It might seem strange for someone who writes about radio to call on all listeners to switch off for half an hour a day. But after hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury and his guests talking about what silence means to them on Radio Three this week I feel compelled to recommend it. After all, the invention of the crystal set and microphone has added a potent new dimension to the endless babble of the world. A hundred years on, there’s scarcely a household in the land without access to a 24/7 stream of artificial sound. I confess I’ve been a hopeless addict all my life, although never so bad that I’ve carried The Archers into the garden. But now in reparation I’ve decided, instead of giving up chocolate or booze for Lent, to switch off. Not for too long, I’d better add, so that I’m not delisted as a critic. But for just long enough to tune out of the world and into the sounds within. Why not join me?
It can be terrifying, as the Archbishop admitted on Silence, the Sunday-night feature, for as soon as you switch off the outside sounds, the inside noise starts up ten times louder. And you never quite know what you might hear when you’re listening only to yourself. An offbeat heart. An unexpected emotion.
Evelyn Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, asserted, ‘There is no such thing as silence.’ She’s turned herself into a world-class percussionist by tuning in so acutely to the vibrations of her xylophones and marimbas that she can play alongside an orchestra and never miss a beat. ‘The whole body is like a huge ear,’ she explained to the Archbishop, constantly beating, breathing, resonating with sound. All we have to do is train ourselves to hear what it is telling us. It can be frightening, but it’s also a chance to discover a connection to something bigger than yourself, to the voice you can only hear if you at first create that silence within the soul.
How might our decisions be different if at first we met in silence, even for just five minutes at the beginning of each meeting or endeavour? The Quakers gather in silence because they believe, the Archbishop reminded us, that through such quiet stillness interesting words can emerge. A friend of mine runs a Quaker boarding school for 400 or so teenage pupils. Each day begins with a silent assembly. At first it is strange and difficult for the children to comply, but by such simple means it’s possible to create a powerful sense of community and yet also of a meaningful individuality. Through the silence, the self emerges. This could explain the inner calm shown by President Obama, who has chosen to send his daughters to a Quaker school in Washington. He understands the importance of silence, of not talking.
Without words, so much more can be said. The other day on retreat we ate the lunchtime meal in silence. At first it feels awkward not to carry on the usual polite pleasantries, ‘May I pass you the salt?’ ‘Would you like some water?’ But after a while the silence takes over and you realise that there is another way of communicating, which is far more effective than words themselves, watching out for each other’s requirements, while at the same time focusing on the meal itself, not as a sensual experience but as an act of refreshment.
Silence, of course, is not always affirming and nurturing. It has another dimension: the silence of the unheard cry. The Archbishop took us to Auschwitz, to the desolate quiet of those deserted railway tracks, the barbed wire and sinister watchtowers. There he met the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The two spiritual leaders spoke in whispers, humbled by the silent witness. ‘The quiet weighs very heavily here,’ said the Archbishop. It’s a silence ‘that swallows words and robs them of their meaning’.
This is the silence of the failure to speak out; and the silence of not knowing how to describe the sight of a baby’s dummy in the piles of belongings taken from the dead. The Chief Rabbi went further. ‘Walking through certain parts of Europe,’ he told us, ‘I hear ghosts…A whole murdered generation in a quite small space of time.’
The silence was palpable, resonant with feeling.
Back in the fastness of his palace on the Thames in the heart of London, the wail of a police siren broke into the Archbishop’s meditation. ‘Unless we’re prepared to be silent, to put aside some of our surface emotions,’ he pondered, ‘we’ll never really notice and respond truthfully to the whole of the world, to the suffering but also to the beauty and the harmony.’
I just wish the producer had given us the chance to practise this, by giving us five minutes of silence at the end of the programme. What a powerful message that could have been.
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