The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir by Donna McDonald

Author:Donna McDonald [McDonald, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, education, Special Education, General, Social Science, People With Disabilities
ISBN: 9781563685972
Google: qY1_ngEACAAJ
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Published: 2014-11-15T23:44:20.202915+00:00

9

In the Beginning Was the Word

When I say out loud the words, “the retreat by the sea,” I hear a dreamy singsong rhythm. They carry the beat of a nursery rhyme that a parent might tell her sleepy child, her head at rest on her pillow. I felt at rest at Bethel. The salt air, white sand, and blue shiver of the Pacific Ocean all cast their magic spell, but the most magical thing of all was the silence of companionship. The days of silence demanded a certain discipline for most hearing people, but I slid into it like a warm bath. The relief of moving among a group of people entirely unimpeded by the expectation that I would have to be on guard for sounds, watch for the direction in which they came from, decipher them, and respond to them by listening, speaking, laughing, or whatever was required of me was in itself restorative.

But the real gift of that silence lay in sharing it for five whole days and five whole nights with other people. I loved this. I loved eating my meals, reading the retreat literature, writing in my journal, watching the sea, and sitting alongside twenty other people all held in the spell of a companionable silence. I knew the silence of unwelcome aloneness and crushing loneliness, that drenching silence of melancholy; knew also the silence imposed by grief and terror; and the silence of guilt and anxiety too, of holding secrets that cannot be told. There’s another silence; the silence of magnificence, the sort that forces wordlessness upon you on contemplating the grandeur of landscape; I had fallen victim to this awe during a visit to Central Australia where the red dirt, dappled with violet and yellow wildflowers, stretched into infinity to meet nothing but the glare of sky. The Bethel silence of companionship held none of this. It was the silence of comfort breaking into joy.

I was familiar with the idea of silent spiritual retreats, having gone to a Catholic girls’ school; an annual retreat was part of the school calendar. Back then, my friends and I enjoyed them as a pleasant break from the classroom schedule. We whiled away the days by reading our Victoria Holt and Susan Howatch novels slipped in between the pages of books about Italian girls made saints for choosing death over the loss of their virginity—Maria Goretti’s name sticks in my mind; why we were not taught how to defend ourselves against assault is beyond comprehension. God was not a high priority in my reflections during my school years. I didn’t think much about God at all, to be honest. Not even when I went to Mass on Sundays or to the Benediction service on the first Friday of each month in the school chapel. And not even when I was in the Sodality of the Children of Mary which I was keen about because I fancied wearing the blue cape over my white dress. I liked going to these services for the same reason as I liked going anywhere.

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