The Sound of Silence
08/03/13 05:15
It is common for books of worship to include instructions to “allow silence for prayer” or to direct people to “pray silently.” I guess that what these books mean by silence is “no talking.” Because times when there is no one talking are far from what I would consider silence. The building where we worship makes all kinds of noises. There are big fans that move air around within the building. The hot water that it pumped through the building makes gurgling noises and the pumps whir. The building makes a lot of creaking noises as it changes temperature. Even the glass in the windows makes a certain noise as the building heats and cools.
I spend a fair amount of time in the building when I am the only one inside. Sometimes I speak because one of the things that I do when I am along in the building is to practice sermons. But most of the time when I am alone in the building, I do not speak. I know how noisy the building can be. I listen to it nearly every day.
There are also lots of noises that come into the building from outside. The building is particularly susceptible to wind noise – far more so than our home. The wind whistles through the glass doors at the main entryway, rattles over the shingles and roars past the building. We can hear sirens from emergency vehicles and airliners and aircraft from the Air Force base taking off and flying over the city. The sound of traffic on Mount Rushmore Road can be heard when the wind isn’t blowing to strongly. And during the rally the roar of motorcycles is easy to hear inside the building.
I don’t put the term “silent prayer” in our church bulletins. Neither do I invite people to pray “in silence.” Instead, I prefer the term quiet prayer. One of the things that I do during such times of prayer is to listen to the congregation. Babies gurgle. An elder might sigh. Teens fidget. There are all kinds of noises that come into the building with the people. I have no desire to suppress those noises. Members of our congregation use supplemental oxygen for medical reasons. The machines that they carry to concentrate oxygen for their breathing make quiet swishing noises. From my point of view such noises are most welcome. Children are rarely completely silent. The noise of children in the room is something that I never want to eliminate. We are a gathering of people. The sounds that people make are welcome when we gather to worship.
Most of my life is far from silent. When I lie in my bed at night, I hear all kinds of night noises. I prefer to sleep with a window slightly opened except on the coldest nights of winter. I can hear the wind in the trees. Sometimes the turkeys make their noises when settling themselves in the trees. I love the sounds of the coyotes singing in the distant hills. These days the traffic is never still on Sheridan Lake Road, so there is a fair amount of automobile noise. I once commented that there must be someone on a night shift who has a bad muffler, because there is one car that has become familiar, though I can’t tell you what it looks like, or who drives it – it simply has a distinctive noise as it climbs the hill between 2 and 3 am. Maybe it belongs to a bar tender. I think it is too regular to belong to a reveler, but that is possible, too.
Even when I walk deep in the woods, it is not silent. These days the ground is so dry that my footsteps make the duff crackle. It is very hard to walk quietly in the woods. The forest has its own sounds as well.
There are several specially designed rooms, usually at universities, where engineers have used what they know to reduce sound as much as possible. They build the chamber with a great deal of sound insulation. On the interior of the chamber they install a variety of different sound baffles to make the chamber as echo free as possible. Leo Beranek coined the term Anechoic Chamber for these rooms describing their echo-free nature. The rooms are used in the study of acoustics and also to test antennas, radars or electromagnetic interference. Several of these chambers claim to be the quietest room in the world, including the chamber at University College London and the chamber at Meyer Sound in Berkeley, California. According to the Guinness Book of World’s Records, the quietest room on the planet is the chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.
Sound researchers tell us that the quieter it gets the more your ears adapt. Sounds of which you are normally unaware become evident when there is less external sound. In an anechoic chamber you become the sound. You hear your lungs, your stomach gurgling, your heart beating. Some people can hear the blood coursing through their vessels and the sound of joints as they move their head or other body parts. The ear will even make its own sounds when it doesn’t detect sound from other sources.
According to researchers at Orfield Laboratories the longest any person has ever been alone in their chamber is 45 minutes. NASA has done research in the chamber because they are very interested in sensory deprivation and its effects on humans. Space itself is though to be a very quiet place and space travel might require long amounts of time with minimal sensory experience. It has been known for some time that people who are exposed to nearly silent rooms begin to hallucinate. It is unknown whether or not people can work through those hallucinations.
It seems to me that the opportunity to sit in such a room would be an experience not to pass up. I don’t know if I would hallucinate, but I suspect that I am no different from others. But there is an appeal to a time of pure silence. It seems like I could easily take an hour of such, though research would indicate otherwise.
Maybe tranquility is more exciting than we thought.
In the meantime, we don’t offer silent prayer at our church. We don’t have an anechoic chamber. A bit of peace and quiet, however, is within our reach.