To Keep Silent

It may seem peculiar that a Pagan’s chronic illness could be helped by one of the rules laid by a Catholic Saint for the order she founded, but here we are.

My energy levels (mental, physical and spiritual) wax and wane with the seasons and time of day. This summer, I’m finding myself consistently able to do more than I’ve been able to do for many years. There are a number of things, mostly discovered by trial and error, which appear to be helping; one of these I stumbled across during the hard lockdowns of 2020 when I decided to take an interest in Catholicism as part of my ancestor work.

There is much about Catholicism that doesn’t work for me, despite the best efforts of my maternal grandmother to persuade me to give it a go. But there are also aspects that are very interesting, and I’ve been drawn to some of the Saints for a long time — almost any Pagan will be able to name at least one or two Saints who are also revered as Pagan deities, on the grounds that the Saint is thought to be a continuation of an older entity. So, Saints seemed like a good place to start, and I decided to begin a sort of ‘dialogue’ with a Saint whose name I share: Saint Claire of Assisi.

My plan was to find out a little, then do some personal work around what I found out, then find out a little more. As soon as I started to read about my namesake, I found myself thinking that I’d have liked her, had we met in real life, especially judging by the impressive side-eye she’s giving in several of her portraits. She established her order with the help of her mentor, Saint Francis, after escaping arranged marriage by shaving her head, hiding in a convent and telling her family she had already taken her vows. This convent being unsuitable for her, and no established order being a good fit, she set up her own. I’ll probably go into her story a little more at some point since she’s interesting and there’s more to tell than would fit into this entry; but the short version is that she also had a chronic illness that left her fatigued and often bedridden; she’s the Patron Saint of television because when her acolytes offered to carry her to mass during a bout of fatigue she declined politely, telling them that she had visions which appeared as images projected onto her wall and could watch it from bed; she didn’t like it when people insisted on giving her things after she’d already said no, and managed to get the Pope to pass a law saying that nobody was allowed to give her a gift that she’d once refused; she didn’t eat meat; and one of the rules of her order was to keep silence before noon.

I had been intending to honour my Saint by emulating one characteristic or rule and seeing whether and how it affected me spiritually. Choosing which was fairly easy. I already have a chronic illness that leaves me fatigued and sometimes bedridden. ‘Not going to Mass’ is quite easy for me, quite honestly; I’ve done it all my life, apart from a couple of times at Christmas and whatnot with my Grandmother, but I have found a local-ish church that still performs it in Latin and also streams it online, so I will give that a watch sometime. Otherwise, I do already watch television quite a bit, so that’s one off the list. I get cranky when people give me presents when I’ve asked them not to (I try to accept it in the spirit with which it was given, I really do! I’m just a very irritable person). I don’t eat meat anyway, so tick. That left only the vow of silence until twelve o’clock.

Well, straight away that presented a few challenges. I’m married, I have kids (one of whom still lives with me), if I want an appointment with the GP I have to ring at 8am, what if there’s a family emergency, blah de blah. So I adapted the rule a little, so that I would not speak with anyone outside my household using my voice until noon, unless there was an emergency or a really pressing issue/appointment. A limited amount of interaction via email/text etc was ok. Luckily for this experiment (Ha! I found a plus side to this, in your face Sickness), I had to stop working again a couple of years ago when a stomach bug kicked off the ME symptoms quite badly, so that was something I didn’t have to try to navigate.

At first, keeping to my rule was pretty easy, because nobody was interacting much. It got harder a bit later, as the world started to open up again a bit more; telling people “I’m sorry, I don’t speak to anyone before noon” has more than a whiff of Diva about it. But once I’d embraced that Diva-ish aspect of it, it felt good. I was establishing boundaries. I used the quiet time in the morning to study, meditate, garden, tidy, exercise a little,or just sit and stare into space, depending on what I was capable of that day and what I needed.

After a while, some changes began to take place. I found myself more able to stay awake all day. My mind felt clearer — where I had been struggling with brain fog all day, it was now clearing during the morning and staying clear until the evening. My time was easier to structure and tasks were easier to prioritise. I had more physical energy during the afternoon.

My useful hours a day had been limited, and had often not been especially useful as I was constantly physically and mentally depleted. But by reducing my vocal interactions with others and limiting the amount of sensory input that I was trying to keep up with, my available energy became more concentrated. So although my physical ability is still somewhat compromised and my thought processes are muddled during the morning, by the afternoon I’m finding myself able to do more than I have for years, including during my couple of years’ remission during which I trained as a yoga teacher. Yesterday, I walked nine kilometres in heat of 31 degrees celsius (about 88F I think), wearing flip-flops, whilst on my period (TMI? I don’t care) and having had a cold the previous week. This would have been unthinkable at any stage since the ME first kicked off; in fact earlier this year a *really* good day meant being able to walk further than the end of my street, which is about 150 yards (I know I’m switching between metric and imperial with gay abandon, I’m British and was born in the 70s so my units of measurement are all over the place).

This of course brought me back to something that I should have remembered and thought to apply to my mundane life just as much as my spiritual/magickal life… that “Keeping Silent” isn’t just about secrecy or discretion. It’s also about conserving energy. And with an illness that includes sensory overload and processing difficulties as an effect, one would think that a reasonable person would make that connection sooner. However, now that the connection has been made, I’m finding more ways to help regulate sensory input, and alongside some other strategies it’s making a huge difference.

So, thank you to Saint Claire, thank you Ancestors, and thank you to all my friends and family for understanding when I don’t pick up the phone before midday… it helps more than you know.