Our world is saturated with noise. One thing after another bombards our senses. Our society consumes one thing after another and never stops to think about it. Back in 1985, Neil Postman noticed this when he wrote about “Now . . . This” in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes, “There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now . . . this.’ The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.” (pp. 99-100)
Our entire culture has become a “Now . . . This” sort of place. Many of us are no longer capable of sitting and thinking about a topic deeply for more than a minute. In many seminaries, they tell us to not make our homilies too long, because people are “incapable” of paying attention for more than five minutes. But forcing ourselves to produce sound bite sized content just continues to feed into the problem. We have to remember how to approach important things carefully. We have to talk things out sometimes. Sometimes, we even have to sit in silence and just sit. Sitting in silence is the opposite of a “Now . . . This” mentality.
In this same vein, Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have often said that all the unhappiness of man come from one thing, that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” The most marvelous things can only be understood in silence. A masterpiece of art must be beheld in silence to appreciate it. A piece of music must be listened to in silence to comprehend the textures and layers of sound. A great piece of writing requires silence to process. But more importantly than these: man can only begin to understand himself in silence, and we can only start to grasp at understanding God in silence. He does not normally speak to us in the rain or the shaking of the earth, but instead he speaks to us in the “whisper of a gentle breeze.” (1 Kings 19:12)
In the Mass, there are moments that the Church prescribes silence for these same reasons. Some of these moments are just before the priests’ prayers, after the homily, and just before and after the reception of the Eucharist. The beauty of silence is that it is an activity that each of us is capable of participating in. Not everybody can sing. Not everybody can respond at various points throughout the Mass. But everybody can be silent. This silence is not empty or simply an absence, but a moment in which we savor and rest and reflect on the gifts God has just given us or that we have just given him.
Fr. Matt