LENT arrives like a hand on the volume dial. It calls the Church — and all of us who follow her — into the wilderness, where the air is thin, the appetites are exposed, and the noise begins to fall away.
Noise is not merely sound. It is the constant demand to react; the pressure to comment; the habit of filling every silence with explanation, content, or activity. In a culture addicted to immediacy, noise becomes a form of safety. If we keep speaking, we do not have to listen; and if we keep moving, we do not have to feel.
The Church is not immune. We can be noisy in religious ways. We host, announce, programme, publish. We mistake communication for communion. Our committees multiply, our strategies expand, and our diaries fill. There is a kind of ecclesial confidence that assumes that the Church can think her way into renewal. If we can only get the words right, the structure right, the messaging right, then perhaps the life of God will follow? We tell ourselves that it is mission. The gospel suggests the opposite. The life of God is received, not manufactured, and reception requires listening.
LENT teaches this without fanfare. Jesus does not go into the wilderness to develop a programme. He goes into silence. He listens for the Father, and he is led not by outcomes, but by obedience. The wilderness contains no microphones.
There is a simple Lenten discipline that feels almost impossible now, and yet might be exactly what the Church needs: 40 days without noise. This does not mean 40 days without words, or without work. It means 40 days without unnecessary commentary. Without frantic reactivity. Without the need to have an instant take on every development, and without the constant pressure to prove relevance by staying loud.
The temptation within the Church is acute. We feel responsible. We are expected to respond, and we want to show leadership. Yet there is a difference between being responsible and being reactive. There is a difference between speaking because it is necessary, and speaking because silence makes us anxious.
LENT is a training in holy restraint: it teaches that not everything demands a reply, that the Church does not need to chase the world’s tempo, that the credibility of our witness depends not on how quickly we speak, but on whether our speech has been shaped by prayer.
Silence is not empty: it is inhabited. The silence of the liturgy is not awkwardness: it is reverence. It is the Church admitting that God is not a topic to be managed, but a presence to be received. There are churches that fear silence because they fear boredom; but boredom is not the enemy. The enemy is distraction, and the modern Church has often been distracted into shallowness.
We have become nervous of the numinous, uneasy with mystery, suspicious of stillness. We fill the service with words, fill the week with meetings, fill the year with plans. Yet the deepest things in the Christian life are often wordless: confession, grief, awe, adoration.
Lent returns us to these. It does not entertain us: it forms us. It does not keep us busy: it makes us attentive.
IMAGINE a Church that treated Lent not as an event calendar, but as a clearing: a Church that used these weeks to reduce output and increase prayer — to speak less and listen more; to let sermons shorten, meetings thin, and silence lengthen; to allow the wilderness to do its work.
The world is already full of noise. The Church does not need to add to it. She needs to offer an alternative: a space where words are fewer, but truer, where the soul can breathe, and where God can be heard again.
Lent does not silence the Church. It retunes her. It reminds her that speech without listening becomes noise. Forty days without noise will not make the Church weaker: it may make her credible. And the Church’s most credible public witness is not how quickly she responds, but how deeply she has listened before she speaks.
