God’s Word and God’s Silence
As a teacher and writer, words are the primary tools with which I try to exert power over reality. I use words to impress people so that they will love me, to create an image of myself that is eloquent and thoughtful and thus worthy of appreciation and respect. I use words to curate an orderly understanding of the universe, to narrate my experiences in ways that make sense to me. Both internally and externally, then, I use words to create a sense of security for myself. It is not difficult to see the fragility of this security. Because my worth is so bound up in words, I feel great pressure to generate them. The idea of being reduced to silence – of not being able to find the right words – is terrifying. When I look at myself most unsparingly, I see the subject of Billy Crockett’s song, “The Day I Gave My Heart Away” – a frightened little boy “collecting words that he can use so he can always win.” On the other side of the coin, I am not sure anything terrifies me more than the state of spiritual aphasia Sufjan Stevens describes in his song, “John My Beloved” – “There’s only a shadow of me / In a matter of speaking, I’m dead.”
Winter Light (1963, dir. Ingmar Bergman) is one of a handful of films I tend to return to in Lent. I first felt the film would be seasonally appropriate viewing for relatively superficial reasons: it is aesthetically austere, emotionally unsparing, and explicitly religious in its subject matter. When I watched the film a second time and really attended to it, however, I found it speaking to this part of me – the part that is terrified of silence and clings to words for security. Winter Light did for me precisely what Lent is supposed to do: it cut deep into my heart and unearthed something I did not much want to face.
The film depicts a single Sunday in the life of Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), the pastor of a small church in a rural Swedish community. Tomas – named, pointedly, for Scripture’s most iconic doubter – is experiencing a crisis of faith. It is not difficult to see why he might be discouraged. The morning service that opens the film is attended by less than a dozen parishioners, only five of whom receive Communion – and of those five, one is an atheist, and another will commit suicide before the day is out. Tomas’ distress cannot be simply attributed to any of these specific issues, though. Asked what is troubling him, his reply is simple: “God’s silence.”
Tomas’ stated complaint is that God is not speaking to him, and the first time I watched Winter Light, I sympathized with him. I shared his frustration with a God who seems to hide Himself from us, a God who will not answer when we call to Him. Each time I return to the film, though, I am less convinced that Tomas really wants to hear God’s voice. I still sympathize with Tomas, but my frustration is less with God’s silence and more with Tomas’ failure to listen – a failure that I also see in my own life of prayer. Tomas wants God to speak to him not because he truly wants to hear from God, to draw near to God, but because he wants God to give him something to say – some words with which to ward off his own sense of inadequacy, to shore up a certain vain image of himself.
We can imagine that, at some point, Tomas was motivated by a genuine love for God and a real desire to serve Him. However, as he reflects on his life of ministry, Tomas recalls a troubling transformation in his thought:
I refused to accept reality. My God and I resided in an organized world where everything made sense… Picture my prayers to an echo-god who gave benign answers and reassuring blessings. Every time I confronted God with the realities I witnessed, he turned into something ugly and revolting. A spider god, a monster. So I sought to shield Him from life, clutching my image of Him to myself in the dark.
Tomas describes a religiosity built on neat, orderly abstractions, rather than a lived experience of God’s real love. Tomas’ faith is primarily rational, cognitive, intellectual. His Christianity is a matter of clearly defined beliefs and doctrines – of words – but those words prove inadequate to account for the messy realities of life. God always calls us to live out our relationship with Him in the real world, but Tomas has substituted the real God for an “echo-god” who repeats his own words back to him. As such, it is not God who has abandoned Tomas so much as Tomas who has abandoned God. I am reminded of one of the most chilling lines in C.S. Lewis’ novel, The Great Divorce: “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.”
