing it to stay.

They wheel in the driveway a few minutes later. Weak-kneed, I serve the lasagna and light the candles on the dining room table. Peace be with you, I say to myself, and look up to see that somehow, it's already here.