There Can be no Music Without Silence

We visited the Chapel of Silence in the middle of Helsinki the other day. The chapel was built to celebrate the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 program. Its design resembles the bow of a ship, or perhaps a huge egg. In any case, it was a unique experience. Its design is innovative and it recently received the International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum. It has been completely made of timber, Finland’s primary building and export material.

But while the chapel’s architectural beauty and innovation was interesting, it was the chapel’s use that was most appealing to me. You see, the Chapel of Silence is completely and solely reserved for just that – silence. In the busiest part of the largest and noisiest city in Finland, the chapel offers an opportunity to calm down and be silent. The chapel is not used for any Church services, no weddings, no christenings and no funerals. The chapel is solely reserved for meditation.

Entering the chapel was a surreal experience. As soon as the door had closed behind us, a complete and utter silence blanketed us. We could not hear a sound from outside. It was indeed a chapel of silence. And it was easy to be silent there; an oasis for the soul in the middle of a busy city.

It’s a challenge for us busy people to be silent. Actually it’s a challenge for us busy people, to be. Father John Main writes in The Hunger for Depth and Meaning, ‘We have to begin somewhere. We have to begin with ourselves. We have to begin by learning to be silent ourselves. We have to really begin by learning to be, to be ourselves, not to be as it were defining ourselves by some activity, whether that activity is some work or some thinking process, but simply to be.’

As the Finnish rock bank Poets of the Fall sing, ‘There can be no music without silence.’ Indeed, without silence, music is nothing but noise. It is the pauses, the moments of silence that make music captivating and understandable. So it is with life. Without silence, our spirits are unable to breathe. It’s only in silence that we discover that we love and are lovable. It’s only silence that makes life captivating and understandable. It’s only in silence that we learn to become fully ourselves, to be fully human, to borrow John Main’s words again.

Stereotypically, Finns are often described as silent and reserved. Words are often few and far between and very measured. Someone once said to me that silence and withdrawing to contemplation is a national past time in Finland. And visiting Finland for the first time in 20 years in summer, I have to agree. As soon as the summer holidays start, Finns desert their city apartments and head to small summer cottages by one of the country’s 180,000 lakes, to be silent, to heat the sauna and to sit in silence.

One Finn said to me recently that for him it’s a good thing if he doesn't see anyone for the five weeks he is there. He can simply be. He added that if he doesn't know how to be by himself, he doesn't really know how to be with others either. I think this is what Father John Main meant.

Although we've been in Finland only for a short time, we have already visited many holiday cottages.

We also visited our family’s old summer cottage near Helsinki, the place where we would ‘get away from it all’ during my childhood summers. I have many fond memories of the place and it brought me great joy to meet the family who now escape the busyness of life each summer and spend time there in solitude and silence.

The river near our summer cottage where I almost drowned as an eight-year-old. I remember not being very silent at that moment in time. 

So perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised by Helsinki’s Chapel of Silence. It’s to be expected of a country that is very comfortable with silence. Perhaps the only thing I should have been surprised about was that there was no sauna in the narthex.

Midnight sun -- A roadside pic just after midnight. We were returning home from our friends' summer cottage. This is as dark as it gets at the moment.