St. Mennas and the Silence We Fear

Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

It’s 309 AD, and a man is walking away from war.

His name is Mennas, a Roman soldier, another cog in the Empire’s vast and meat-grinding machinery.

He is not an officer, not a senator, not the sort of man whose name would have been chiseled into marble by a city that lived on its own self-importance.

He is just a man with a sword, a man who has marched, killed, and bled in the name of emperors who never knew his name. And then, one day, he walks away.

Not in cowardice, but in refusal. A sort of spiritual defection.

He takes off his armor, leaves his regiment, and disappears into the desert, seeking something beyond the hum of the war machine, beyond the clamor of Rome’s endless ambition.

In the silence, he learns the truth: that the world is so loud because men are afraid to hear themselves think.

Years pass, and Mennas emerges from exile not as a soldier, but as something more dangerous—a man who has nothing to prove. He preaches, he unsettles, and soon enough, he is executed. Rome knows how to crush men like this. His head is severed, his body discarded, and the world moves on.

But the Church, that ancient collector of the dead, remembers him. He becomes a saint. The patron of wanderers, hermits, and those who have lost their way—which is to say, the patron saint of our entire age.

The Silence We Have Lost

Mennas was a deserter of noise. We, on the other hand, are its willing recruits.

Our world is a hymn to distraction. It is not just that we have lost silence—we have waged war against it.

If you do not believe me, try sitting in a quiet room without a phone. Try standing in line without pulling up a screen. Try waiting at a stoplight without checking a notification. We cannot do it.

The 21st century has no deserts, only deserts of the mind. We exist in a world of infinite stimuli, and yet we are starving.

We are so inundated with information that we have mistaken input for insight.

We absorb, we scroll, we consume—but we do not sit in the silence long enough to think.

The moment an uncomfortable thought arises, we crush it with content, drown it in podcasts, choke it with status updates. We pretend that being “informed” is the same as being wise, that knowing everything means we understand anything at all.

Mennas knew better.

He knew that silence is not a vacuum, but a proving ground. He understood that solitude is not an escape, but a confrontation. The greatest battle a man can fight is the one where he faces his own soul with nothing to distract him.

This is why mystics retreat to caves, why monks take vows of silence, why Christ wandered into the wilderness for 40 days instead of debating theology in the Temple. Because truth is not found in noise.

And yet, we flee silence. We fill our homes with sound, our minds with static. Even our supposed quiet spaces—yoga classes, meditation apps, self-care rituals—are structured, performative, controlled. True silence, the kind that Mennas sought, is raw and terrifying. It leaves you naked with yourself.

And we do not want to be alone with ourselves. Not really. Trust me. I did it for 4 years. I came out a different person.

Rediscovering the Desert in an Age of Noise

So what do we do? Do we all flee to the wilderness, abandon our jobs, take up asceticism like a bunch of part-time monks who still need Wi-Fi? No. Mennas wasn’t asking us to run from the world—he was asking us to learn how to stand apart from it.

We do not need to escape noise. We need to reclaim silence.

• Turn off the noise, and keep it off. Not just for a few minutes. Not just during your morning routine before you immediately turn on music or scroll Twitter. Let silence have its say.

• Learn to sit with discomfort. Do not flee to distraction at the first sign of boredom. Stay with it. Boredom is where thoughts begin.

• Walk without a destination. Go nowhere, for no reason. Let your mind wander. It will not lead you astray.

• Let conversations breathe. Do not rush to fill every pause. In silence, people reveal themselves.

• Reclaim solitude. Take time alone without apology. No guilt. No justification. Alone does not mean abandoned.

We do not need to join a monastery to hear the silence again. We need only to listen. Mennas is waiting. The desert is calling.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.