Hush Now

 I will try again! Yesterday I posted a blog entry about Canada Day from my phone but it evaporated into the...who knows where! Today I want to muse about silence. Silence, to my way of thinking, is not an absence of sound, but an absence of unwanted noise. We humans have become very adept at creating jarring, grating noise with the myriad devices we have developed to assist our daily living. Some of them are hugely helpful, others are nuisances of questionable value.

I have never liked noisy stuff, and "toys" that roar make me want to run for cover. As I age my hearing is deteriorating, as is wife Ruth's. She commented the other day that both of us adopted the same favourite expression: " pardon, I didn't catch that." Yet noise has become an even greater assault with the passage of time.

If I had stayed at St Paul's I would be on sabbatical now and my submitted plan was to explore the spiritual dimensions of silence and solitude. Most religions encourage silence as a way to encounter God, with that sense that the divine can only be encountered as the rests between the notes of heavenly music. I have assembled my arsenal of silence books which will still be my reading this summer.

Bye the way, our search for a home in Belleville included a quiet street as a high priority. We hope we have found one, within reason.

What are your thoughts about silence?