Breaking Silence
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| La Sainte Chappelle in Paris, from Monks and Mermaids, a Benedictine blog |
I’m up there in the pulpit in the
middle of the sermon when the first car alarm goes off. The woman whose car it
is doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids so she doesn’t notice it. I pretend
not to. For some reason, one of the tenors in the choir thinks it’s his car and
he makes his way out of the choir stall, treading over the other choristers’
feet, then across the uncarpeted side aisle, out of the sanctuary and into the
parking lot.
Now another car alarm begins to go
off. A second choir member decides it must be his car.
I keep preaching.
Then both alarms stop. Both men
come back into the sanctuary, down the side aisle and noisily back into the
choir loft. Mission
accomplished. And I’ve only got a few more pages to go.
But then the car alarm goes off
again. It’s the same car alarm that had gone off the first time and the tenor
now recognizes that it hadn’t been his alarm
that had gone off before. Somehow he’s figured out that it’s the car belonging
to the woman who doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids.
So the tenor decides it’s a good
idea to go tell her about it. But just as he is stepping down from the choir
loft again, the second car alarm starts up again. And this time a third car
alarm goes off. It’s like a parking lot full of wailing toddlers—it only takes
one to set them all off.
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| Princton Bulldogs |
I see the tenor walking toward the
woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids. Then a man in a red tie gets up from
about halfway back in the pews. He thinks one of those alarms is his. He makes
his way out of the sanctuary to the door into the church foyer. Then I see a
woman sitting toward the front. She’s been holding her baby, but now she hands
the baby off to her husband and sprints after the man going to the back of the
sanctuary. Suddenly it all seems like a football play, the two of them setting
up an offensive formation. I expect the husband to lob the baby into the choir
loft. Whatever happens, I hope it’s a completed pass.
Meanwhile, the tenor has made it
over to the pew where the woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids is sitting.
She is looking up at me with a rapt smile. So she jumps in surprise when the
tenor stands at her shoulder and tries to tell her about the car alarm. It’s
easy to see she’s confused. I find out later she hadn’t even realized she had a security alarm in her car. So
naturally she would have had no idea how to turn it off even if she had heard
it.
She gets up slowly, a little
stiffly and she and the tenor join the others going into the parking lot. After
a bit we hear the car alarms turn off, one by one. Then the man in the red tie,
the tenor, the young mother and the woman who hates her hearing aids, each of
them holding their car keys, come back to their pews. I keep right on
preaching, now just a half-a-page away from the ‘Amen.’
“Rabbi,
what can we learn from the sound of a car alarm?”
“That
what you need to hear is not always what you are listening for.”
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