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I love the sounds of silence!
I planned on starting a little ranch for my years after retirement so that I could be “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife!”
My planning has paid off; I love the solitude, the silence of my little ranch.
Of course, as is obvious to you, my readers of the blog, withdrawing to the solitude of the ranch does not mean withdrawing from the world, at least not in the same way I withdrew from the world when I became a Benedictine monk. Thanks to the internet I have been very much in contact with the world and my interests are wide ranging. I have also remained active liturgically and sacramentally, celebrating wherever and whenever I can.
One thing I do not do much of these days is travel great distances; all my travel is by automobile. Since I broke my back for the third time in 2006 I have not been on a commercial airplane. Consequently I have been spared the ‘pleasures’ of flying such as they increasing are as I read in the media. My last encounter with the TSA before my 2006 accident was one that I will never forget.
I was returning to Corpus Christi from Washington and I was passing through security at Reagan International Airport. I had put my carry-on bag through the scanner and was about to pick it up and retrieve my boot-jack so that I could take off my cowboy boots when I was challenged by a TSA agent who could have been a candidate to play the role of Brunnhilde in Richard Wagner‘s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen In a loud voice she ordered me to take off my boots. I calmly said that I would as soon as I retrieved my boot-jack from my bag. She loudly yelled at me, “Don’t touch that bag!” I kept explained that it was impossible for me to take off my boots without the use of a boot-jack. She kept shouting for me to take off my boots. Since we were now drawing a group of spectators and since I was dressed in my clericals with episcopal insignia, seeking to defuse the situation I sat down and struggled to take off my boots without the aid of a boot-jack, a near impossible task. All the while she kept shouting for me to take off my boots. Finally, after many minutes of struggling, another TSA agent, a man, probably a Catholic man, came over and pulled my boots off. I guess that my experience was better than the groping that seems to be standard procedure these days from what I read.
Even so, in 2006 cell phones were starting to proliferate in the general population. Next to having the person in the seat behind my seat keep kicking me in the back, I found it particularly annoying to have the person sitting next to me loudly carry on a telephone conversation on a cell phone during the time we were waiting for the boarding to end and the announcement to put away all electronic devices.
All of which came up in my memory when I read these thoughts of Father George W. Rutler on the subject:
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In his address to the bishops of New York during their “ad limina” visit, which canon law mandates for every five years, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of “an increased sense of concern on the part of many men and women, whatever their religious or political views, for the future of our democratic societies. They see a troubling breakdown in the intellectual, cultural and moral foundations of social life, and a growing sense of dislocation and insecurity, especially among the young.”
I became mindful of this on a train when someone seated behind me spoke interminably on a cell phone about shopping for sweaters. It would be pedantic in such a circumstance to expect a conversation about polyphony, nuclear physics, or the Cambridge Platonists, but what was miserable, apart from the inconsequential subject being discussed, was the repetitiousness, profanity, and inarticulateness of the speaker – not to mention the unmodulated voice that sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium – and the total lack of regard for the other passengers. Some trains now have a “quiet car,” as though silence were an oddity reserved for eccentrics. Perhaps trains will soon have a “thinking car” for those who want to perpetuate the dying custom of using one’s mind.
It was “in the wilderness” – the Biblical equivalent of a “quiet car” – that John the Baptist appealed to those willing to think. Only by thinking can people avoid “dislocation and insecurity,” and only by thinking about the deepest things can the “intellectual, cultural and moral foundations of social life” avoid breakdown.
Our Lord expects each of us to use the mind He has given us, and daily to be discontented with the little we know about our world. When a society breaks down, the best that dislocated and insecure people can hope for is that they might “feel good about themselves.” It is a limited aspiration. St. Augustine said, “If you would obtain what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For when you are pleased with yourself, there you have remained.”
If I should have the chance to listen in on a saint talking on a cell phone, I expect that the conversation would be edifying and articulate. I do remember speaking over the telephone with Blessed Teresa of Calcutta about a newspaper that had misquoted her, and she was brief, to the point, and blunt. There was nothing dislocated or insecure in her simple eloquence, and – although she was surrounded by noise – her voice was both quiet and quieting. That is the essence of prayer, and we may be thankful that we do not need a telephone to talk to God. We only need to direct our thoughts to Him. That is what John the Baptist was saying in the wilderness. Some people thought he was crazy, but he would have said the same thing about that person on the train shouting four-letter words over a cell phone.
– Father George W. Rutler
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
Father Rutler’s remark on people thinking that St. John the Baptist was crazy brings to mind a couple of thoughts. In the Soviet Union, before its collapse, one way that the Communist Party silenced dissidents was by having them certified as mentally ill. The idea was that only a person suffering from a mental illness could possibly be opposed to the grand and glorious vision of Marx and Lenin.
What happened in Soviet Russia is disturbing because what happened there seems to be happening here although on a much smaller and benign scale. The pagan philosopher Aristotle taught that moderation was necessary for moral virtue. Many well-meaning people confuse the concept of moderation with the concept of normality. And they are not identical even though they overlap in many cases. The concept “normal’ is a statistical concept. In Nazi Germany many Germans came to feel that it was normal to believe that Germans were genetically superior to other races; that it was normal to segregate and kill non-Germans. A lot of Germans felt that they were morally justified as long as they stayed in the center of the Nazi bell curve of normality.
Psychiatrist Jeffrey Moussaiff Masson, abandoned his psychiatric career when he became convinced that the psychiatric profession showed an implicit acceptance of the political status quo. He was concerned that the dominant society by and large accepts, unthinkingly, psychiatric values. He felt that power tended to be seen as a right to have one’s definition of reality prevail over all other people’s definition. He dared to say that psychologists and psychiatrists share a number of prejudices and that one which affects their clients greatly is how religious beliefs that patients hold are, at best, unimportant, and, at worst, evidence of neurosis or psychosis. Digging a little deeper he came to the conclusion that in many respects, the client of psychiatry and psychology is not the patient, but the State. He was uneasy because he felt that as a psychiatrist accepting a great deal of government funding, he was unable to speak out against things which he thought were untrue but which would have put him at odds with the dominant liberal culture.
Many people are deathly afraid of not being “normal.” This anxiety may be justified when normality refers back to the eternal human values of the natural law or sound medical reasons. But what happens when the concept of normality becomes divorced from eternal laws and becomes wedded to juridical positivism? How many people have walked up to me while I stood in front of Planned Parenthood protesting the killing of the unborn and given me the ultimate liberal insult: “You pro-life people are nuts.” “You anti-abortion people are not normal.” Being normal in liberal America is be indifferent to moral values. For a liberal, being indifferent to eternal values is equivalent to political sainthood. Liberals do not attack conservatives by saying that conservatives are wrong. They attack conservatives by saying that conservatives are wacky extremists out of touch with the main stream. I notice that President Obama is enamored of being the spokesperson for normality in America.
In America conservatives face taunts and insults. In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, conservatives faced the Gestapo and the KGB. We say this couldn’t happen here and yet the Holocaust of legalized abortion is happening here. Many Catechism children preparing for Confirmation have told me that they do not want to speak out against abortion because it will cause them to be unpopular or lose friends on Facebook. Listening to many of them speak candidly reveals to me that many youth feel that their self-esteem depends on the number of “friends” they have on Facebook. Some have told me that they regard it is as being almost a fate worse than death to be “unfriended” for any reason. I find that to be discouraging, because this is the next generation of Roman Catholics!