Silence

Snow. It isn't officially winter yet, but we have snow. I open the library early in the morning, as we do every day of the semester. It is ghostly quiet. The students have finished their exams, turned in their last papers, and hustled out of town to be with their family and friends, just in time to avoid any bad weather.



I stand in the Fireside Reading Room, looking out over the deserted campus, struck by the silence. Even the fake gas fire does not crackle or intrude on my thoughts in any way. It is a peaceful silence sans suggestion of any imminent difficulties. I am struck by how seldom we encounter true silence.



There is that phenomenal silence when you look into your newborn child's face for the first time. He lays there quietly sleeping in your arms, as if he had not just been through Dante's inferno being thrust into the coldness of the world. He sighs a deep sigh of contentment, his lips twitching in a sucking motion, his eyelids flickering in dreams. You look unrestrainedly into his face, and even if there is noise in the room about you, it fades into the distance as you connect with this baby. It is you and he together alone, locked in a silent bond that will link you forever.



There is that sad final silence when you share in the dying of someone - it doesn't even have to be someone you knew well. We don't often get to experience this silence. We shuffle our dying off by themselves to a sterile room where professionals see them to the other side. We think we must avoid that gut wrenching emotional distress at all costs. Don't make us face our own mortality!



But once in awhile, if you are lucky, you get to be with someone passing from time to eternity (isn't that a movie title?). And you hear the quiet noises of a body ceasing, sometimes the utterances of a spirit translating. And then the last breath. You aren't sure. Perhaps they are just taking their time, resting before the next breath. You wait. It does not come. Their eyes seem to be open, they seem to be there, and yet they are gone. You take your time accepting it. The world quiets and fades while you intersect with the eternal.



Silence. A more serious silence than just lack of noise. Those rare moments when you are lifted from the incessant chatter of the immediate world to the solemnity of the everlasting. I think that's what Franz meant when he wrote Silent Night, Holy Night . . .