There are many reasons I feel compelled to keep silent. The preacher teaches it. The Bible teaches it and my own experience teaches it. God’s silence teaches it to me as well. I hear not a sound, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. Today, we commemorate the death of Christ as he descends into Hell. Hell seems to overwhelm me today. I watched “The Passion of the Christ” last night. Holy Saturday seems almost worse than Good Friday. I pray this is temporary. Life is dead to me.
Questions I often ask are these:
- What makes me speak? Sometimes it comes from a broken soul who has no answer, in a time and place when there is nothing but unanswered questions.
- What keeps me silent? Other times it comes from another side of that same broken soul who continues to receive the same answer in different ways, from the same people (or even occasionally from different people who have no idea what I’m talking about). And still other times, it comes from receiving different answers, which make no sense to me.
- What continues to make me feel heavy-hearted even in the midst of that selfsame happiness in others? Is it because I think I know there is no hope?
- Where is the hope? The silence is deafening!