There are no words I tell my dear friend whose husband has been in a devastating accident. It’s silent for a few long moments on the phone. Then I ask how I can help, because that’s what we know how to do, right? She tells me: prayers for hope and joy to keep the discouragement at bay, prayers for a soft heart, for the damn neighbors to stop parking in the handicapped spot, for energy and endurance. And then she pauses, tucking into the other prayer requests a neon blue one. She tells me that her husband has asked her to pray for healing for his body, to pray for a miracle.

I’ll join you, I tell her. And then we hold our phones to our ears and sit in more silence. She’s teaching me how to be in the mystery.

*

In her collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books Marilyn Robinson writes about how much she loves what she calls “the frontiers of the unsayable.” Robinson writes:

. . . as a writer, I continuously attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said—or said by me, at least. I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for, and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail again to find these words. . . . The frontiers of the unsayable, and the avenues of approach to those frontiers, have been opened for me by every book I have ever read that was in any degree ambitious, earnest, or imaginative; by every good teacher I have had; by music and painting; by conversation that was in any way interesting, even conversation overheard as it passed between strangers. . . . We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”

Robinson also points out that science, too, is ambitiously exploring the unsayable through “dark matter, dark energy, the unexpressed dimensions proposed by string theory, the imponderable strangeness described by quantum theory.” She says that the science articles exploring these topics might as well be titled “Learned Ignorance” or “The Cloud of Unknowing.” I agree! What a great cloud of curious and compassionate folks reflected in all of these disciplines. I love picturing poets alongside scientists and musicians and strangers earnestly conversing—all of them humbly reminding us to imagine the reality of the great unknown, all of them saying there is so much more than we can ever say, and we must still try.

I love the mystery that is implied in our common phrase “a loss for words.” It means we’ve come to the end of ourselves, which is both frightening and good. It means that no matter how much talking, examining, or even deep pondering we give, some things are simply imponderable. This is certainly true in our response to tragedy, as we are often rendered silent before the painful mysteries of our world, to be still, to remember how small, how inadequate we really are. And then sometimes we get the chance to act, to say I’ll join you to those suffering. The poet Christian Wiman writes: “Silence is the language of faith. Action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation.”

Yes, we live on a little island of the articulable, and sometimes howls or groans are all we can utter. Admitting this and offering our silence can be sacred.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 35.