The Holy Is Hidden Right Here

It’s hard to hear it amongst all the noise, but a little silence may not be as far off as you think.

Jul 02, 2025

I turned the summer solstice into a time machine.

At 9:42pm local time on Friday, June 20th, the Earth’s north pole was tilted closer to the sun than at any other point in its orbit—making for the longest day and the shortest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. Around that time, I decided I didn’t want to live in 2025 anymore. It wasn’t the cultural disintegration that made me leave. It wasn’t the whole world on a hair trigger. It wasn’t interest rates or the price of eggs or the cost of gas. Nor was it microplastics, phishing emails, or spam.

It was the noise.

It was twenty-four hour news.
It was advertising in every nook and cranny.
It was an algorithm seeking to know me better than I know myself, by giving me more and more content with which I’m tempted to interact.
It was the gradual disintegration of my identity into a data point.
It was podcasts on walks, audiobooks while doing the dishes, and HBO Max or Max or HBO Max again (that only took a year) streaming through my phone while brushing my teeth.
It was bottomless books and music and movies and shows.
It was social media feeds that somehow make you feel both more empty and more entranced the longer you scroll.

It was how finely tuned the surface of everything has become to my most superficial instincts. It was the desire for the depths of things. It was wanting to take the red pill and to leave the Matrix—to experience, as Morpheus said in that iconic film, “the real world.”

So, on the seasonal solstice, I decided I needed a summer of silence.

This summer will be my thirtieth high school reunion, and it occurred to me that 1995 would be a relatively quiet destination. Time Warner wouldn’t acquire CNN until the following year—and Fox News wouldn’t launch until 1996 either—so 24-hour news was still considered a novelty rather than a necessity. You got your news from the newspaper. You had to sit still and hold a book in your hands to read one. No one I knew had a cell phone. I hadn’t even heard of email or the internet yet. And you had to watch television on…a television.

I traveled back in time by vowing to live my summer as free as possible of the noise that didn’t exist in 1995.

Very quickly, the summer of silence began to feel like the summer of simplicity.

For instance, I woke up the next morning and went on my typical Saturday morning bike ride. Headphones were allowed because I had a Walkman in 1995, but I limited myself to only one cassette’s worth of music. In the summer of ‘95, that might have been Hootie and the Blowfish’s debut album, so it was once again. I stand by that album. It’s a classic.

However, in 1995, because you couldn’t stream music infinitely, music got…boring. You bought one album at a time, listened to it over and over again, and once you had it memorized your attention started to wander. In 2025, you might stream a suggested new artist. In 1995, though, you just looked around.

On my bike ride, I looked around.

I was passing a field where the grass had been rolled into bales of hay. When did that happen? I’d ridden that route the previous Saturday. Were they rolled up then? I hadn’t noticed, because I was finishing an audiobook for our book club and was paying minimal attention to the world around me.

Between the bales of hay, five wild turkeys were behaving very strangely. The wild turkeys I’ve seen before have always been very businesslike. But these turkeys looked like they were…playing. The summer sun shone on it all from a high angle and it was as bright as can be, both materially and spiritually.

And just like that, the summer of silence and simplicity was becoming the summer of sacredness.

Author and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner describes walking through a stand of maples at sugaring time with a friend who had never tasted the sweetness of fresh sap. As he tipped a bucket of it up for his friend to drink, the friend said, “I have a feeling you ought to be saying some words,” as if a new kind of Eucharist was being offered right there on that holy ground. Buechner writes,

…and it was no joke because the whole place became another place or became more deeply the place it truly was; and he and I became different, something happened for a second to the air around us and between us. It was not much and lasted only for a moment before it was gone. But it happened—this glimpse of something dimly seen, dimly heard, this sense of something deeply hidden.

The holy is hidden right here, nestled beneath the noise.

Or, at least, it’s hidden somewhere in 1995. For the next few months, I’ll be sending you dispatches from there. I can’t wait to tell you more about what I see…

in this summer of silence,

this summer of simplicity,

this summer of sacredness.