Learning to Hear Ourselves Think Again

Lewis on Noise, Silence, and the Beauty of Properly Paying Attention

It’s never been easier to avoid being alone with your thoughts. As C. S. Lewis observed, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”¹

In the eighty years since Lewis wrote these words, we’ve only become more starved for silence. Research shows that the “normal” noise threshold has steadily risen—each generation tolerating as “normal” what the previous one called “too loud.” But regardless of how we perceive it, sustained exposure above fifty-five decibels (roughly the noise level of a busy office) produces subtle but steady physiological stress.²

Beyond literal noise, there’s also the existential noise from our digital devices. Our world’s cleverest minds work night and day to perfectly engineer devices to safeguard us from quiet boredom. At our convenience, our screens can chip away every millisecond of dead air we might accidentally stumble into.

Even churches—historically places of calm respite—aren’t immune.³ Many now produce and curate gatherings that unintentionally crowd out stillness. With noble intentions, we layer gatherings with tips and tricks that mirror social media engagement strategies (like and subscribe for eternal life!).

While this may come across like old-man-complaining-about-“kids-these-days” syndrome, it isn’t new. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote almost two centuries ago, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence!”⁴ Similarly, A. W. Tozer thought that making church gatherings noisy was a “monstrous heresy.”⁵ And of course, there’s Pascal’s infamous theory that most problems arise from our inability to sit in a quiet room alone.⁶

The theory remains piercingly accurate. We don’t avoid silence purely because we love noise; we avoid quiet because it’s uncomfortable. But, as Pascal warned, avoiding this discomfort merely prolongs our problems; avoidance can’t remedy our deepest aches.

The mind unfettered by stimulation is mysteriously restorative. In one way or another, many of history’s greatest minds have stumbled into this wisdom. Silence stings. It’s like pouring peroxide on a wound. So we typically resist, but if we pull away, we forfeit the chance to heal.

Lewis doesn’t just diagnose this problem—he also champions the way through it. He began his final sermon by admitting that he often approached his quiet time with a sense of timidity. Not because he feared he wouldn’t meet God, but because he knew he would.⁷ If he wasn’t careful, God might maneuver past Lewis’s rote prayers. Then, in the silence, God might tell him to do something he’d rather not do, such as skip his extra morning cigarette, or, worse, tear up the sharply worded letter he was about to send to someone who’d been rude to him.

Beneath the humor is a serious insight: Capturing the thoughts that enter the mind amid prayer is a panacea for our human ailments. We move past filling in every gap with empty words and meet God.

Avoiding silence might feel pleasant, but it delays growth. By rejecting quiet, we reject opportunities to mature beyond those emotional insecurities that tell us we must win every fight to be content.

The boredom of raw silence is the ideal venue for weaning our overstimulated minds from noise fatigue. As Lewis wrote in a poem about trying to wind down in the evening, “O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.”⁸ The peace we long for lies on the other side of what we avoid in the quiet.

However, the tricky part is adjusting our overstimulated brains to quiet. Lewis understood this intimately, but cleverly transposed distraction into an opportunity. When Screwtape coaches his apprentice on how to sabotage a man’s prayer life, he advises stirring up a guilt complex about prayer-time distractions:

“When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavours, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm.”⁹

Our enemy loses ground when we stop rejecting the silent wandering mind and embrace it as the very substance of raw prayer. The distractions we interpret as an excuse to call ourselves undisciplined are often exactly what God wants to surface. This is one way Lewis is practically mystic; the anxious thoughts, the unresolved conflicts, the quiet guilts we keep scrolling past—taking these captive is often the doorway to God and true peace.¹⁰

Silence is a natural means toward intimacy. When we first begin to pray, we tend to fill every void with rambling, petitioning—explaining ourselves as if God requires a briefing. Over time, persistence guarantees that we start to say less. We trust He already knows our hearts because He is greater than them.

In a letter to a friend, Lewis offered this reassurance: “Our minds are in ruins before we bring them to Him and the rebuilding is gradual.”¹¹ For beginners on the path of rebuilding, he suggested starting with practicing concentration:

“It may help to practice concentration on other objects twice a week quite apart from one’s prayer: i.e. sit down looking at some physical object (say, a flower) and try for a few minutes to attend exclusively to it, quietly (never impatiently) rejecting the train of thought and imagination which keep starting up.”¹²

Beyond structured concentration, there’s a simpler practice: sitting quietly, often in nature, with no agenda at all.¹³ It’s essentially just the practice of detoxing from urban noise long enough to soak in the world around us. We may achieve nothing other than staring at the foliage, but it calms and declutters the mind so God can fill it.

Even this kind of quiet “soaking” becomes a form of worship—and worship itself is a unique form of joy. Lewis believed that God’s desire for us to praise Him was never coercive or selfish; rather, we’re to praise Him because it’s life-giving. In the same way that praising artwork can elevate our minds to a new standard of beauty, so admiring something as glorious as God leads us into truer, heightened joy. And while expressing praise through words and song could do the trick, Lewis mentioned that silent reverence is just as powerful. Silent awe is a “necessary reaction: the divine light sent back to its Source from the creature which has become its mirror. The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it: but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.”¹⁴

For Lewis, silence was always instrumental, never ultimate. The goal wasn’t pursuing mystical stillness for its own sake. I doubt any would disagree that Lewis’s chief aim was one and the same with the New Testament’s: love. Silence is a means to love—quieting our compulsions so we can receive and give it more freely.

It may begin simply: five minutes without your phone, a quiet walk, or a prayer without words. The silence that some experience as agony may become, gradually, eventually, progressively the place we most want to be.

-Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Gooch’s writing has appeared on Christianity Today, Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition and this October he will be a speaker at the C.S. Lewis Festival in Petoskey, MI. He writes most frequently on Substack.

1. C. S. Lewis, “Membership,” in The Weight of Glory. HarperOne, 2001.

2. Jamie L. Banks and Elaine A. Cohen Hubal, “Noise: A Public Health Problem,” Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology 35 (2025): 1–2; Mengjie Gong, et al., “How Does the Urban Environment Shape Noise Perception? Evidence from a Longitudinal Study in New York City,” Urban Informatics 4 (2025): Article 24.

3. For an overview of the role of silence in Christian history, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (New York: Viking, 2013).

4. Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 47.

5. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1948), 90.

6. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 139.

7. C. S. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue,” in The Weight of Glory. HarperOne, 2001.

8. C. S. Lewis, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” in Poems. HarperOne, 2017.

9. C. S. Lewis, “Letter 27,” in The Screwtape Letters (Deluxe Edition). HarperOne, 2026.

10. On Lewis’s mysticism, see David C. Downing, “Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C.S. Lewis,” Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016: Vol. 4, Article 13, https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol4/iss1/1; see also the upcoming The Everyday Mysticism of C.S. Lewis by Gary Selby.

11. C. S. Lewis, Letters on Living the Faith (HarperOne, 2026).

12. C. S. Lewis, Letters on Living the Faith (HarperOne, 2026).

13. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 1, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperOne, 2009), 608.

14. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperOne, 2009), 763.