As the Advent of Christmas is fully on us, two of my senses are overwhelmed with the sights and sounds or Christmas: All of the blinking Christmas lights and then the music. I love Christmas music. Some of songs make me laugh and some of them make me cry but they all make me happy when I hear them. I love sitting in our van listening to the music that our Christmas lights are synchronized to. But there are some people that can’t get the full effect our light displays because they can’t hear.
I have been fortunate that throughout my life I have a wide variety of friends. Not just male or female, young and old but I have had the pleasure of friendships with people from many different cultures and backgrounds. I have learned a smattering of words in several languages and how to cook some really wonderful foods. I even have friends that are a bit out of the ordinary. I count among my friends someone who is blind and a few who are deaf or hearing impaired.
I was visiting with one of my dear friends who is hearing impaired and we were watching my lights and I realized that for her, it was just lights randomly blinking. She could not hear the pure musical tones to Silent Night so what was the huge attraction of the blinking lights?
My deaf friends live in a silent world that most of us think we long for. There are days when I just don’t want to hear anything and every little noise wakes me up or gets on my last nerve. And I suffer from Tinnitus so I always have a high pitched sound going on in my head that really gets loud at times. I never have total silence with that going off in my head.
Today, (Sunday), I had some Christmas gifts that I had to work on and this article to write and I thought I would block out everything to stop me from being distracted from people walking around overhead and dogs barking and the washing machine churning and the heater coming on and going off. Then there was a football game, the girls fixing a meal, more laundry, the sound of the hot water going through the pipes making its crazy knocking sounds and the squeak in my chair. Toss in someone upstairs singing slightly off-key at times and there is a cacophony of pure racket.
I keep earplugs handy so I popped some into my ears and blocked out the external sounds. Alas the tinny ringing is still going strong but I could not hear anything else. No cell phone, no tv, no washing machine….silence. ahhhh.
But is it really so wonderful? Just think about not being able to hear. You don’t hear everything going on around you. Unless people are directly in your line of sight and you see their lips moving, you don’t realize or catch everything that is going on around you. People behind you might say something and when you don’t respond, they don’t take the time to figure out that you don’t hear. Or even worse, they KNOW you can’t hear and they treat you like you don’t have good sense.
I have seen this happen with my dear friends. People take advantage of their deafness or say ugly things about them right in their presence knowing that they don’t understand. They don’t even try to communicate with them. That is almost too much for me to bear. I am trying to learn to better communicate with her and I am slowly learning another language called Sign because I know that I am a hard person to try and lip read. And I with help from my friend I know that I will learn more and more of her language and her silent world.
As I sit here in my self-imposed sound deprivation I realize that for my friend, Christmas has always been about the Silent Night. It is in the silence that we hear the whisper of Gods voice. My friend has been blessed to truly know the holiness of the Silent Night.
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