Bernadette Griffith

There are moments when I still catch myself turning toward a sound I’m not sure I actually heard. A soft “Hey!” from the doorway, a whispered “thanks,” a beeping that supposedly pierced the whole building except my corner of it. For years, these moments felt like little glitches in the system. I’d brush them off, blame the air conditioner hum, or convince myself that the world had suddenly decided to speak at a decibel only dogs could hear.

Hearing loss doesn’t arrive with a grand announcement. It creeps in on tiptoes, rearranging your days while you’re too busy sending emails and sipping coffee to notice. And then one day someone sits you down and tells you gently, too gently, that something is wrong. And the floor shifts.

I didn’t know then that this would become one of the great themes of my life, woven right into my faith like another thread that had always belonged there. When you’re Catholic, you’re used to stories about the blind seeing and the deaf hearing, miracles that appear suddenly and decisively. Nothing about my hearing loss felt sudden. Nothing felt decisive. And, honestly, nothing felt miraculous. It felt unfair.

Still, grace has a habit of working in a quiet manner, behind the scenes, where I can’t sabotage it with overthinking.

When I finally started the long road that led to cochlear implants, I didn’t feel brave. I felt like someone who had been pushed out onto a stage without knowing any of the lines but told to “just act natural.” I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or pretend everything was fine until I convinced myself it was.

Yet, in the middle of the appointments and the paperwork and the fear that I’d lose even the little hearing I had left, I kept bumping into something that felt suspiciously like God. It wasn’t in the loud, dramatic miraculous way. It was quieter: the colleague who laughs with you when you mix up words that rhyme, the friend who hugs you like a she’s trying to hold together all the pieces you’re afraid will fall apart, the moments when you think the silence might crush you but somehow it doesn’t.

Silence, for me, isn’t empty. It’s crowded, full of old versions of myself, questions I’m not ready to ask, and prayers I’m not ready to pray. However, it’s also where I learned the shape of God’s voice. He’s not booming or theatrical. He’s more like someone sitting beside you, elbows touching, saying, “I’m here. Keep going.”

Faith didn’t remove the fear. It just didn’t let me drown in it.

Cochlear implants changed my life in the practical sense; the world is louder now, sharper around the edges, sometimes startlingly so. But they changed my spiritual life even more. Suddenly, I had to learn to listen again, not just with my ears but with intention, with attention. I had to include a kind of reverence for the little sounds most people never have to think about.

Mass sounds different now. Readings have crisp edges on some feast days but not others. Music arrives in pieces and assembles itself slowly in my mind. Homilies are sometimes crystal clear and other times, I can’t grab a word. I miss things. I catch things. And somehow, in the middle of it all, I meet God.

People often imagine faith as something you either hear perfectly or not at all. Mine is more like a radio station that sometimes crackles, sometimes breaks, and sometimes arrives so clearly it feels like God’s speaking straight to the center of my chest. My cochlear implants didn’t fix everything, but they gave me a way back to the world. Maybe that’s a kind of miracle too, a modern one wrapped in wires and software and a whole lot of courage I didn’t know I had.

If you’re walking this road, (hearing loss, cochlear implants, diagnosis after diagnosis that makes you wonder who you’ll be on the other side), I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me years ago: you’re not losing yourself. You’re meeting a new version of you. God isn’t going anywhere, even in the quiet, especially in the quiet.

Sometimes faith isn’t about hearing a voice from heaven; it’s about trusting that heaven hears you when you can no longer hear the room around you. It’s learning to be patient as trials and tribulations do their hidden work, tuning your soul towards choirs of angels who only sing of his perfect love.