Nothingness
I don't like silence, at least that's what I thought. I avoid silent places, I play loud music to read, to concentrate. My best place to ponder theology is in church, where someone is speaking loud enough to become background noise to place my thoughts on.
There is some truth to the claim that we younger ones have seriously short attention spans, and I've noticed that deep thought is not really done these days. But I cannot blame others, because I myself am caught in this. My "allergy" to silence is a symptom of another problem, my unwillingness to let my mind be Silent. I noticed I didn't mind the silence on a Starry night, when I start pondering constellations and distances. I always want my head engaged, I love to be entertained, to be lost in some intellectual riddle or concept. I love to be distracted, it's a problem.
Why do I want to be distracted so much? Maybe because I fear what the Silence reminds me of. You go to a cemetery, and what do you hear? Silence. It's a particular point to note that the dead do not speak, that life has dark sides, places of "nothingness". The ceaseless noise keeps me, and I suspect a lot of others insulated from the reality of death and the dark side of living in this broken world. We simply have no answer to the nothingness, we run from it. We prefer to ignore the emptiness of it all, rather than despair at the futility of our believed lonely existence.
You would think that as a believer, someone who trusts in the one we say is limitless being, who I believe, as a Christian, incarnated in order to save us from this very nothingness, that the problem is solved. But faith is not magic, and we have to learn to believe what we believe. Strange statement yes, but it's true. In this broken system of postmodernity where we breathe nihilistic air, it's easy to forget your faith in every day life. But the fight continues. For those fighting alongside me, I hope you've not given up?