Sometimes Quiet is Violent

The Hsu family has been listening to a lot of Twenty One Pilots lately. Little Kyrie’s favorite is Doubt and Carissa can’t choose between Semi-Automatic, Trees and The Judge. One of the great things about their music is that, not only is it catchy, but the lyrics also give you a lot to chew on. One that has stuck with me the past few months is the song Car Radio.

Checkout the song before reading on:

The verses are talking about a true story of me being late to class…and I forgot to lock my door and when I came back out everything had been gutted and stolen out my car. At the time financially I was not able to replace anything that was taken, the GPS, the radio, all my CD’s. When I get in the car my first reaction is to put the radio on and for a while I wasn’t able to do that and finding out that once I removed that piece of me I realised that sometimes music can act as a distraction and can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.”

It’s true that quiet can be violent. When there’s no sound to hide behind we get antsy because we dread the oncoming onslaught of silence. And so we click open a browser, turn on the car radio, swipe open our phones. We fill our lives with noise. And it is this immediate stream of stimulation that keeps us living in a constant state of distraction. And as Tyler puts it, “it can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.” Sometimes what we need is to take a long look at the ugly parts of us that, if ignored for too long, will deform us in ways we never intended. This is no easy thing to do.

It is why I love the line, “Faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think and for us to think is to be alive and I will try with every rhyme to come across like I am dying to let you know you need to try to think.”

We often equate noise with being alive, with being awake, where, really, the opposite is true. Noise is what allows us to sleep walk through life, “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). As one writer aptly observed, “We live in an age of continuous partial attention.” This is our default setting.

Faith, on the other hand, points to an attentiveness that believes there is more to life than what is determined by our default setting. And to see with the eyes of faith requires the space silence creates in order for us to think. As renowned priest, Henri Nouwen, so matter of factly stated, “Without silence and solitude it is impossible to live a spiritual life.” It is an impossibility because such a life is nourished and sustained by what can only be heard when we quiet all the voices that bombard us everyday. When, in silence, we try and hear the only voice that matters.

So maybe we should all get our car radios stolen. Or maybe we can simply try and keep them off.