When There Are No Words

Attending three funerals in two days leaves one with a lot to ponder. After having that experience this past weekend, I found myself thinking of how uncomfortable we are with silence, especially in situations where people are mourning. There is an almost compulsive need to fill the silence with a cacophony of words that mean well, but can often leave the hearer stunned by the insensitivity.

Two of the three funerals I attended were for gentlemen who had lived to see 79 and 91 years old, respectively. There is a common inclination to tell the remaining loved ones, “Well, at least he had a nice, long life.” And while that is true, it does not change the fact that this person leaves behind a hole in the lives of those who loved him/her. This person will be missed. People are sad. We have to resist that need to explain sadness away.

The third funeral I attended was for a young man in his mid 40s. In my mind, there is no more difficult funeral to be at than one where parents are laying their child to rest. And truly, these are the occasions when people who are uncomfortable with silence offer up baffling pronouncements like, “Everything happens for a reason” or “God must have needed another angel.” Such trite expressions cast God as the one deciding who dies when, and expecting the rest of us to deal with it without complaint.

No explanation you come up with will ever help a grieving parent make sense of their child’s death. There is no sense to be made. I imagine it’s the most awful, heart wrenching blow one can endure; bringing you to your knees and making you question everything you ever thought about God. No combination of words you string together can do anything to alleviate that kind of pain for another person.

In his brilliant book, “The Sin of Certainty”, Peter Enns suggests that in times like these, “the way forward is not to ‘find the answer’ that will allow familiar ways of thinking of God and our world to somehow stay as they were. The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway. That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.”

So we need to stop trying to explain God’s reasons for things to other people and simply let God be God. Let God do the healing work in people’s lives that only God can do. Our job is not to explain God. Our job is to trust God.

Enns goes on to say, “What if the darkness is actually a moment of God’s presence that seems like absence, a gift of God to help us grow up out of our little ideas of God?” There are no words for that kind of mystery. It must be experienced. We have to be vulnerable enough to sit in our pain and grief and trust that God is there: maybe not in ways we expect, but there just the same.

I adore the notion of “growing up out of our little ideas of God.” We spend so much time trying to make God fit into our limited human understanding when the more liberating way would be for us to expand our experience of God; and this starts by not qualifying God with a bunch of words.

In her insightful book, “Untamed”, Glennon Doyle talks about her search for God, and after years of dutifully saying and believing everything she was taught, she tried something new. She tells the story of how she would go sit in her closet for ten minutes a day after the kids left for school and do nothing but breathe. (God breathed life into Adam and Eve, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. There is power in the breath: especially when we are paying attention to it!)

Here is how she describes the experience, “Eventually, I sank deep enough to find a new level that I’d never known existed. This place is underneath; low, deep quiet, still....There in the deep, I could sense something circulating inside me. It was a Knowing…What I learned is that God lives in this deepness inside me.”

We spend so much of our lives surrounded by noise and distraction. There is often an incessant chatter in our own heads that we then extend to others, whether they want to hear it or not. We can either be victim to the frenetic pace people call “life”, or we can choose something different.

God did not say, “Recite the Creed and know that I am God.”

Nor did God say, “Memorize your prayers and know that I am God.”

Rather, God said, “BE STILL.

And know that I am God.”