Fall 2025 • By JEM
Listening to Silence

An Artists Reflection on Returning to Mt. Saviour

I arrive in Elmira on a hot, hazy June evening. I’m nervous to return to Mount Saviour, almost a year after my Orein session. I wonder how it will be without my artist comrades. I came to listen for God, and I wonder whether I will be too deaf to hear, or whether I will hear too much, too loudly.

Love casts out fear, and I am quickly reminded how much there is to love here. The bells ringing for Compline, the steeple in the dusk, the murmuring of sheep, the monks ambling across the grounds, the knotted walking sticks leaning against St. Joseph’s doorway: everything exactly as it was the day I left. Well, almost—there’s a new sheepdog, Olaf, and Br. Pierre is battling  illness.

As I reacquaint myself with the Psalms, the difficulties that pursued me here do not disappear but they do shrink, like a village seen from a high peak. This sense of relief is also a kind of vertigo: of being lifted by the scruff of the neck with no clear idea where you’ll be set down again. This requires a trust that can only come from outside oneself. I pray for this trust, and am answered on all sides by images of the good shepherds that love this miniature universe into being through praise and work.

This time is also marked by conflicting feelings, both a sense of peace and of unsettling, a resting in love while also being gently spurred to understand, as Rilke was: “You must change your life.”

I came to Mount Saviour a year ago seeking to deepen my vocation as an artist, a Christian, and a human being. I came back because those questions cannot be separated from the particular places and communities that have been given to us, and to which we must find ways to give ourselves back, however modestly. Have I succeeded? Add it to the long line of questions for the clouds and the sheep.︎ 

—text and artwork by James Elliot McBride (Orein ‘24)

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