The Sounds of (Minneapolis) Silence

In the face of this week’s horrific school shooting in Minneapolis, it occurs to me that there are two kinds of silence.

One is a silence of denial, apathy, or callous indifference. “Don’t look at it; don’t talk about it, just move on.” “Just keeps happening, nothing to be done, nothing can be done. Forget it.” In Simon and Garfunkel’s classic, “The Sounds of Silence,” there’s a line that about such silences. “Silence like a cancer spreads.”

More recently there is the phrase that showed up on signs at marches protesting police violence. “Silence is Violence.” And, a call to not be silent, to “Say Her Name,” meaning speak the name of the victim. Don’t let her be forgotten.

Yes, silence can be a form not only of a hardened heart or fearful denial, but also a form of complicity with evil. Silence in the face of the ICE dragnets and thuggery directed against immigrants who are not criminals but contributing members of the community is the silence that “like a cancer spreads.”

We are living in a time when there is a temptation to be silent, to say nothing, in the face of things we know to be wrong.

But there’s another kind of silence in the face of such evil as that which happened in Minneapolis this week. It is a silence of grief, horror, and shock for which, “there are no words.” I find myself experiencing such a silence.

In Paul’s letter to the church at Rome he writes of the Holy Spirit coming to our aid when we do not know how to pray. He speaks of “groans and sighs too deep for words” in Romans 8: 26. It’s not entirely clear there whether it is the Holy Spirit that is groaning and sighing or we mortals, or both. I think it is us, we mortals, our groans and sighs too deep for words. The message is that when all we’ve got is moans and tears, the Holy Spirit gets it and comes to pray in us and for us, giving some coherence amid our stammering incoherence.

For me there is comfort and meaning in Paul’s acknowledgement that at least sometimes we have no words, that we are struck dumb. This is a second kind of silence, a silence too deep for words. It can be the silence of shock and horror and unutterable sadness. (And it can be silence in the face of unspeakable beauty or powerful truth.)

Silence now can also contain a reverence, one that respects the victims, their families, their community by avoiding easy answers or cliched responses (“God needed two more angels in heaven.”). It is a silence that refuses to jump to quick or easy explanations. A silence that holds fast when we want to find someone to blame.

As always, there has been plenty of that blaming this week. Looking at shooter Robin Westman’s biography, online presence and video and written artifacts, some have blamed “trans activism” for this shooting, which seems to me absurd. Others point to Westman’s evident anti-semitism. Still others go on about “mental illness” unacknowledged, untreated. And for others it’s all about guns, American gun culture and the failure to establish reasonable measures of gun control.

Generally, these quick answers and assignments of blame follow a predictable pattern. People on the right blame someone on the left, such as trans-activists. People on the left, blame someone on the right, such as Second Amendment advocates. The tragedies become a kind of rorschach blot where people see what they want and are predisposed to see.

Such quick attributions of blame, this immediate “speaking out,” often also seems to me a way of creating distance between ourselves and the horror. It’s a way of coping with our feelings of vulnerability. “If they are to blame and we aren’t them or like them, then we’re safe, right?”

Mostly the blame game focuses on the people or things already identified as the enemy or the problem or the bad guys. In this, they function sort of like crime-scene tape, creating a barrier between us and the evil. If we can assign blame, whether to trans-activism, or gun nuts, some distance is created.

I understand this, but I find a different silence, the second silence, the silence that is “too deep for words,” to be where I go and what I need at such times.

We pastors are often called upon to show up at such times, at scenes and moments of tragedy, horror, and loss. I’ve found that being with people in the sadness, the grief, in the worry and fear, to be more important than what I might say. Or, if I have said something that has been remembered, I typically have no memory of it, which suggests that the Holy Spirit was using me, speaking through me when I had no words.

Hold off on assignations of blame. Be reticent about easy answers. This reticence is not the silence of denial or distancing (which blaming someone else, some evil enemy, also accomplishes). It is the silence of a deep, wordless grief. It is the anguished prayer of our sighs and groans, for which we rely on the Holy Spirit, to give form.

But the silence, the second silence, is not the end point. Not the final word. At some point, the silence is, must be, broken. We preachers are called to “wait upon a word,” to wait upon “a word from the Lord.” We wait in silence, listening for a word not our own. Then, we bear witness to the hope that is within us even in the darkest moments.

The very best words, the truest words, are those spoken out of the silence.