August 7 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Somewhere on the dusty shelf of books I read to my children when they were young is a little volume called A Hole Is to Dig. Each charmingly illustrated page declares the purpose of something: "A pile of leaves is to jump in." "A mud puddle is to slide in and go 'Oodlee-oodlee-oo!'" And so on. The reasoning is sound, if you're a child. The world is made for our general entertainment; it gives us things to do and pleasures to revel in. There's something rather poignant about reading the book as an adult, having developed a much more pragmatic sense of the purposes of things like holes (to fill in before someone trips and sues you) or piles of leaves (to put into plastic bags before the Thursday pickup) or mud (to be scraped off boots before stepping on the carpet). The same pragmatism that turns a tired and jaundiced eye toward holes and mud seems to inform the liturgical sensibility reflected in churches I've attended of late, on the purpose of silence. Silence, it seems, is to be filled. I suppose we inherit this sense of silence as "dead air time" from radio and TV, where every second of time not pulsing with a voice or image is "lost" or "dead." Silence, like prime time and airwaves, has become a commodity to be bought, sold, filled, framed, and obliterated: a "nothing" that must be made into a "something." Our church bulletin, preserving some vestige of antique decorum, still reminds us in italics just above the "Words of Welcome" that we may use the minutes before the service to "gather ourselves for worship in silence." Oddly, though, this kindly invitation seems to be the one printed rubric that is routinely ignored. Not only is that time of "silence" filled with music (and I would be the first to attest that the ...