There’s nothing special about it, but our family is one of millions of families who have been asked to keep a Nielsen TV viewing diary this week. It isn’t the first time we’ve been on the list, so I am familiar with the process. My wife says that if they had gotten her on the telephone, she would have refused. I often refuse to participate in surveys, thinking that most of the so-called research is not very credible. Leading questions and push polls don’t provide useful information and the opinions of participants are easily manipulated to the advantage of whoever has commissioned the study.

But there is something kind of fun for me to take the detailed nielsen diary, fill out the basic statistical information at the beginning, write our names in the columns and then record “no television viewing” in each of the segments for morning, afternoon and evening for seven days. Then I seal up the diary in its return form and drop it into the mailbox felling a bit smug and hoping that in some way more people who don’t watch television will get that information to the advertisers.

I know that when my diary is received it is probably thrown away and that the company doesn’t do anything with the information. Their goal is to provide information to television stations about how many people are watching what programs on television so that information can be used to sell advertising. There is no market for data on how many people are not watching television. Still, I hope someone notices that there are some of us out here who have other things to do with our time.

We live in this intensely busy and very loud world. Recently I’ve been struck by how many places that once were quiet are now filled with sound. I visit in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and find them filled with large screen television sets, constantly on, and often with the volume turned up quite high because the viewers are hard of hearing. Doctor’s offices and waiting rooms in professional buildings now are filled with television sets. There are restaurants in our town where you can find dozens of television sets, often tuned to 5 or 6 different programs. I find it hard to eat in such a setting. As one who doesn’t watch television much at all, I get disoriented by two different moving images at the same time. It almost makes my dizzy and I can’t figure out which image to watch. I turn my head away and focus on the people with whom I am eating, but am soon distracted by the visual images. We don’t eat in restaurants very much, but when we do, we prefer those that are quiet and do not have television sets.

It isn’t very meaningful to complain about all of the noise of our world. We are surrounded by construction, cars, motorcycles, trucks, televisions, radio, computer-generated or recorded sounds and a million other sources of sound.

Despite this constant sound and the constant presence if not actual human beings, at least images of humans doing all sorts of activities, study after study reveals that we, as a culture, feel more alone and alienated than ever before. We are constantly bombarded by images of people and yet we feel more an more isolated.

Here’s the paradox. I don’t feel lonely when I am all alone in my canoe on the surface of the lake. Of course I’m rarely alone at the lake. The ducks and geese float about the surface of the water. The eagles fish from high in the sky above. The red-winged blackbirds flit from cattail to cattail along the shore. The heron silently stands on the trunk of a tree fallen in the water.

The bible reports that our people suffered when they were carried off into exile. They felt cut off from one another and cut off from God. It is remembered as a time of great trial. I think that all of the noise of our world is a kind of self-imposed exile for too many people. They fill their lives with sound and noise because despite the hunger to be connected, people don’t know how to re-connect with God. They live in exile.

Prayer is our way to to connect to the heart of God. It is our way to connect to the hearts of others who are praying. Gandhi said, “Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”

The most important part of prayer is silence. God does not require our words. Sitting in silence and listening for God’s voice is essential to my ability to engage the world. I’m not sure that I am often in deep meditation, though there are many benefits of meditation. Most of the time, I am happy to just be quiet and still. I like to be out in nature, walking in the woods or paddling a canoe. Sometimes I just sit quietly in my canoe and go nowhere. Sometimes I just sit on a rock and don’t go at all. When I listen to the quiet of the natural world, I become aware of the breath of God that surrounds us all of the time.

Yesterday, I sat in my small boat and watched a heron. The heron was watching me almost as much as he was watching the water for a fish. He turned his head and stretched up his neck to see me. I knew that if I made any large movements, if I raised my paddle to turn my boat, he would take to flight in that marvelous almost prehistoric motion that herons have employed for millennia. Somehow, however, neither of us felt a need to move.

As I sat, I began to be aware that there must be many others sitting quietly. Perhaps a coyote was looking for a mouse or an owl for a rabbit. But also there were people all around the world - religious people in monasteries, faithful at worship, workers in gardens, mothers who rise before their children - all sharing this silence. My prayers were not alone, they were connected to the prayers of millions of others.

I may not be in the majority of those asked to fill out the Nielsen ratings, but I am connected to millions in prayer, and that connection is deeply meaningful.

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