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Every Threat of Quietness Last week, an acquaintance was talking about traveling with a friend. As soon as they entered the hotel room, the friend turned on both the radio and the TV. Further evidence, as Rodney Clapp writes in a recent issue of Christian Century, that "we seem determined to use radios and iPods and televisions to blot out every threat of quietness."
We live in a culture where even breakfast cereal is marketed in terms of the sound it makes ("Snap, Crackle, Pop"). I suspect many children today have never heard those sounds, simply because they cannot hear them over the music from their earbuds. Or maybe because one of every eight U.S. children suffers from noise-induced hearing loss.
That statistic is from a book I have only just begun reading, but highly recommend: The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise, by Garret Keizer. As Keizer says, with pointed understatement, "A culture attempting to imitate America rarely grows quieter."
Indeed, it seems that we are afraid of quietness. Our MP3 players separate us from others, cocooning us in familiar sounds. Quiet, on the other hand, is beyond our control, inviting us into mystery.
I am reminded of the third-grader quoted by Kathleen Norris: "Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go."
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Sacred Squawking
---by Jan
Noise is unwanted sound, usually intrusive, sometimes obscene and repugnant. More than unwanted, much of the sound I abhor is the racket of traffic, talkers yelling over each other in an eatery, and rock music. For one who covets her solitude and quiet, noise makes my teeth rattle in my jaw.
During the night of a peaceful slumber, what is it that makes us sit straight up in bed at the whimper of our sick child? Why is it that visitors speak in hushed voices in a funeral home? How is it that the faraway sound of church bells can quiet our minds and call us to prayer wherever we are?
In The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, Keizer at one point writes about "sacred squawking." He describes this scene. "A Buddhist writer sitting in his hermitage on a hill in Kandy, Sri Lanka, on a Saturday night lists the following audible loudspeaker noises: 'Buddhist chanting from three temples, Sinhala Christian folk music from a church (which had been going on non-stop the whole day), and prayer calls from several mosques.'"*
Noise might be our wake-up call, to pay attention to the invitation to pray, to praise God with the fullness of our voices. "Come, sing with joy to God, shout to our savior, our rock. Enter God's presence with praise, enter with shouting and song." (Ps. 95:1,2. The Psalter, ICEL)
*p.148 |
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