In 1929 the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.
A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.
Sweet… I remembered a quote I had read from Mikhail Naimy’s Book of Mirdad which went something like “speaking is at best an honest lie, silence is at worst a naked verity”