Pop 89: A little peace and quiet
By Madonna Hamel
“I had to leave for the library to find some peace and quiet,” I told my sister, returning to her house to work on this column. “So I went to the hockey rink!” She laughs and nods. She understands; she has worked in libraries for years. “They call libraries ‘resource centres’ now,” she says. I tell her I understand the desire to be a welcoming haven for everyone, but the library seems less a haven and more an after-school hangout for kids waiting for their parents to get off work. “Five nine-year-olds were sitting at the table behind me - well, more like jogging on the spot- playing a video game which involved a guy trying to eat a penguin!”
I was not yet nine when I first entered a public library. It was evening, and it had been raining. I remember Mom and I climbing the steps, and when she opened the heavy front doors, light spilled from the warm and well-lit front hall, and the wet steps shone in the light. And yes, there was silence. But it was not a stifling silence - in fact, its very presence allowed for the echoes of other things: soft voices of women at the check-out counter, book trollies, pens scribbling and, most of all, those inner voices that allowed me to speculate at what lay inside all those books. I imagined hearing the voices of the characters calling me. Nobody shushed me. Nobody had to.
Today, the voices are not the subtle, accented whispers I imagined drifting through the spines of books, but the squealing of kids playing video games or repeatedly climbing up onto then jumping from the mini plastic story-time chairs. I want to ask their parents: how do your children fall in love with the buried treasure lurking and languishing, untouched, on the library shelves? But I’m afraid I’ll grumpily blurt: how is this free-for-all helping them learn about silence? Discipline? Boundaries? Respect?
I’ve always been skeptical of efforts made to “keep with the times.” It smacks of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Whose “time” are we trying to keep up with? Who sets the pace? I suspect that’s why, for some of us, the longer we live, the more we come to respect certain traditions. We come to understand which traditions are worth maintaining, which are indispensable habits of soul-survival.
On that first library visit Mom showed me the children’s section but assured me the whole place was open to exploration. I was thrilled to be left alone - free to lift whatever book called to me from the stacks, vying for my attention, promising to transport me into a whole other realm and time, not necessarily “the times.”
Perhaps the streak of traditionalism that runs through me, begging for quiet places, is the same one that longs for holy places because you can’t have one without the other. Silence is Golden, we were taught. Yes, but not because you have no right to be heard or because your witness impact statement is being stifled, but because silence is where we find our soul. Without silence, how do we slow our minds down and focus on what truly matters to us? How do we concentrate? How do we get comfortable with waking up alone in the middle of the night? Maybe even hear voices emanating from books on library shelves?
The next morning, I go to church to sink into the psalms and rituals and the replaying of the confounding Mystery of Faith. But I find I can’t concentrate on the priest’s words because the two kids in front of me are fighting over a Tonka truck, and the four kids in the pew across from me are playing hide and seek. I should find this adorable, even refreshing, I know. But I don’t. I find it annoying. In fact, I cuss to myself in the middle of mass: Where do I go to find a little peace and quiet?
Grasslands National Park, where I live, and long to return, was dubbed the quietest place in North America. But when I returned to the city to care for my dad after his stroke, I expected to be confronted with the steady din of traffic on busy streets. And I looked forward to the hum and chatter of coffee shops. I just hadn’t planned for shrieks and mayhem in libraries and churches.
“Surely the pre-condition for both intellectual and spiritual discovery is a focussed and blessed silence?” I ask a friend, who is also parent, after Sunday’s mass. Her answer is that “children need to experience church as a happy places, so that they will return again and again.” “Do they?” I ask.
Happy is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of church. (Except when I recall singing as a family choir.) But happiness was never the goal. I felt many things when I heard the stories, like Magdalen at the empty tomb and Mary coming face to face with an extraterrestrial, but happiness was not one of them. More like: Awed. Moved. Troubled. Confounded. Curious. A subtle and ineffable longing. A vague awareness of something beyond words that made me willing to listen a little longer. To sit still and hopefully enter into The Mystery.
And anyway, why are we assuming that noisy children are necessarily happy children? Aren’t we just teaching them to be like us, looking for distractions whenever restlessness, irritation, and boredom hits? “Hmmm, I doubt child monks in saffron robes run roughshod in Buddhist temples,” I murmur.
Noise chases away the subtle feelings of awe and yearning as it chases away critters from their private dens and nests. Without silence, Mystery is just another genre in another aisle in the noisy library. Noise might keep my nagging fears, doubts and boredoms at bay, but libraries and churches helped me to learn to face them and to ask for relief from them.