The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and Epiphany

Christian Century, May 19, 1999 by Kathleen Norris

By Doris Grumbach. Beacon, 126 pp., $18.00.

Barbara Brown Taylor's concise, pithy and challenging prose is evidence that she is practicing what she preaches: that Christian pastors take more care with the words they use and treat language with economy, courtesy and reverence. Her book When God Is Silent makes amply clear what she means by these terms. If we believe that God spoke the world into being and made the human in the image of the divine, then the words we say matter. Taylor's thesis is that language is in crisis - that "the whole enterprise of trusting words to mean what they say" is endangered.

All too often, Taylor insists, Christians are part of the problem rather than people who offer an alternative. It isn't simply that the jargon of psychobabble is working its way into worship, but something deeper: a lack of trust in the essential mystery of God's word. When, as Taylor puts it, preachers "wield words such as God or faith as if they were made of steel instead of air," they make faith remote and abstract. Her concern resonates with the dismay I felt as a writer returning to church after a 20-year hiatus. I experienced worship as such a bombardment by words that my mind went numb. I had spent years learning to be careful with words, and I couldn't understand how so many people, including pastors, who professed the religion of the Word could be so careless with the language they used in worship.

Back in the mid-'60s Thomas Merton spoke as a prophet of language, commenting that for us saying "God is love" is like saying "Eat Wheaties." Taking up the prophet's mantle, Brown asserts that advertising, media and professional jargon and sheer verbal overload have so corrupted our way of speaking and hearing that God has chosen to be silent. She suggests that we are suffering the kind of famine that the prophet Amos foresaw, a grim famine that deprives us of "hearing the words of the Lord. They shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it."

Taylor sets forth a grim challenge: "First we nailed the flesh. Now we have nailed the Word by speaking of it too glibly." To the extent that we continue to value information over reflection, communication over contemplation, we'll continue to try to keep the Word under our thumb. But God's Word won't be confined, not in any tomb of our devising.

Taylor suggests that we return to the Hebrew scriptures, the "Hear, O Israel," as the ground of our faith. The focus of the language, she points out, "is on the ears, not the lips - on listening, not speaking." She suggests that when we pray, "Hear us, O Lord," we are tempted to imagine that the burden of listening is on God, rather than on us. She asks that we try instead, "Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening."

If Taylor is eloquent in describing our misuse of language, she is even more eloquent when meditating on the value of silence, on "the game of divine hide and seek [which is] part of God's pedagogy . . . [making] silence a vital component of God's speech." She offers concrete and practical suggestions for ways to improve our relationship with both silence and the words God has given us. It is only idolaters, she suggests, who insist on talk and the illusion of control it gives. "Only an idol always answers. The God who keeps silence, even when God's own flesh and blood is begging for a word, is the God beyond anyone's control. An answer will come, but not until the silence is complete. And even then, the answer will be given in silence. With the cross and the empty tomb, God has provided us with two events that defy all our efforts to domesticate them. Before them, and before the God who is present in them, our most eloquent words turn to dust."

Doris Grumbach's The Presence of Absence is as brief and forceful as Taylor's book and is a good companion to it. It is an important book for pastors in that Grumbach, a novelist, conveys something that many older people experience but do not articulate - a profound disappointment with the churches to which they have devoted their lives. I suspect that most pastors are familiar with the syndrome: many church members of a certain age resist joining another committee or organizing another church supper. As their lives near their end, they shun the easy platitude, the lure of more activity. They want the church to help them go deeper. But all too often, it cannot slow down enough to hear and respond to their silent plea.

Grumbach, who began publishing memoirs at age 70, begins this book by describing an experience of the mysterium tremendum that came to her as a young woman, an unbidden sense of the holy, of "ineffable joy, a huge delight." Having no "history of belief . . . no formal religion or any faith at all," she is astonished by the powerful sense of God's presence, and responds by seeking God in church. "I hoped that, in a hallowed place, and with the help of Holy Rite, I might again experience a moment of 'noble freedom,'" she writes. But in more than 50 years of church membership, of praying in community, Grumbach never again had that "same astonishing sense of epiphany."