`Louise Erdrich constantly indicts the Lord for His “silence”. As if the expected next sound, after her line, would be God talking back. And I agree. Repeatedly expecting and then missing His approval is the ache in the core. This hunger is not chosen. It afflicts.
She would be happier if she could walk in the woods or see the daisies and not move instantly to dialogue with their maker. But that would be weird: you can’t have intact retinae and not want to talk with the maker of colors. Our affection toward God happens prior to thought until it is forcibly suppressed, by the cruelty of parents, the horrors of history, or years of practiced numbness in the service of certain sophistications.
I sympathize. And in Erdrich I’m thrilled to have another psalmist complaining that God is silent. It’s useful employment for the poetic craft. My complaints need better words.
If biblical psalms are anything they are complaints. And we pray better as we let ourselves hear the expert unpracticed complainers. Not complaints about other people (we lack standing), or toward “nature” or “life” (we lack jurisdiction), but complaints toward the Judge of all the earth.
Our complaint is not that He is unjust (we lack knowledge), but that He is not here, with me. Here, complain; complain where complaint is valid, from the lonely heart. That’s a complaint that holds standing, jurisdiction and knowledge and worth taking up into a chant at matins, with directions for the choirs-master.
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I accept that complaining to You is an insult and sometimes angers You. But I have nowhere else to go, and Your angry voice would be meat for starvation. The creeds I believe. The story makes sense, I buy it all: creation, fall, and how You came back from heaven to find us and take us home.
But I still feel like the child whose father read him a sweet story from the other end of the house but never came to say goodnight and kiss my forehead.
TimothyOne 