“No more lip from you now, d’ya hear?”

Often in life we hear these angry or frustrated words on the streets of our city, at the check-out or on buses, especially at the end of a long and busy day when the parent or guardian can just take no more “lip”, as they call it.  Yet,  if it were only coming from the lip it would merely be a whisper.  (it is probably the combustion-driven voice box that causes most upset!) 

The Whisperers

Only last week I heard a playwright describe so beautifully a couple she used to visit in her childhood days.  It was such a joy for her to leave the hurly burly of her own home and go to the home of this elderly couple.  “You know”, she said, “there was such peace in that home that this couple seemed to talk in whispers and they could still hear each other”. She had just left a home where the last words were of her mother saying: “Go out and play for I can’t hear me ears”!

“You know, it’s bad manners to whisper in company”

This is what we were taught. Never whisper in company. Yet many people are now complaining that they suspect private conversations are going on at meetings as people are texting one another. I suppose you could call this  “electronic whispering”! (Need to take a  patent out on this one!)

“Cogar mé seo”

In Gaelic this means to gently intimate in a whisper, some confidential or personal information.  It is an invitation we receive in places like St. Peter’s,  made holy everyday,  by the many prayers whispered on the lips.  This is our temple, our place of quiet, of solitude, of tranquillity.  Jesus is angry today. They have turned the temple into a market place. Our sensibilities are hurt also when people just forget and turn our churches into market places of noisy exchanges on public occasions. Yet, on occasions like this it is unlikely that Jesus would shout out: “no more lip now”  but rather “more lip and less noise, more whispers and less banter, for my house shall be called a house of prayer”!

Could we make St. Peters a house of whispering prayer in these weeks leading up to the Week of Great Silence?

Fr. Michael McCullagh, CM

19th March, 2006