Quaking in Quiet

If the medium is the message, maybe, where religion is the subject rather than communications, maybe the church is the statement of belief.

When I say "church," I mean the actual building, the structure of walls and windows and the division of generalized space into discreet spaces, divisions between public and private, communal and individual, holy and mundane. In every single church we have attended so far in this series, the central space is the worship space, and it has been divided, whether Catholic or Baptist or Buddhist, between the area for the sacred (the priests and sure, why not, any god in residence) and the profane, we humans, full of foible. In the Quaker meeting house, there is no such division. The open space where Quakers congregate on Sunday morning is not even square. Chairs are ranged from various angles, forming no known geometric shape, not even the quirky rhomboid or trapezoid. We all vaguely face the center. I think the centering of this must be significant as we sit in silence, meditating, relaxing, or sleeping. We face no one human being. None is exalted above, all sit in silence.

Silence is deafening. My tinnitus ensures I know this; my world is never without several constant lines of humming at varying pitches and decibels. But sitting in the meeting house, one becomes aware of the obvious, that all silence is somehow rich with sound. At first one notices only the gurgling of one's own stomach, lamenting what is now painfully obvious, that one did not pause to eat breakfast this morning. Then, like crickets rising in chorus at sundown, other sounds begin to penetrate the foggy curtain of quiet in the roomful of people. A cough, a wooden chair creaking, the woman on the respirator who has apparently entered a doze. As minutes pass, more and more creakings from the wooden furniture, like wind picking up strength in a forest. Mine is not the only stomach rumbling; we are, after all, each a human. Silence is ripe and rife, like a drop of water seen under the microscope lens.

Eventually, it produces words. A nicely dressed man rises and speaks in a quietly deep voice about a march he did the previous day to draw attention to the reality of global warming. He questions whether it mattered to participate in this walk since it drew no attention from either passers-by or press. "I would like to be proven wrong in this," he finishes humbly. He resumes his seat. Silence enfolds him. It proves a better answer than the woman who eventually rises to her feet and chatters about the worth of sending positive thoughts to the universe. The ground does not open under her feet, though I am cheering for it to do so.

Sometimes, very often in fact, people entirely miss the point. The woman did not understand the man's query. Thirty-two students were slaughtered at a university in Virginia yesterday, and Bush's response was, "I still believe in a person's right to bear arms." That is not the question. The question is, "What's wrong with us?" You can send all the thoughts and prayers you want to the universe, you can go out and buy the hit book "The Secret" and feel convinced that you'll get whatever thoughts you put out there and moreover, that you deserve to get everything you put out there, but what it comes down to is simply, "What's wrong with us?"

What's wrong with us may be, in not insignificant part, that we have forgotten how to listen. I find myself doing it all the time. I notice others doing it all the time, too. Doing what? Talking, talking, and telling. Not listening. Parents don't listen to their kids and while they don't always pick up machine guns or rifles or shotguns and shoot their fellow students or, like the recent case in Lafayette, suffocate their mother before stuffing her into the trunk of her own car, they lose hope in the simple act or condition of understanding. Couples stop listening to each other until finally they need to find a therapist who can stand-in and provide an open set of ears. It's no accident that the basic refrain of counselors has become, "What I hear you saying is this." Therapists have become our ears.

But here in the sanctuary of the Quakers, we hear it all, the little sounds of the old man's labored breathing, the creaking of the chairs, the cough of the closet smoker. We even hear a comment and a question or maybe a treasured anecdote: the words we use to explain ourselves. Mady and I, of course, say nothing. We are listeners; we are observers. I like it, this quiet. I find myself close to wishing no one would talk. Deliberate silence is so resonant you can almost hear music in it.

I don't want anyone to tell me anything. I don't want to tell anyone anything. Like the song says, "I just wanna be here with you."