In Praise of Annoying Noises

Credit Richard Catabay on Unsplash

It is lawn-care season in our neighborhood: mowers, chainsaws, weed eaters, leaf blowers, and unknown machines of shrill frequencies shredding the birdsong and breezes at any given time. Of course, our own household contributes to this cacophony with our efforts to keep the grass at a socially-acceptable height, so I have no basis to blame. But I have been wrestling lately with forming a redeemed view of annoying noises. What if car alarms and jackhammers, barking dogs and chewing mouths, even the strains of music outside one’s range of taste could all be doors to holiness, peace, and even joy?

One helpful guide in this quandary is St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the “Little Flower” who quietly sought to love God and neighbor in a French monastery before her death at age 24 from tuberculosis. In her deeply human and humble autobiography The Story of a Soul, she describes a Sister who would make a “strange little noise” at evening prayers. The Sister’s annoying tic, which sounded like two shells rubbing against each other, caused St. Thérèse such great agitation that she began to sweat profusely. Though St. Thérèse wanted to give the Sister (who was happily oblivious to her disruption of evening prayers) a look, she felt compelled to suffer the irritation for the love of God and the love of her Sister in Christ:

“I was obliged to simply pray a prayer of suffering. But as I was suffering, I was seeking the way to undergo it, not with agitation, but with joy and peace, at least in the innermost part of my soul. So I made every effort to love that little noise that was so unpleasant. Instead of trying not to hear it (which would be impossible) I placed all my attention on hearing it well, as if it had been a delightful concert, and my whole prayer…was spent in offering that concert to Jesus.”

Rather than let the irksome noise disfigure into a reason for disliking or even hating her fellow Sister, St. Thérèse goes beyond overlooking it, to embracing it out of love. The ugly, aberrant tic becomes something of order and beauty. The jarring disruption to prayer becomes a path to prayer. Loving the noise becomes a way of loving the neighbor.

Instead of getting irritated at a neighbor who obsessively leafblows (particularly, it seems on Sabbath afternoons!), what if I accepted the noise as a way of loving my fellow human being? What if I offered the concert to Jesus? What if aggravating noises could be doors to prayer, that is, to intimacy with God, the one who created ears and created humans who create noisy objects and surely has a perfect sense of humor about the whole thing?

St. Thérèse’s resolution to regard the shell-scraping sound as a “concert” reminds me of poet Billy Collins’ famous poem “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House.” Nearly a century after St. Thérèse wrote her reflections, Collins describes a neighbors’ dog barking “the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time they leave the house.” At first, the annoyed narrator tries to muffle the incessant barking with a Beethoven symphony reeling at full blast. But it does not help. Like St. Thérèse, he realizes that trying not to hear the sound does not help. 

Like St. Thérèse, Collins plays with what it would be like to actually embrace the enervating noise rather than resist it. He imagines the dog sitting in the orchestra as part of Beethoven’s symphony, as if the barking weren’t an aberration, but an intended part of the whole. In this redeemed, imaginative perspective, “the other musicians listen in respectful / silence to the / famous barking dog solo, / that endless coda that first established / Beethoven as an innovative genius.” To St. Thérèse’s prayerful, loving posture, Collins adds the encouragement to see annoying noises with imagination and humor.

Perhaps if there can be parts for barking dogs in the orchestra, there can be parts for lawnmowers and weed eaters, too. Just like there can be parts for each of us who will inevitably annoy our fellow neighbors (“Who can discern his errors?” sings the Psalmist, “Declare me innocent from hidden faults” [Ps. 19:12])--and who are called to give and receive forgiveness, as incessantly as dogs bark and weed eaters whine, again and again and again.

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This series is inspired by my new book In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries (Calla Press) now available for purchase.Click here to join my e-letterfor more quiet reflections, book updates, and a few of my favorite things!