Sometimes it can be hard to hear yourself think. The literal and figurative noise of the world can overwhelm our senses, our thoughts and our spiritual lives. On a recent trip abroad, I was confronted again and again with the incessant noise of a world that no longer knows how to be quiet or still or expectant. From planes and trains to restaurants and museums, people seem to be losing the ability to know when it might be necessary to turn down the volume.
At one point, on a train from Rome to Florence last month, a man in business class was blasting “reels” on his smartphone, so loud that you could tell the entire train car was restless. Then he started taking calls, allowing us to be privy to one side of his conversation. Finally, another man got up and, as gently as possible, asked him to please use headphones. It worked, for the most part, although even then, not completely. The scenario repeated again and again throughout my journey, and lest we think it’s an Italian thing, it’s not. I’ve encountered the same behavior on Amtrak trains to New York, in doctor’s offices, and too many other places here at home. I’m sure we all have. And we might wonder: How can people be so self-centered that they assume we all want to listen to their music, their videos, their conversations?
But I’m beginning to think it’s less about selfishness and more about fear — fear of what happens when we get quiet. What might we hear if we finally silence the encroaching madness of the world and just listen? Whenever I lead retreats, I ask participants to be silent from bedtime through breakfast the next morning. Most people are willing or even happy to give that brief period of enforced silence a try; others have told me they would have skipped my retreat if they’d understood they would need to eat a meal in silence. That might seem extreme on the surface, but silence can be scary and uncomfortable and challenging, and that’s exactly why we need more, not less, silence in our lives.
“Christian hope is not born in noise, but in the silence of an expectation filled with love. It is not the offspring of euphoria, but of trustful abandonment,” Pope Leo said in a General Audience last fall.
What does the “silence of expectation” look like for those of us living in an increasingly loud and demanding world? It means more than simply using headphones when we’re in public. It means first turning off the actual noise — whether that’s on our phones or on our TVs or in our email inbox — and then slowing down the need to fill every moment with an activity.
“We struggle to stop and rest. We live as if life were never enough. We rush to produce, to prove ourselves, to keep up,” Pope Leo said. “But the Gospel teaches us that knowing how to stop is an act of trust that we must learn to perform.”
I’m trying (not always successfully) to have more compassion for those who blast videos and conversations from their phones in public. It must be exhausting to need to fill every space in your own life, not to mention everyone else’s, with nonstop noise, but it’s a product of our culture and an upside view of what gives us value.
Society wants us to believe the chatter that tells us we are not enough and we don’t have enough, but that leaves us listening to all the wrong voices. Today, just for 10 minutes, turn off all sound and retreat to the quiet with Jesus. “It is precisely in that silence that the new life begins to ferment,” says Pope Leo. “Like a seed in the ground, like the darkness before dawn.”
This column originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of The Evangelist.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
