The Noises of Our Silences

The sonic landscape of my Quaker meetinghouse changes with the seasons. In the springtime, as we humans shed our heavy coats, the antiquated and noisy heating system is shut off and a hush returns to worship. As we enter early spring, we open up the old eighteenth-century partitions that once separated the men’s and women’s meetings, and the sounds of the space open up with more vibrato. By the time the heat domes of August settle in, ratcheting the U.S. Mid-Atlantic up to subtropical humidity, people and building alike fling off any pretense of decorum, and the outside doors are flung wide to let in any errant breeze.

The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hearing them reminds me that a family shares the trees of our burial ground. The crunch of the gravel in the driveway reassures me that one of our perpetual late-comers is about to join our fellowship. Not all the sounds are natural, of course. Once or twice in the hour someone will redline a motorcycle on the street outside, the whiny revs and gear changes drifting over to bounce inside our worship space. I usually try to tune out this sound, but sometimes I smile instead, knowing that someone is having fun on a hot summer day. I say a little prayer for their safety and wish them well.

What is the nature of silence, and how do we share sounds with our neighbors? Author Joe McHugh introduces us to an “anechoic chamber” in Minnesota designed for almost unimaginable silence. It is said that you can hear your heart pound and blood rush. The closest I’ve ever come to such conditions was a visit I once took of the UK’s Lancaster Castle. The building is an impressively heavy structure of stone, iron, and wood where hundreds of Quakers were imprisoned in the late 1660s for refusing to pay tithes. At one point in the tour, visitors are led to a chamber deep in the bowels of the old prison. With a warning (and the option to chicken out), the heavy wood doors are closed tight, and for a full minute all light, sound, and air is blocked off. Yes, my heart pounded as I imagined the deafening silence of the worship early Friends must have endured in that room.

This is not the level of silence we strive for in our worship on the average Sunday morning. I’m glad for the shifting sounds of the season, which root us in the world. Ours is not a monastic faith, and it is not the emptiness of silence that we worship. Indeed, in many parts of the Quaker world, silence is not even the point: our faith tradition can flex enough to allow prepared preaching, music, and song.

To that end, we have a wonderful story from West Coast Friend John Helding, who was transported from a rather self-consciously traditional Liberal Friends meeting into one that was much more freewheeling and experimental with its worship styles. At first, he found its “Singing Sundays” to be mildly embarrassing (especially when visitors from his old meeting were in town), but over time he learned to appreciate his new meeting’s “worship-fluid” style. Sometimes a resident from the neighboring goat farm comes in to join.

Like the engines of the revving cycles outside my meetinghouse, the Religious Society of Friends has developed many gears. We don’t all need to push the redline—or, to mix the metaphors, let in the goats!—but I do think the Great Teacher is quite capable of reaching us through all the noises of our silences.