A number of years ago, I heard a college student give a witness talk. Sitting casually on the edge of a stage, he first described his life before his conversion. Then he spoke about his realization that God wanted him to be his friend. When he came to tell of how his life was now, he stumbled for words, and his stumbling is what I remember most. He was unable to come up with adequate analogies for a life lived in the light of the Gospel.

The friendship that God offers us is a gift that we will never be able to completely describe. Yes, images abound to shed light on the relationship: “the Lord is my shepherd” (Ps 23:1); God is “a refuge and strength” (Ps 46:2); “the Lord is my light and salvation” (Ps 27:1). Evocative as these images are, none of them fully exhausts who God is to us. Our words run out without having captured the mystery. 

This forced wordlessness offers us a choice. One option is to keep speaking. For example, what should we do when someone asks a question about our faith that we do not, at the moment, have the ability or wisdom to answer? In these situations, it’s tempting to talk on and on about God, almost as if to convince ourselves of his reality. Yes, perhaps we should have paid attention in CCD and know the answer to the question. But even if someone else could answer the question clearly and succinctly, we still say something profoundly true if we can declare happily (and not only acknowledge ruefully) that God is beyond our speech. If we keep talking ad nauseum, however, we become like the person who takes a thousand pictures of a sunset to hold onto the memory of its beauty, only to be disappointed by each one later.

The other response admits our wordlessness and asks God to provide. In response to questions we cannot answer, we acknowledge our ignorance or confusion. In response to opaque moments of mood or prayer, when God seems far or absent and faith counterintuitive, we can will to wait in the silent darkness and offer a prayer for light. To allow ourselves to become wordless not only acknowledges God’s unspeakable majesty, but it also reveals that we, as unique persons made in his image, share in that unspeakability. The interior monologue we carry on in ourselves about who we are, and who those around us are, will always be incomplete. 

To be wordless before God is to enjoy our littleness and his greatness. It is unsurprising, then, that the saint who preaches spiritual littleness, Saint Thérèse, often comes to this wordlessness in her letters when she discusses divine things. To conclude, here is one example from a letter she wrote to her sister Leonie:

I cannot, dear little sister, tell you all that I would like, my heart cannot translate these intimate sentiments with cold language of the earth…. But one day in heaven, in our beautiful homeland, I will look at you, and in my look you will see all that I would like to say to you, because the silence is the language of the happy inhabitants of heaven. (Letter 163)

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Image: Jean-François Millet, Woman and Child (Silence)