Stop disturbing the peace... (sounding board).

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I PARKED MY AGING SCOUT above Wyoming's Red Canyon and surveyed that rust bluff circuited by unpaved roads. Nothing moved below. No livestock, no farm machines, no people. Birds were absent in that cloudless sky. Behind me, State Highway 28 was devoid of traffic. For those few moments on a muted Tuesday the world was still. I thought to myself then, and I reflect now, that few Americans will ever experience that sensation of complete quiet.

And yet we are called to silence, to meditation. We're told this is when God speaks to us, and our memory and instincts confirm that truism. We need freedom from noise to hear, to understand, to pray. A cloistered monk once tried to persuade me that we all have a contemplative dimension. If so, we're in deep denial.

The truth is, we don't welcome this state. We fear silence. Samuel Beckett recognized this decades ago when his two expectant wayfarers fought their boredom. In his play Waiting for Godot, Vladimir urges Estragon to say something, to say anything, to sing even.

"It's so we won't think," Estragon agrees.

They don't want to hear the dead voices that sound like ashes or sand or wings or leaves. Still, some silences interrupt.

"This is awful," Vladimir says of these intrusions.

We are like these Waiting for Godot characters. We arrive home from work and turn on the television set, even though we don't plan to watch it.

En route to our workplaces, morning and evening, we punch in a radio station to fill the void. If our hormones are fresher, we crank up the battery of speakers that engulf the car's interior and thump through the evening suburbs. We tote awkward boomboxes or affix plugs to our ears, ingesting decibels, oblivious to our surroundings. Or we raise the ubiquitous cell phone to our head, reciting gossip, grocery lists, or other neglected trivia. Observe the passengers exiting airplanes where they've had to practice cellular celibacy for two or three hours. Before they clear the waiting area, their instruments are unfolded and slapped into place.

Everywhere we exhibit this addiction to aural stimulation, perhaps faulting God for failing to provide our lives with soundtracks, like those supplied to our film icons. We've become immune to noise, laborers in the proverbial boiler factories.

When I hear teens, straddling their cars, complaining about there being nothing to do in their cities, despite the expanding menu of entertainment options, I suspect they are really saying their town isn't loud enough, that it lacks that mind-blowing amplification that defines a great metropolis.

ALL OF THIS MIGHT BE MERELY A DE GUSTIBUS ARGUMENT unless you consider what this disturbing ambience does to thought or creativity or belief. You can't appreciate a phrase like "I am in the Father, and the Father is in me" when distracted by fortissimo influence. You can't meditate on the mysteries of the rosary while being hammered by dissonance.

Artists know this, too. Writers advise other writers to cultivate silence and point out that there should be tension in the creative process but not in the creator's life. Inspiration slips in quietly.

Running parallel to this penchant for volume is the decline in our attention span. My brother, who's spent almost all his working life in network television, says executives there figure the attention span of the average audience to be seven seconds. You can test this yourself. Count the seconds between the different edits in your typical TV drama, say The West Wing or ER or NYPD Blue. You rarely see dissolves any more, unless you're watching an old movie channel on cable. Everything is based on quick cuts--two or three seconds, Half the commercials and half the feature films now rely on special effects. When I was in the advertising business, we used to hold statically on the brand name until it registered with the viewer. Now, even these "idents" move left or right, zoom in or out. It's like staring for hours into a strobe light.

Naturally this frenetic assault on our eyes and ears has an impact on religion. We are less tolerant of homilies, less impressed by simple rituals like the blessing of the congregation with holy water or the lighting of the Advent wreath. We covet excitement rather than absorption. It's hard to imagine a modern congregation mirroring my childhood awe when, as we sang "Good Night, Sweet Jesus," the Benediction lights were slowly turned off, tier by tier. Pretty primitive stuff, I admit.

I watch the children in the pew in front of me, with their coloring books and action figures and Lego units and plastic bags of Cheerios, and I remember my own youth when you paid attention to the Mass or you were rapped on the head with a missal--and not one of those wimpy paperback jobs but a hardbound copy bearing the extra weight of Latin. Our own children were also sans amusing or tasty Mass adjuncts. Still, if I were raising them today, I suppose I might opt for the toys and the treats. After all, they will spend nearly five hours a day looking at a television or computer screen. They would be conditioned to expect diversion.

WHEN I FIRST STARTED MAKING WEEKEND RETREATS, after surviving the soul-searching scrutiny of the Jesuit version, I enjoyed the silence. No conversation was allowed. Meals were sometimes awkward or amusing when you tried to hand-signal the salt or butter your way, but there was something magical in that enforced silence, something mentally cleansing. There are still silent retreats these days but many accommodate our more social culture and some add confrontation, role playings, and a lot of hugging.

For years the hour of Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament featured you solo or with a companion to whom you didn't speak. You were left alone with your thoughts and petitions. Now we have a manual with prescribed prayers, familiar litanies, exchanges from the left and right pews. During the pair of short silences mandated by the text, you start looking at your watch. How long before someone says something? Where is Estragon when you need him?

We really are afraid of silence, the way a telemarketer dreads a pause. We don't like verbal white space. We want to fill it, like those Celts who worked their convolutions into ever), margin of a manuscript. Keep the dialogue going, play something, drown out the silence.

And yet people confess they are often amazed when they do spend some quiet time on their decks or in their cars or even waiting in a doctor's office. Thoughts crowd into their heads, solutions appear, creative lines surface.

When did this all change? When did we start looking at the elderly woman kneeling in the pew with her rosary as an anachronism? When did we decide that activity was preferable to adoration?

Probably in the '60s, when so much was altered forever. The era satirized by Tom Wolfe in his essay on the "Me Generation" spawned so many encounter groups, so much confessional recitation. We grew to solicit support and affirmation. No doubt some of this teamwork is valuable, but we concurrently surrendered a certain amount of private reflection. We substituted sound for silence. And we began to inflict this addiction on others.

MANY SUMMERS AGO MY WIFE AND I ACCOMPANIED A neighbor couple on a Colorado camping trip. After arriving at a solitary meadow, we pitched the adjoining tents, set out the lawn chairs, distributed the beverages, and relaxed to the subtle murmur of a nearby brook. Just then a jeepload of yahoos invaded our retreat, mounted speakers blaring. They settled across the stream, hurling discord in our direction. I fantasized that it was the Old West and I could walk over there, using John Wayne's gait and voice, and after scolding these pilgrims, take out their speakers with my twin Colts. But I didn't. I suffered in--well, not silence.

What can we do? We can't retreat to the desert like Jesus or embrace a Trappist regimen, but we can reclaim some of that peace. Unplug the set. Power down the computer. Pocket the Palm Pilot. Leave the cell phone at home. Keep your fingers off the dial. Disconnect so you can connect. Welcome the void and listen to it.

Carpe silentium.

Seize the silence.

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ROBERT T. REILLY, a freelance writer who lives in Omaha, Nebraska.