I remember sitting in the church pew with my older brother Ryan – I was probably 10 – and the people in the pew behind me were chatting and laughing about something.
It went on and on, and I was getting increasingly irritated. I cleared my throat once … twice, thinking that that would be enough to remind them of where they were. I looked over my shoulder and sighed a few times. Nothing worked. The chatting went on and on, my obnoxious sighing went on and on. Finally, my brother elbowed me and whispered, “Will you shut up?! You’re more annoying than they are!”
You can see I was already an opinionated Catholic at a young age. And while I readily admit that my brother was maybe, well, probably right, it still frustrates me. If silence does not reign at Mass, then where does one go to find it? Certainly not in my day-to-day life.
I’ve written before of the size of our home. It’s pretty tiny, especially for a homeschooling family of eight. And one of the things I crave, one of the reasons we are hoping our house will sell soon, is silence.
We have musical instruments, Frank Sinatra sing-alongs, puppy barking, arguing, laughing, dancing, crying, the washing machine, squeaky doors, me yelling.
Good noises and not-so-good noises, all within a thousand square feet, fill our days, with nowhere to go and find refuge. If quiet is Vitamin C, then we might have scurvy.
So when I go to Mass, to the most sacred place and moment on earth, I long for silence, for the opportunity to meditate on the cross, to hear God speak, because it happens so infrequently at home.
But I almost always feel ripped off. And trust me, I’m not talking about babies, or adorable toddlers asking whispered questions. I’m talking about full-grown adults. I’ve been privy to so many conversations in the pew behind me, about weekend plans, about sore backs, about what people ate for breakfast. I’ve listened to bubble-gum popping all the way up the Communion line. And I can’t help but wonder why we seem incapable of the simple act of just not talking.
That indignant 10-year-old still inside of me wants to cry out, “Why are we here!? Don’t we see what’s in front of us? It’s Jesus on the cross, and we’re acting like fidgety kids in a kindergarten class!”
I know how pretentious that sounds. Believe me. I immediately pray to God to help and forgive me for my hypocrisy. I pray more that the priest will stand up and say it all for me. But, alas, it hasn’t yet succeeded.
I worry that we are a generation of restless Catholics. We are so distracted by a world of gadgets and noise and information in our everyday lives that it is impossible to go on without them, even for a mere (but holy) 61 minutes.
Maybe it seems impossible to us that the Holy Mass is real, that the Eucharist is real, that we are really offered a time to meet God heart-to-heart. Because if we do know it’s real, how can we be anything other than quiet?
Maybe the sense of the sacred has simply become foreign to us. Whatever it is, we are often missing out on the great treasure and opportunity to hear God, to hear our inner selves, and to feel hope. Without those, what it means to be human suffers the loss.
In his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Sarah wrote, “Why are men so noisy during the liturgies while Christ’s prayer was silent? The words of the Son of God come from the heart, and the heart is silent. Why do we not know how to speak with a silent heart? The heart of Jesus does not speak. It radiates with love because its language comes from the divine depths.”
Do you, like me, long to hear that silent radiating love? I believe the time has come for our churches to reclaim their rightful silence.
“Pay attention, O Job, listen to me; Keep silent, and let me speak ... listen to me; Keep silent, and I will teach you wisdom” (Job 33:31-33).