LIVING IN THE SILENCE

Family communication

Did you know that husbands and wives speak to each other on average, only about seven minutes a day and fathers and teenage sons manage only around seventy seconds a day?  Which family member would you say gets the most communication directed to them?  The family pet!

In Western culture, more people are suffer the pain of loneliness and alienation than go without food, shelter or clothing.  Even when living under one roof there is no guarantee that we will get to know one another.  Television, twitter and facebook haven’t helped.  Everyone seems to be spending more time connecting with others via technology than relating to those in the room with them.  Recent news items in the UK reported children were being neglected by mums addicted to facebook, and a common sight is children playing in a playground while mum or dad checks emails on the phone.  Whatever happened to those conversations that enabled us to enter and share each other’s worlds?  It is all very well to have the idea of a happy family, but every now and then we have to look at our lives and make sure we structure them so as to give space for relationships.  Mother Teresa’s comment was an insightful one:  “There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty: it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”