When You Don't Know What To Say
When I was a child on the shoreline, my sister and I would build sand castles when the tide was low. We kept as much space as possible between the brine and wash of the ocean and our fairyland skyline. We would run our cocoa-tan bodies across the sand-grey ombre plateau and fill small neon-colored plastic buckets with handles ready to burst from the unexpected pounds of water-shock. The long, hurried carry would see us lose the cargo and splatter raindrop-sized jewels into the grains beneath our bare girl feet.
The saltwater was part of the construction. Water to sand made a remedial cement. We’d scrape moats around the towers with our fingernails until the land felt cool under our hands. Where the sun had never reached.
When the buckets arrived, we’d pour less than we’d gathered. That was just how it went.
You can be so full of the magnitude of what is important that it overflows from your body and somehow there is not enough left to be used in purpose. What tumbles from your hairline, and ribcage, and from the backs of your knees. What exudes from your nostrils as a finite dragon. What exists when you open the silent cavity of your mouth.
When you don’t know what to say.
What I have understood about prayer is that it is an outpouring of the depth of your heart. If the heart is a thing like a river that can overflow, I see the nominal topics of everyday living as the water. The current carries the bulleted list I know like the lines to a favorite movie: health, protection for family, peace, discretion, wisdom, clarity, for God to bless the work of my hands. This holy knowing flows in my spirit with an ease that comes with ceaseless exercise.
But what feels most important to pray usually does not begin so easily. Trauma and emergencies, the work of heart-mosaic. These are not in the current, but have sunken from their heft. Down where the sediment is. What shrouds with dust-cloud when disturbed out of its settled layer of grit.
I have told Christ that I cannot pray specifics about trauma because it is too painful to think about the details. I have offered God what feels like a clenched fist, clutching the beetle I caught. I am so afraid to open my hand, so afraid to see it’s large, shiny elytra or the paste of its remains. Both options mean I will mourn, but at least in the latter I don’t have to look at it looking at me. I have offered a crunched-up wad of despair that I can feel but cannot say.
One of my most deeply-held beliefs is that poetry can be prayer. Sometimes I speak poetry to Christ because it is a sieve for my sediment. Sappho: “What cannot be said will be wept.” Amen.
When you don’t know what to say.
Our life rhythm is the ceaseless prayer, a liturgy we know. A kneeling and turning or hands-up praise chorus. But what makes us ache is a pause. What catches our breath and tongue. A hung-open jaw, heart door ajar. A prayer so still and silent it is transcendental - a moment like before we existed, when God was the Thing Who Spoke and we listened so well, our bodies began the cross-stitch of completion.
When you don’t know what to say, say nothing. Lower your small bucket or the cup of your hands to the sediment-full crush of the Maker-God who pours more than you can hold. Let your curled spine be a prayer against those who are watching, unhelpful. Build something you have no plan for. See where the cement falls. Let your body be speckled with it.
We know a scripture that says we do not have because we do not ask. Today, what I know is that asking can be a wordless knowing that something I need is absent, even if I don’t know what that is. I dig deep, until my spirit is cool under my hands. Where the sun has never reached. I lay on my back to feel my spine and elbows and heels against the hardness of the floor and I tell myself, you are here in reality, you are here in reality, you are here in reality, because I have lost sight of what is real under the magnitude of irrationality. My bones press in to the earth, my spirit to the hardwood of the supernatural. It presses back.
It presses back
when you don’t know what to say.