If we are brutally honest with ourselves, we probably don’t like silence, especially the silence we experience when we are unable to use a technological gadget to distract us.
Silence means that we have to deal with life and with our inner thoughts and feelings.
It’s much easier to turn on the television, look at our smart phone, or even get into the car and drive away from our problems.
Technology certainly has its advantages, but not all technological progress is inherently good or healthy for our soul.
Constant background noise
Pope Benedict XVI lamented the effects of technological progress when visiting a Carthusian monastery in 2011. He specifically wanted to visit the monastery in hopes that it would help us in the modern world:
The Successor of Peter’s Visit to this historic Charterhouse is not only intended to strengthen those of you who live here but the entire Order in its mission which is more than ever timely and meaningful in today’s world.
Technical progress, especially in the area of transport and communications, has made human life more comfortable but also more keyed up, at times even frenetic. Cities are almost always noisy, silence is rarely to be found in them because there is always background noise, in some areas even at night.
Pope Benedict XVI was worried especially about the future of technology and how more and more people were living virtual lives:
In recent decades, moreover, the development of the media has spread and extended a phenomenon that had already been outlined in the 1960s: virtuality risks predominating over reality. Unbeknownst to them, people are increasingly becoming immersed in a virtual dimension because of the audiovisual messages that accompany their life from morning to night.
He also spoke about the tendency among young people to fill every waking moment with media:
The youngest, born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, out of fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer able to remain for long periods in silence and solitude.
Spiritual nakedness
Pope Benedict XVI then explains how silence and solitude “exposes” us to God in a way that we do not want to face:
[B]y withdrawing into silence and solitude, human beings, so to speak, “expose” themselves to reality in their nakedness, to that apparent “void”…in order to experience instead Fullness, the presence of God, of the most real Reality that exists and that lies beyond the tangible dimension…The monk, in leaving everything, “takes a risk”, as it were: he exposes himself to solitude and silence in order to live on nothing but the essential, and precisely in living on the essential he also finds a deep communion with his brethren, with every human being.
Technology allows us to cover our spiritual nakedness, hoping that consuming enough media will quiet the longing in our soul.
Again, there are certainly many benefits to the technology we now possess, but it forces us to become more deliberate in seeking out silence to hear the voice of God.
And today we celebrate...