Silence of God Part 2

What do I do when I face the silence of God?  What do I do with all the prayers I utter that are answered in silence?  What do you do?

A number of months ago, in a session with my therapist, I noticed myself in the middle of a ramble, going on about things that seemed important to me right then.  I was not talking about my experience of the silence of God; I don’t normally talk about it, maybe mostly because I don’t normally like to talk about it.  I experience a heavy discomfort, talking about God’s silence, a kind of squirminess, like restless leg syndrome but deeper, restless leg syndrome of my soul.  

No, it was therapy, so I was talking about something from my past.  I remember I talked about that time that I was in a new school, maybe I was 11 or 12, my family had just moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Mandeville, Louisiana: just 30-something miles north of New Orleans, and a hundred thousand miles from childhood as I had experienced it to that point.

I remembered my first day of school there, halfway through 6th grade, we moved over the Christmas break.  I remembered walking on the playground, sort of kicking at the pine straw and dirt with my British Knights, carrying a brown paper bag with my lunch inside, my stomach too tied-in-knots to allow me to eat.  Some other 6th grade boys were playing in the field not far way, throwing a football.  A group of very put-together-looking girls were leaning against a brick wall, and a teacher was walking the grounds, alone like me, but unlike me, he seemed at home, confident, like he knew what he was doing.

And it seemed to me that I was totally invisible and at the same time the subject of all of their stares, like I was a hazy ghost that all the kids could see and see right through.  And it seemed like they were all laughing, too, or giggling, or smiling, owing probably to my British Knights (they all knew something I didn’t know at the time: BK’s were not cool).  But it felt to me like they were laughing because they knew I didn’t know what I was doing, like they knew I didn’t know where to go, like somehow they knew I was alone.  And my eyes were locked down at the pine straw at my feet, held there by fear, the risk of making eye contact with those strange laughing kids was just too strong, too high a hazard.

And as I talked about all of that, sitting there on the overstuffed couch in my therapist’s office, I stared at my shoes again (not BK’s this time), and realized I was staring, so I looked up, sort of shook my head to break the gaze and looked up.  And my therapist was sitting in his overstuffed chair, eyes closed, with a grimace across his face, a painful look like he could feel what I was saying.  I finished talking and he continued sitting, his eyes squeezed shut, and he breathed in: an inhale, but bigger than that, a sigh, but a sigh is breathing out and he was breathing in, taking in my story.  After a silence for a bit he opened his eyes, sort of shook his head to snap out of my story, looked at me, noticed I was looking at him, and said, “Oh, sorry, I was just listening."

He was listening to me, to my story, to the contours and layers of it, to how I shifted in my seat as I told it, to how I paused and hesitated with questions of what to say and how to say it, and he was listening. He was silent in his listening, silent because he was listening, because what I most needed as I remembered that day, my first day halfway through sixth grade in a new school in a new town, was to be heard.  What I most needed in that conversation was to be heard.

I didn’t wonder then, but I wonder now, if that is the silence of God.  What if the silence of God is the listening of God?  What if the silence of God is full of the quiet of God listening, the silence of God is God’s breathing in of our stories, taking our stories into himself, hearing what we are saying, feeling what we are feeling.  And listening.

What if the silence of God is God listening to you and to me?  Listening to my story and to yours, to the contours and layers of our stories, to how we shift and move within our unfolding stories, to how we create and love and fail and keep going.  And what if God is listening because what we most need in the conversation of our lives and of our prayers is to be heard, to know that someone is listening?

Listen to or watch the conversation that is companion to this piece