"The Dictatorship of Noise"

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

I’ve come across an intriguing new book by African Cardinal Rober Sarah called “The Power of Silence: against the dictatorship of noise” (Ignatius Press) and you may be reading excerpts from it in these Reflections as time goes by.

The Cardinal maintains that as our world becomes more and more noisy, the need for us seek and carve out moments of silence in our lives is more difficult than ever and yet vitally important. I’m reminded of what C.S. Lewis said in the Screwtape Letters (another book you should read if you have never done so before) that “noise is the music of hell.”

These summer days are times when a whole host of construction and repair projects are taking place all over campus. We have endured far too many Masses and offices where the noise outside the church windows has made it even impossible for us to hear one another as we sing the Mass and pray the Liturgy of the Hours. Sometimes the coincidences are diabolical: just at the Mass begins, the noise outside will get louder and louder. I can’t help thinking about the Life of Saint Benedict where it describes noise outside the church while the monks are trying to pray, noise which is meant to distract and tempt the monks. Obviously nothing has changed except for the fact that we are bombarded with far more decibels on a regular basis than would ever have happened in St.Benedict’s time. And every year it gets worse, haven’t you noticed?

I have a good set of headphones and some of my favorite music loaded onto my Iphone, and I have to fight the temptation to play the music when I am working in my studio. So far, I’ve been successful. I think of the students on our campus, and I would expect that they would find it difficult or even impossible to understand why one would even want to turn of the music.

And then, of course, there is the ever-present noise inside our own heads which never ceases. Nonetheless, it is urgent, if we want to live spiritually and reflective, to make time in our lives when we focus on our breathing and try to get beneath the constant chatter our minds produce, even as we try to fall asleep.

And yet the Lord comes to us in the silence. The words He speaks to us are silent words, and we have to grow silent if we are to hear His voice. Right in the beginning of his book, Cardinal Sarah writes:

When he drapes himself in silence, as God himself dwells in a great silence, man is close to heaven, or, rather, he allows God to manifest himself in him.

And when we do so, wrote Symeon the New Theologian, “He makes us utterly real. And everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged is in Him transformed.”

And without silence, those hurtful things continue to assail us.

God bless you!