Barn Owl

When noise turns to silence

When I was visiting Death Valley National Park in California, I rose before the sun did. The first prayer of the day, fajr, takes place in the liminal time between dawn and sunrise, and I decided I wanted to pray fajr on the sand dunes I had spotted the day before. So I mercilessly divorced my body from the warm embrace of my bed and waded through the cold of the early morning. In order to get to the dunes in time, I had to go by car. The lights of my car were blindingly bright against the dark of night, and the engine was disturbingly noisy. It almost felt sacrilegious. When I arrived at the dunes, I saw lizards rush away from the gaze of my headlights. I closed the door of my car as quietly as I could. As I looked up I was silently greeted by the last remains of the stars.

It was so quiet. In fact, it was truly silent. I think that may have been the first time in my life that I ever experienced complete silence. The kind of silence without even the subtle sound of an air vent, the ticking of a clock, or the rustling of leaves. It filled me with awe. I breathed ever so subtly in an attempt not to ripple its surface.

I slowly walked between the dunes as its inhabitants were just finishing their last affairs of the night. A snake slid by me and moved quietly into her hole. I climbed one of the dunes and prayed fajr on top of it, in silence. I then sat down to watch the sunrise, in silence. I read my book for a bit, in silence. And then, in silence, I walked back to my car. At the parking lot, I saw that my car was now in the company of others. The people at the parking lot answered my silent smile with a greeting.

“Morning!”

So loud… They had broken the spell of silence and summoned the noise of the day. Now, inevitably, it would come, wave by wave, slowly covering the foundation of silence like the ocean covering the seabed.

Life is inevitably accompanied by sound. The first breath of a newborn baby is immediately accompanied by the noise of its cry. As the child grows, so does the range of sounds it interacts with: babbling, laughter, playful shrieks, the clinging of cutlery, the ever-faster beat of its own footsteps, a lullaby, and a well-told bedtime story. As childhood morphs into adulthood, deep conversations, confrontations, loving whispers, and beautiful music are added to the list. But perhaps no sound defines the growth of a child into adulthood as much as the sound of silence.

We don’t expect children to be comfortable with silence. They’re only just finding their voice and need to learn how to use it. Those children who do love silence we often label as ‘old souls’, for it usually takes quite a noisy journey before one can see the beauty in stillness. Before one is done speaking and ready to listen.

But there’s something weird going on in our modern world. It seems we never really reach adulthood. Long after our childhood years, we continue to fill every empty moment of our days with noise. If we find ourselves caught in a sudden moment of silence in the car, we turn on the radio. The TV plays the background music to the silence of our eating. Even those of us who prefer to read gladly use the voice of our inner narrator to replace our inner silence. We fill every moment of silence with conversations, podcasts, music, TikTok, and YouTube, from our breakfasts to our midday walks to the most intimate moments right before we go to sleep. And even in those rare moments when we do not produce noise, we are inevitably confronted with machines that do. Most of the time, we don’t notice, but perhaps on one of those rare sick days or sleepless nights, some of us have suddenly thought to ourselves: “How loud, this the ticking of the clock…” “How noticeable, this noise of the washing machine…” “How uninspiring this constant zooming of the air vents…”

To certain animals, our constant noise is more than just ‘uninspiring’ - it is destructive. Barn Owls need our silence to hunt. In the dark of night, they are fully reliant on their impeccable hearing to spot their prey. With their uniquely shaped faces, they capture and locate sounds like a satellite dish. As such, they can hear mice moving under the snow, in tall grass, or hidden under a pile of leaves. The ears of Barn Owls are hidden beneath the feathers on the sides of their faces. Both of their ears are positioned at different heights, allowing the birds to determine the exact location and height of their prey. They then approach it flying in complete silence, so as not to lose their prey ‘out of hearing’ before catching it in their claws. Almost all other birds inevitably make noise when flying, but the Barn Owl truly is the master of silence. Its wings are uniquely shaped to silent perfection.

The noise of a highway is as deafening to a Barn Owl as the headlights of our cars are blinding to deer. If our structural noise gets too loud, the Barn Owl loses its ability to find food. Since the Industrial Revolution, sensory pollution has been one of the red flags of our increasingly toxic narcissistic relationship with our natural environment. Not only do we blind the deer, we also blind ourselves. Light pollution has blinded so many of us from seeing the Milky Way, even when the sky is clear. And noise pollution has deafened so many of us from hearing the majestic sound of silence, even in the dead of night.

I read a beautiful reflection on our modern noisiness by Robert Sarah, a Guinean Cardinal of the Catholic Church. In his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, he wrote: “Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often ‘truth’ is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies.”

“When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has no place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking.”

Such beautifully written wisdom. I almost entirely agree with my Franciscan brother on this matter. But I think there is one important difference between the Catholic monastic approach and the Islamic approach. The Catholic monastic solution to the problem of noise is to seek God in the silence of withdrawal. In monasteries, we find a silence that heals the heart. Brothers and sisters of various Catholic denominations wash their sins away in that purifying bath of silence, and find God in the absence of their own words.

The Qur’an, however, does not recommend a monastic life of withdrawal. I don’t believe that God is only found in silence, absence, and denouncement of the flesh. I believe that God speaks as loudly through silence as through the cry of an infant, a protest song for justice, or a conversation that turns two strangers into friends. Beyond withdrawal, for me, Islam is the way of beautiful integration. Of not annihilating the ego, but beautifying it. The Qur’an does not teach us that our bodily functions are bad, but just that we need to find a middle way with them. Don’t overconsume, but also don’t fast all year: there’s a time to eat and a time to fast. Don’t be promiscuous, but also don’t blind yourself to the beauty of love: marriage is a gift from God we ought to be grateful for. Speak up for truth and against injustice, but don’t engage in idle talk and gossip: your tongue can be your greatest friend or your strongest enemy.

In Surah Al-Isra’, ‘The Night Journey’, the seventeenth chapter of the Qur’an, God tells us: “Do not recite your prayers loudly or silently, but seek a way between” (Qur’an 17:110). Traditionally, the daily prayers that are offered whilst the sun is up are done in silence, whereas the night prayers are recited aloud. For me, this reinforces the central Islamic notion of striving towards balance. In the busyness of the day, we need silence to restore our internal balance and regain remembrance. And in the silence of the night, we need to raise our voices in remembrance, lest we forget.

It’s all about balance. As a whole, the noise of modernity has shifted us out of balance. It is as though through all the artificial noise and artificial light, our days never seem to set into the silence of the night. We are constantly alert, constantly engaged, and constantly plagued by noise. Perhaps that’s why, in that rare moment of silence in Death Valley, it did not even occur to me to pray fajr aloud. I was so thirsty for silence that I couldn’t bear the thought of spilling a drop of it, even in prayer. In the silence, I heard a prayer that I simply wanted to join. That I wanted to bathe in, like a nun in the silent waters of the monastic life.

So I think we see eye to eye, Cardinal Robert Sarah and I. We both long for the majesty of silence to be remembered and restored. And I think we both fear that the longer we continue to mindlessly entertain this maddening noise, the real threat is that that noise will turn to a not-so-very majestic silence. The silence of the death of the heart that no longer hears God’s speech, that no longer hears quiet insights on slow walks, that no longer hears the silent call of conscience from within, and that no longer hears the miracle of the soundless flight of the Barn Owl.