Cell Phones and Silence

Continuing the cell phone theme . . .


In the 11/2/09 edition of Newsweek, columnist Julia Baird reminds us that, in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, the devil brags that "We will make the whole universe a noise . . . We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end." She explains that Christian scholars in medieval times believed that Satan did not want people to have time alone with God or their fellowman in which they could be "fully alert and listening."

Baird mentions a book by Sara Maitland, a British author who traveled through deserts and hills and spent 40 days in an isolated house in the remote Scottish Highlands in an attempt to discover what silence truly is. Maitland "believes the mobile phone is a 'major breakthrough for the powers of hell.'" In her work, A Book of Silence, Maitland says, "I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture, and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing, and unpacking."

Baird reveals that Maitland's book made her "realize what a profound longing many of us have for silence, how hard it is to find, and how easily we forget how much we need it." Baird concludes, "I know, [this article] sounds like the lament of the Luddite. But if generations of mystics and seekers have insisted that there's something that connects silence with the sublime, you have to wonder what we are distracting ourselves from--and who we could be if, every now and then, we paused."

I do believe humans have a longing for silence. I know I do. I love to be in a silent house. I can stay home all day, doing chores, reading, whatever, without ever turning on the TV or the radio, but I rarely get to spend a day like this. Many people turn on the TV as soon as they get up, but continuous electronic background chatter shreds my nerves. It's been a long time ago now, but I remember one of the most moving HU chapels I've ever experienced was devoted to silence. No one said a word while messages on the screen in front of us challenged our dependence on electronic noise and busyness and encouraged us to spend more time "being still and knowing."

I'm not against electronic gadgets. I've got a lot of them--laptop, BlackBerry, ipod, etc. I use them and I like having them. At the same time, I often feel as if they are more in charge of my time than I am. I read the other day of a communications professor who challenged her students to go on a technology fast for one weekend--from Friday at the end of class until classes resumed Monday morning. Her students were aghast. They really didn't think it was possible.

I think Maitland's book may have to be added to my must-read list.

The View from My Front Porch

This is the view from my front porch.

We live in a valley. In front of our house are acres and acres of pasture, a gently rolling space that stretches to touch a distant, tree covered ridge. In summer, as you can see from the picture, the green is often dotted haphazardly with big round bales of golden hay. In fall, the grassy pasture, a duller shade of green now, seems crowned by a ridge of glorious reds, golds, and oranges, a few stubborn evergreens successfully hanging on to the color of summer. On an early winter morning, the trees high on the ridge are sometimes covered with a thin film of ice that glints prism-like in the distance. And of course, after the bare grayness of winter, spring tints the ridge a light green that, at first, seems to be only a figment of my hopeful imagination.

For my birthday this year, my husband gave me two beautiful wooden rockers, and we placed them to the right of our red front door, on either side of the potted geraniums. Our front porch is a soothing, special place to be.

I often sit on the porch in the early morning as I finish my last cup of coffee. I sit there, occasionally, to read. And often, my husband and I spend whole evenings there, rocking, and talking, and rocking, marveling still, even after six years away from the Delta, that there are no mosquitoes to spoil the twilight.

I can sit there and sip, or read, or converse, with great ease. But what I’ve found that I can’t do is just sit there, alone with my thoughts.

And this is not just a front-porch issue. I find it almost impossible to just be. It makes me uncomfortable. My mind immediately starts listing all the things that I need to do—laundry, homework, housework, grading, buying groceries, ad infinitum. To our multi-tasking generation, sitting there doing not even one thing that seems necessary or productive may be the ultimate sin.

It’s hard to be still and know if you can’t even be still.