The Order of the Silent Drift
The Contemplatives · the Stillers · Masters of the Prayer of Stillness
The Order of the Silent Drift is the great contemplative monastic order of Frostianity: monks and nuns who withdraw to the high cold places to pursue the Cold to its very depths through the prayer of stillness, the vow of silence, and a life of austere keeping. They are the spiritual masters of the faith and its appointed Stillers (exorcists).
Origins and Rule
Founded in the early monastic age (c. 500 A.F.) by the hermits of the The Hoarwaste who followed Connor Frost’s own forty-day fast into the waste “to be still before the Cold.” Their Rule of the Drift orders the whole day around the The Hours of Frost, long The Stilling, manual labor in the snow, the study of the Rime, and deep silence — the Great Hush, in which speech is reduced to the necessary and the heart turned wholly inward.
The Vows and the Vow of Stillness
The Drift keep the three Cold Vows (Stillness/obedience, Bareness/poverty, Purity/chastity), but their special mark is the Vow of Stillness — the renunciation of needless speech, motion, and stimulation, that the soul may “grow as quiet and clear as deep ice.” The strictest keep perpetual silence, speaking only in the liturgy.
The Prayer of Stillness
The Order’s great gift to the faith is the Stilling-prayer: the inward, ceaseless repetition of a single cold word or the name of the Savor (“Connor Frost, keep me”) until the whole soul is stilled and the Clear Beholding is given. Its classic maps are the works of Mother Aldis of the Silent Drift and the treatise The Cooling of the Passions (Treatise).
The Stillers (Exorcists)
Because they have “grown most cold,” the senior monks of the Drift are the church’s appointed Stillers — those who perform the grave Rite of Cooling (exorcism) over those possessed by the The Embermites and the Fevered.
Significance
The Silent Drift embodies the conviction that the highest human vocation is to be stilled and kept — to become, even now, as much like the silent Stillness as a mortal may. Their monasteries (the chief being The Silent Drift in the The Hoarpeaks) are the spiritual heart of the faith and places of pilgrimage for those seeking depth in prayer. Even the warm-born and the laity now seek their teaching (the modern Stillness Renewal).