December 13, 2005
Silence
Bamming along reading the Daily Office, there suddenly appears the rubric, “Silence may be kept.” It was a good idea of the liturgers to think of that, especially in our time when silence comes at such a premium. It’s rather a wake-up call.
We need rubrics. We need silence. The rubrics (from the Latin for “red,” I’m told, and originally printed thusly so we couldn’t miss them) are neat and useful little road signs along the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. When they say “may,” it’s more or less up to you, when they say “shall,” you’d better believe it. We’ve got them everywhere. In the owner’s manual for the VCR (as my son reminds me when he’s adjusting it) and for the Honda. But so much for that. It’s silence that’s also important.
It may be kept, the rubric says, as if one doesn’t have to return it. It’s a keeper, a gift. We can make it a part of our retinue so that we can fetch it now and then when the world gets so noisy which is most of the time.
Maybe we’re getting deafer in self-defense and will soon have built-in silence all the time. I asked the tenor man sitting next to me in our band if he ever has tinnitus. He said, “You mean you can’t hear it?” In it’s rather quaint way, my dictionary says silence is “forbearance from speech or noise.”
Forbearance. Now, there’s an idea overdue for its time.