Not many people take vows of silence anymore and it shows. In 1965, the United States was home to 180,000 catholic sisters. Now, due to harsh conditions, loud environments, invasive species such traffic and people taking speakers on hikes, only 42,000 nuns remain. At this rate, by 2050, there will be fewer than 1,000 nuns left in the country. This puts nuns on par with the Sunda Island Tiger with estimates of only 600 left in the world.
I must make a confession: Nuns don’t actually take a vow of silence.
However, talking is prohibited during many activities such as work silence, time of prayer, magnum silentium, probably mime practice and the great silence that ends and begins each day. In the movie Sister Act, Whoopi Goldberg found herself at odds with all these silences when faced with the need of reading her script out loud. At the end of filming, it was thought she had gotten it out of her system but Sister Act 2 proved that hope barren.
The average human speaks 10,000 words per day. To put that in perspective, a 200-page book is roughly 50,000 words. Every 5 days, you speak a novel of “how bout that weather?” and “a lot of traffic today” and “I can’t function until I’ve had my coffee” and “OMG, that’s so fetch!”
Based upon no research, a nun probably speaks a mere fraction of those words. Why bother to speak if prayers go unanswered?
With the rest of us speaking novels into existence weekly, it has become the wild west of righteousness and opinion slinging as we shoulder half-informed ideals like Atlas holding up the world except our foundations is slippery when in actuality, we’re all lost in need of an atlas.
There is a lesson the women of the cloth are teaching us through example. We should have less opinions. It’s nun of our business.
But alas, the opinionless is an already extinct species which is why we urge you, reader, to not let the nun go the way of the dodo. The next time you see a stranger going about their day, remember, it’s nun of your business.