God Gives Us Language, Silence Gives Us God

provisional theses on suffering, God, and the limits of communication

Karoline Kubin Head of an Old Woman with Hand on Mouth 1945 

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.