I’ve said in the past that my mind twists words around, making them better than what was actually said. It is sounds I need to be more concerned with, not speech. More accurately, it is sounds turned into words that have me worried I am all too human.
Most of us are not great at using language to express ourselves. We don’t get much practice with other people talking about how we view the world. Most of us are lucky if we have a thought provoking conversation once a week.
I’m here to say that it’s not language that has us getting close with other people (language actually separates us from people because it puts us into classes and boundaries). The thing that brings us closer to God is our hearing. It is the sounds outside of our heads most of us hear that helps us unify.
Everybody who can hear will identify sounds around them often. If an acorn falls on a roof it makes a sound but you can’t identify that it’s an acorn, only that it made a sound so we can leave it at that. If you are in a very noisy room you probably won’t notice the clock ticking but it is and so you let it be. If you are in a quiet room you will hear the clock ticking and if you tap your foot you will also hear that, so you contribute to the cacophony of noise.
It is incredible to me that people fear silence but I think they only fear silence when other people are close and not speaking, so they tap their foot or say something when all we really have to do is sit there and know we are hearing the same things. If it is human to speak to one another then it is even more human to hear the acorn at the same time, to just know we heard it like every other sound. Why try to guess that it is an acorn and share that with anybody? Unless there is some deep, conceited reason to let everybody know what we have heard, we could just let it be.
Francis Erich McElroy 