How much chatter does "active participation" require?

One thing about the classic form of the Roman Rite that contemporaries unfamiliar with it find initially unnerving is the long periods of silence, or "dead air space," particularly during the Canon of the Mass. In the ordinary or modern form the the Rite, "dead air space" tends to be treated as something abhorrent, like an awkward vacuum to be filled with sounds. Priest and people face each other, so shouldn't someone be "taking the lead," talking, singing, directing or something ... Please!! ANYTHING so long as we don't have to just sit here looking at each other?!!

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: "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'."

Even the BAPTISTS today appear to have discerned something that many Catholics have all-but-forgotten -- that the way forward in this matter is "back to the future": Mark Dever writes, in a post entitled "Making Silence Together" (Church Matters, July 20, 2009):

One of the most frequently commented upon aspects of the morning Lord's Day service here at Capitol Hill Baptist Church is nothing we do. Or rather, it is the nothing we do. It is our moments of silence.

There's silence between various aspects of the service. I encourage service leaders to NOT do the "no-dead-airspace" TV standard of busy-ness. We LIKE "dead air space." "Dead air space" gives us time to reflect. To collect our thoughts. To consider what we've just heard or read or sung. The silence amplifies the words or music we've just heard. It allows us time to take it all in, and to pray.

... In the last century, E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India, referred to "poor little talkative Christianity"....

But in all the noise of our choirs, and drums, and electic guitars, and organs, and praise bands, where is the solemnity? Where is the dignity and majesty that is so often indicated in the Bible by a stupified silence, soaked in awe and covered with wonder?

“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

[Hat tip to J.M.]