God Gives Us Language, Silence Gives Us God
provisional theses on suffering, God, and the limits of communication
God has given us language so we do not have to live at the mercy of suffering. Empowered by that gift, we are bound to speak up against evil done to others and free to call out for mercy and justice even when we cannot find the words.
The attempt to speak in and to suffering, our own and others’, brings us up against the hard limits of language as well as the soft limits of our powers of communication.
Language is not only limited, it is also broken. In any and all of its forms, it has suffered a trauma. The same goes for our powers of communication. These limits speak to the nature of our being-in-process, but the brokenness is proof and symbol of the unnatural gone-wrongness of things.
Language can be overwhelmed or exhausted on any or every side. Experiences can be too deep, too high, too close, or entirely out of reach.
In spite of everything, the Spirit presides over our speaking as well as our hearing, and either gives us what we need to say or affords us a language beyond language—”tongues,” tears, groans that cannot be uttered. If we are abused, our blood cries out. If we are silenced, if no one speaks up for us, our silence becomes sacred, sacramentally charged.
We wrong others in what we do and do not hear and say about their suffering not always only because we lack wisdom or compassion but also because language itself—the words and patterns of speech we have inherited or learned—is sometimes overmatched.
We cannot love those who are suffering if we do not take care for how we speak to them and for them. Finding ways to speak truthfully about suffering, refusing to let evil have the last word, is inextricably bound up with suffering gracefully, redemptively.
For this reason, to abuse language, to dishonor it by being cruel or careless in speaking and listening to those who are suffering, especially when its done in God’s name, is a grave evil, like poisoning a well or starving a child.
Christ taking form in us awakens a longing to speak in ways that mend and do not harm. That desire, as it matures, leads us into a silence that we learn to keep even when we are speaking and listening.
We cannot say what we want to say about God, suffering, or healing. But we are required by the force of Christ’s growth in us to strive to speak truthfully. The ache to be truthful in our hearing and speaking is what keeps us aware of the love we are receiving.
Language, despite its brokenness or because of it, gives us God in the midst of our suffering—exactly as it is pressed to and beyond its limits into groans, cries, tears, sighs, laughs, silence.
Language is never more beautiful than when it breaks under the weight of the goodness experienced in the depths of co-suffering. It is what we cannot say—in gratitude for what we have been given and allowed to share, in longing for what we hope to give and to receive—that is truest.
This...
For this reason, to abuse language, to dishonor it by being cruel or careless in speaking and listening to those who are suffering, especially when its done in God’s name, is a grave evil, like poisoning a well or starving a child.
AI being trained by our broken language is likely to pick up our brokenness, and not the good kind. Joonathan Pageau has talked about this in The Symbolic World.