Why Is It So Quiet in Here?

At the evening Mass tonight – a rather full house for a Sunday late afternoon – I made my way towards the front of the church where I usually try to sit. Much to my teenage daughter’s chagrin – she would prefer to sit in the back or even in the choir loft. Apparently at that age, girls don’t want to stand out. Except when they do. Which is all the time. I am so confused. Regardless, I strolled up the center aisle with my son. He’s a teenage boy and doesn’t really care if anyone notices him. And I don’t head up front to be noticed myself. I sit there because I want to pay closer attention, to be closer to the altar, to the sacrifice. I also like that I receive Holy Communion before most of the people in the church and therefore have more time to pray in thanksgiving. Sometimes when I sit in the back, I’ve barely made it back to my pew before Father has started praying the Communion verse.

As we took our seats and knelt to pray before Mass, I was struck by the presence of a young man and three young children who clearly sprang from his loins. I just now debated using that expression as it is somewhat archaic but there it is. I did not see a “Mrs.” with him but these things happen. There were times when my kids were little where my wife and I would split up for Sunday Mass and one of us had the children with us. Typically this happened when one of us was under the weather and just needed a break. To be certain, we would all go to Mass, just separately.

One of the man’s children, a little girl of about four, was playing about in the pew as children do. She would crawl under the pew and then re-emerge to climb on top. She played with the missals as though they were great big books of fairy tales. She climbed onto her daddy’s lap and asked a question that meant a lot to her but the premise of which I had taken for granted these past few years.

In a whisper she said,

“Why is it so quiet in here?”

And it was quiet in here. It was blissfully quiet. It is not as though there was absolutely no noise. We weren’t in a vacuum or some kind of isolation chamber. There was the ambient noise of the air conditioning. There was the sound of doors opening and people taking steps, of hard-soled shoes on linoleum. Kneelers were creaking and thin pages of missals were turning and ribbons were being set.

But it was quiet.

This quiet had actually come into sharp contrast for me the day before. I had been at a different parish for a wedding. It is a novus ordo parish and it was a novus ordo crowd. In fact, I don’t rightly know if half the attendants were even Catholic at all. These things can be expected at a wedding. Couples tend to invite lots of people and not all of them share our faith. But the atmosphere was entirely different. There was no sense at all that the place we were in should be marked by sacred silence let alone that others might appreciate the quiet for their own prayers. Both before and after the Mass (and even during thanks to priest-encouraged applause) conversations at full volume, the smacking of gum being chewed, backs being slapped, and laughter permeated the air. I hadn’t experienced that in such a long time and it was jarring.

The church is the dwelling place of God. Our Lord reposes in the tabernacle. Silence is an outgrowth of the reverence we owe to Him. In the silence we can hear Him. In silence we can close our eyes and meditate on His Wounds, envision His Sacred Body hanging on the cross and contemplate His Diving Love for us sinners.

I had come into this traditional world several years ago not really grasping that and was caught by surprise when it all made sense to me. I didn’t even recognize that I didn’t miss the noise.

Why is it so quiet in here?

Because He Who made you and me and all the stars of night chose to inhabit a little golden box so we could always come to Him and speak the secrets of our hearts to Him. It is so quiet in here because His sacrifice takes place here. It is so quiet in here because He loves us and desires us to contemplate that love. It is so quiet in here because no words could express adequately the contrition, the adoration, the desire we should show to Him Who speaks no words before us but Who IS the Word and Who Is Truth and Who Is Love.

Faced with all that, could a man find a word to utter that even made sense?