Don't Forget to Listen . . .
The Museum of Curiosity, live stream on bbc.co.uk/radio4 on Wednesday, March 26, 6:30 PM GMT, 1:30 PM EDT, 11:30 AM Pacific and 10:30 AM Alaska time, with John Lloyd (Spitting Image, Blackadder, Not the Nine O'Clock News, QI), comedians Bill Bailey and Alan Davies, cosmologist John Gribbin and Maggie Ross/Martha Reeves. You can also listen again for a week after the broadcast. Information at the BBC website.
posted by Maggie Ross at 2:21 pm
3 Comments:
I heard you on Radio 4 and was intrigued to find your blog
I go to a mega church as you refer to them and am always trying to catch that small piece of spirituality that flits in and out of my peripheral "vision". I have to force myself to look for silence amongst the chaos of our service and cant help thinking that if instead of shouting out to God we could spend the whole service listening, it might reveal a lot more of His glory
I am going to work my way through your archives and no doubt will post a lot more comments. Feel free to ignore them and continue your silence. Thanks for revealing a different way to praise our Lord
Phil
Hi Martha
I really enjoyed your comments on silence in schools on Radio Four last night. I am writing a piece to advocate the introduction of periods of silence to the curriculum and wondered what your sources for the history of silence in schools were. I could not agree more with your comments on our ability to listen in today's information heavy, text rich environment leaving us no knowledge of the sound from within from an excessively early age.
Many thanks and best wishes
Cecily
Dear Cecily,
Here is one source: Georges Duby and Philippe Braunstein, “The Emergence of the Individual” in A History of Private Life, vol. II, Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 1988), 619.
Mary Carruthers has done a lot of work on memory but she refuses to allow silence as "non-rational"—a lot of medieval scholars are afraid of being accused of being religious.
Silence may be the source of religion but can be accessed, used, and benefited from without that sort of language or propositional belief. See some of the recent sermons in this blog and my article on adoration in the current issue of "Weavings."
Because silence has dropped out of sight both of scholarship and most of what passes for religion, we no longer understand how to interpret and apply texts, create liturgies, or engage in the sort of mental activity that generates and enhances creativity.
We taped the show for two hours: unfortunately a lot of the remarks pertinent to your question were edited out. For example, John Gribbin and I agreed that science is a series of metaphors for what we can measure and religion is a series of metaphors for what we can't. Not entirely irrelevant to the present topic is that Bill Bailey set me up with some reference to Daniel, to which I responded by pointing out that it's Daniel who teaches us to read between the lions. [long, rolling laugh]
Thanks so much for writing.
Martha
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