When theologian LeRoy Friesen and his wife, Sharryl Lindberg, moved into their lovingly created B&B on Smith Island in the Chesapeake, he never dreamed that the magic of that setting, its citizenry, and several thousand guests at their Inn of Silent Music would reshape his life in so many ways. Listening to the Silent Music: The Memoir of a Journey in Place reveals how Friesen gradually became more aware of the spiritual density of his experience of the islescape, the teeming biosphere, the stunning night sky, each inimitable guest, the qualities of the waterman culture, and the region’s human saga going back many thousands of years. The island would become for him a microcosm for the planet, indeed, the cosmos, on these and other fronts. This book testifies to a vast and lavish more to life, not in some distant and exotic Shangri-La, not in some future Paradiso, but amid and under the common, here, now. But this requires being opened so as to see, or more accurately, to listen. Read More