The Sounds of Silence

The silence of a winter snowfall,
taken by Sister Karen Streveler

Snow falling on a nearly windless day, the pause between psalms, the second before sleep claims you—all epitomes of peace and silence.

We, at the monastery, love silence. In fact, some days we all keep silence in honor of a season or in prayer during Lent, for example. During retreats, we listen to holy talks twice a day and then read Scripture and/or meditate on those words of wisdom for the rest of the time.

Every morning, we try not to talk unnecessarily in the hallways around the entire monastery, still in keeping with the nightly silence.

But talk isn’t the only way to disrupt quiet or silence.

Machines speak loudly. We humans have invented and invented trying to make life easier and less strenuous. Yet the loud buzz of the lawnmower disturbs neighbors at odd hours, the blaring songs from a car radio might irk the street residences, or the incessant whine from plain two-story buildings in the Arizona desert cause neighbors to demand change.

I recently read an article in Atlantic that revealed this problem to me. The plain buildings belong to a company called CyrusOne and house data stored in the cloud. The article covered the sleuthing done by neighbors to find the cause of the whine, and their ensuing quest to eliminate the sound.

Yes, they were successful in getting the company to provide some sound-absorbing materials, but not to eliminate the sound entirely. The alarming section of the article revealed that sometimes people become so bothered by incessant noises that they become mad/crazy and harm whatever is the source, perhaps another person.

Fortunately, that was not the conclusion in this article, yet this conclusion was almost as frightening. The reporter claims that noise is going to take over, just as a smog does.

What do you think? Are quiet spaces and places on the road to extinction?

Mary Jane Berger, OSB