The Big Silence

The other evening, I watched the first episode of a new* series of three one-hour programmes in which two men and three women seek to "build silence and prayer into their daily busy lives." Their quest involves a preliminary briefing session at the Benedictine Worth Abbey. (Incidentally, Worth was very nearly my prep School instead of St Richards.) This is followed by an eight-day silent Ignatian retreat at St Beuno's Jesuit Retreat and Spirituality Centre in North Wales. "The programmes give moving accounts of life-changing experiences... simply through becoming silent, although there were quite a few struggles to get there! The prevailing theme of the series might be summarised as “Silence is the gateway to the soul, and the soul is the gateway to God”."

The thinking behind the programme is that the pace of modern life is such as to afford little time for meditation and prayer. To put it a slightly different way, we go to great lengths to ensure that we are at all times surrounded by noise or distractions: radio, TV, music, the Internet and so on. In short, we are rarely, if ever, "alone with ourselves".

It would be stupid of me to deny the force and truth of this argument, and and indeed I myself have often toyed with the idea of going on a retreat. I even experienced an abbreviated form of a retreat at both prep and public school. In passing, I might say that imposing retreats on schoolchildren is perhaps NOT a good idea!

However, I would like to challenge the idea, never consciously stated, lying behind the programme, namely that the lack of silence is the besetting sin of modern society. Is it really? Personally, I would say that loneliness is the great bane of our existence. If only for demographic reasons, there are more and more of us living on our own, literally crying out for human contact. Silence, meditation and prayer are all very well and enriching when we know that there is a beginning and end to them, but for those among us whose loneliness knows no end?

* First aired in June of this year