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O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore. –– Psalm 131
Be still, and know that I am God. –– Psalm 46:10a
I was in college when Reagan was inaugurated as President, and there was the news story you hear every four years about how the exiting President is moved out of the White House and the new President is moved in all on the same day. A friend remarked that if he was moving into the White House (or any house for that matter), before unpacking anything, the first thing he’d do would be to set up his stereo, because you can’t do anything “without your tunes.” Nobody disagreed with him. Everybody needs their tunes. All up and down the dorm floor, the woofers and tweeters were perpetually pulsating with the cacophony of fifty different soundtracks –– Springsteen; Earth, Wind and Fire; Aerosmith; Count Basie (okay, that was my room); Crosby, Stills, and Nash. On top of that was another layer of noise as televisions competed for their own sound waves.
Here, silence wasn’t golden. It was nonexistent. So, why not just go to the library to study? Because I couldn’t decide what was louder, the clashing of fifty dorm soundtracks or the murmurs and whispers of the frat boys and sorority girls flirting in the reading room of the campus library. Personally, I yearned for a pair of high fidelity headphones I couldn’t afford, hoping to reduce the massive campus to just me, my book, and my select tunes. You’ve got to have your tunes, right? To this day, a perfect evening would include sitting at home with Donna, a good book in my hands, and a soundtrack of cool jazz in the background.
However, there are an increasing number of days at work or at home when I choose silence over tunes, which strikes me as odd because I have always relished life with a soundtrack of music. In these latter years, however, I have begun to appreciate the symphony of silence; not total silence, mind you, but the kind of silence accompanied by crickets, cardinals, the deep sigh of a dog at rest, the bleating of a distant Harley, and the laughter of a passing walker. I’ve come to value the quiet, I think, because of the insufferable noise of a culture besieged by irritating voices tuned with arrogance and in love with their opinions, incessantly questioning the intelligence of others, resorting to insults and epithets because they have no coherent thought to offer, yet remaining blind to their own cluelessness. Did you know there are well over 3.5 million podcasts out there filling the atmosphere with opinions? There are approximately 500 million tweets on X per day, and approximately 34 million TikTok videos posted per day. That is a lot of noise.
A healthy percentage of today’s noise is negative, acerbic, and unsympathetic; and if a typical podcast is anywhere from one to three hours, how can the listener not be eventually changed by all of that indignation. Software developers tout new advances that allow parents to monitor and regulate what content their vulnerable children consume. Perhaps the developers should spend some time developing programs allowing teens and young adults to monitor and regulate what content their parents are consuming.
Jesus was regularly trying to escape the noise and find some quiet, and he didn’t even have Sirius/XM or Spotify to filter out. We live in a time when a daily dose of silence may be the only thing to prevent us from being consumed by the noise we consume. “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother” … “Be still, and know that I am God.”
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