When you go for a quiet walk and observe others walking with earphones on, you wonder what they are afraid of.

At church people talk right up to the moment the service starts — and resume talking the moment it ends.  You wonder why they came.

One can be arrested for polluting public air or water — but less likely for “noise pollution” (loud parties etc.). It’s so hard to police. Noise-makers are addicted to noise, often inebriated with alcohol or something else — they react with violence.

* * *

You could join the “Right to Quiet Society” organisation, which campaigns against noise pollution (www.quiet.org).

I wouldn’t.

Once we start talking “rights”, we’ve joined in the rat-race ourselves where he who shouts the loudest, (campaigns the hardest, clamours the most persistently) wins.

“Rights” are a bad way of thinking.

* * *

For what is left of Lent, you might give up canned noise.

Try not exposing yourself to electronically-transmitted sounds for 40 days.

You’ll find yourself praying without even meaning to . . . plus having more time for regular prayers.

* * *

Attend the Old Mass.

Most of the time the building is silent.

God is there.

Not only do you know in your head that he is there.

You can feel his presence in the quietness.

* * *

Blessed Mary MacKillop, renowned busy campaigner for children’s educational rights etc., spent long hours, silent, before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel every day.

The original “Rule” for her Josephite Sisters said, “Silence shall be kept in every room, except during recreation in the community room. If necessity obliges, the Sisters may speak in other places, but in a whisper, and as briefly as possible . . . .  The hearts of the Sisters should be fixed upon God, and every occasion removed which would keep them attracted to external things . . . .”

“Christmas is for the children,” we often say.

But after tearing open the latest plastic present, children soon get bored with it – or it falls apart – whichever comes first.

Christmas is NOT really a children’s thing.

* * *

To understand Christmas, a child needs help from devout adults.

Without Jesus, our Creator, becoming man at the first Christmas . . . .

our children have no future but to live and die for no reason whatever . . . .

and then to rot and become non-existent . . . .

* * *

The Bible says, “While all things were in silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, God’s almighty Word leapt down from heaven.” (Book of Wisdom, chapter 18)

Do you believe that?

If you do, you have discovered the meaning of Christmas . . . and of the Universe . . . .

What do you think of this?

Interesting, eh?

There’s something good about it — bold, audacious. Yes there’s something there to think about.

Not everybody could get away with this as well as BF, EJ, AM etc.

But hardly deep enough to support you in keeping the faith in a world as hostile to God as the one we inhabit today.

****

More traditional and musically in a different and higher class is this:

Still inspiring 268 years after being written’

Whenever this one is performed, everybody present feels it appropriate to stand up out of respect.

Yes, but it is very noisy, is it not?

Ideal, perhaps for public expressions of confident faith — but how useful in times when faith reaches breaking point through tragedy, despair and failure?

****

This next one takes us a long way towards contemplating and experiencing something of the infinity of God.

Yes, this one, more ancient, is more “supernatural” in its feel.

Some would say that it can take one as far towards experiencing God’s presence as we are willing to go. Do you agree?

Any faults? Perhaps the very beauty of this composition is, itself, a distraction.

Hard not to think of the genius who wrote it and the brilliance of the vocals required to sing it — which could take one’s mind off God himself.

****

This next is different again. Simpler.

Those who give their life fully to God, day in day out, by joining special communities — like entering a monastery — use the simplest, most ancient, of all musical forms — plainchant.

No distraction. Nothing to think about except God himself.

****

God does not call everybody to enter religious life as in leaving the outside world altogether.

Yet for everybody, the most important aid to meeting with God is available.

Yes to everybody.

That greatest of all aids to contemplation is SILENCE.

Blessed Mary MacKillop, like all saints, loved to spend time in silence with God — silently contemplating him.

Yes, she was a woman of action, but she believed such activity was a “less agreeable duty” which must not interfere with her primary interest, the contemplation of God.

In the early days, her younger sisters (Lexie and Annie) would mock Mary for the long times she spent in prayer and contemplation. Yet later, both became, themselves, women of prayer.

When Mother Mary was too preoccupied to stop her worldly duties, she tried to make all her life, even her busiest times, a prayer.

She wrote to Father Woods, “God’s presence seems to follow me everywhere and make everything I do or wish to do a prayer . . . . I love at night to sleep where I can see the lamp burning and the Tabernacle behind it.”

****

The silence that matters is inner silence.

Even if the world refuses to be quiet around you, you can still quieten the frettings about the future and the broodings about the past, which are the real enemies of spiritual silence.

Once they are put aside, even a busy life can be an on-going act of contemplation of the Lord.