The ultimate inadequacy of Tomas’ words is laid bare through his interactions with Jonas (Max Von Sydow), the suicidal parishioner who comes to him for counseling. Jonas is tormented by the fear of nuclear war. His thoughts are trapped in an anxious circle from which arguments cannot rescue him. True to form, Tomas tries to help Jonas with words: “Let’s have a nice, calm discussion,” he says. However, words are not what Jonas needs. Far from helping him, they may only hurt him. “We discuss [his fears] constantly,” Jonas’ helpless wife tells Tomas, giving us a hint of the conditions in which Jonas’ despair has grown and thrived. Like so many demons, despair must be fought with the body, not the mind. It is not something one can be argued out of. Tomas tries to find a neat verbal solution to Jonas’ dilemma, but on some level, he knows this is a losing battle: “It’s so overwhelming,” he falters. “And God seems so very remote. I feel so helpless. I don’t know what to say.” Tomas is trapped in his words, even as he recognizes their insufficiency. However eloquent he might be, his words are spoken without love and he knows this makes them “drivel” – he has become “sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Corinthians 13:1)
Bergman uses the character of Jonas to reveal the inadequacy of Tomas’ words; through the character of Märta (Ingrid Thulin), he suggests a way in which Tomas might be healed if he would accept it. Märta, the local schoolteacher, is aptly named for Martha, the sister of Mary. Tradition sees Mary and Martha as icons of, respectively, the contemplative and active lives – and while Tomas is preoccupied with words, Märta is preoccupied with actions. We might imagine a situation where Märta and Tomas balance each other out: where Tomas’ faith counterbalances Märta’s atheism, where Märta’s physical helpfulness counterbalances Tomas’ cold intellectualism. However, their temperaments exist at such opposite extremes that their relationship is pervaded by hostility. Märta is hostile towards Tomas’ intellectual convictions, and Tomas is hostile towards Märta’s embodied reality. In her letter, she recalls a time when her hands were subject to a horrible rash. She rebuked Tomas for not even thinking to pray for her physical needs – and then Tomas was too disgusted by the sight of the sores to pray for their healing. Later, trying to end their relationship permanently, he spits out his chief complaint against her: “You force me to occupy yourself with your physical condition.” But Tomas’ hatred of the physical body in all its sub-verbal, sub-rational messiness is far from the Christian attitude.
Ironically, it is Märta, the atheist, whose body he hates, who recognizes Tomas’ “peculiar indifference to Jesus Christ.” At first, it is shocking that Tomas, a Christian pastor, should be indifferent to Christ – but this is part and parcel of the underlying problem with his faith. His Christianity is intellectual, but not Incarnational. He has fallen into the error of Apollinarianism – the heresy that emphasizes Jesus’ divinity at the expense of His humanity. Tomas is preoccupied with his God of words, but ignores or rejects God’s Word made flesh. Looking at the roughhewn wooden crucifix over the altar from which he preaches, he mutters: “What a ridiculous image.” The crudely carved image is a far cry from Tomas’ orderly words. And yet, the very visceral, embodied crudeness of the image could tell him something words cannot.
As our own Bishop Scarlett has written, “God’s answer to our suffering is to join us in it – not to explain it or take it away.” The cross is God’s answer to our suffering – and it is not a verbal or rational answer. The cross is not an explanation of our suffering so much as solidarity in our suffering. We might even say that, paradoxically, Christ endured God’s silence so that He could be with us in His silence. In a very real way, God’s Word is in His silence – and His Word is no verbal abstraction. His Word is Himself.
For most of my life, my idea of prayer has been limited to forming words or sentences in my mind and articulating them to God. And yet, “the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” – which are, as other translations put it, “too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) Through my time at St. Matthew’s, I have been growing in my ability to conceive of prayer as a much broader category than simply speaking to God in words – to experience silent prayer as another kind of communion with God. Even by analogy to human relationships, this makes sense. In relationship with another person, volubly pouring forth torrents of words is not necessarily the way to achieve true intimacy; indeed, the ability to simply sit silently in each other’s presence often manifests a deeper closeness. And this is all the more true of our relationship with God. When I am silent, I can begin to listen for God – and when God speaks, oftentimes, He does not do so in words as I am accustomed to think of them. He does not give me words, but His Word. He gives me Himself and invites me to be with Him in silence.
When our words fail us, as they always must, it is an opportunity to let God’s Word carry us. In On Christian Teaching, Saint Augustine writes: “Now it is especially necessary for the man who is bound to speak wisely, even though he cannot speak eloquently, to retain in memory the words of Scripture. For the more he discerns the poverty of his own speech, the more he ought to draw on the riches of Scripture…” When I recognize how poor my own words are, it is a painful blessing, reminding of my need for God’s Word. If there is any hope at the end of Winter Light, it is in the fact that the final words of the film are spoken by Tomas, but are not Tomas’ words. He has exhausted himself in his strivings to prop himself up with his own eloquence. All that is left for him is to speak the Word:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.