Palpable Silence

“Am I able to trust that the tombs of my life are all gateways to resurrection?”

                                                                                     – Sr. Joan Chittister

The silence after Easter seems so different from the silence of Lent. We have just been through a terrible and magnificent drama. We have been through a period of wrenching, profound questioning followed by a sudden resplendent response. 

And then, at least for some of us, there is silence again. Wrapped in longing – or rapt with longing – for the power and opportunity to express to others our impressions of what we have just been through and what it has meant to our lives, we are left voiceless again…at least in the traditional Catholic Church where one gender speaks for all genders, deigning to describe us to us, to tell us what this season means to us and for us.

Author Tillie Olsen sees that kind of imposed silence as producing a form of deep weariness. As part of a New York Times series on “Writers Who Show Us Who We Are”, essayist A.O. Scott, focused on how this great American author’s life and writing showed us a side of women we do not often see: their exhaustion…and the awful silence it produces…and the missing bounties they could have bestowed on us if we only had been able to hear from them. In this present time when so many of us of all genders describe ourselves as physically and existentially fatigued, Olsen’s choice of exhaustion as a theme is as unusual as it is fiercely relevant.

Tillie Olsen’s best known work, Tell Me A Riddle, shows us women consumed by busyness: busy with jobs, child raising, care giving, with the endlessly repetitive chores of daily existence, with the attentions constantly demanded by children and husbands, family and neighbors, with the emotional and physical costs of living an ordinary working class life. The women in the stories are not complaining, and neither is Olsen; they often love their work, certainly their children, their spouses, even the caregiving and caretaking required. They are not unfulfilled, but they are depleted. They are carrying too much weight in life, including, tragically, the weight of their own silence.

So many of us, if not all of us, know what that weight feels like.

Isn’t it then our responsibility – and certainly the Church’s – to make sure those whom Olsen mentions as most affected: “whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women” (and, I would add, all genders) have equal access to “the privileges, the visibility, the resources…the time, the space, the confidence” that A.O. Scott lists as necessary for their stories to be heard? 

Of course we would answer “yes”, but how do we fulfill that responsibility?  How?

One way may be for the privileged and visible and resource-blessed to be a bit more silent and let those others speak. I’m pointing a finger, not only at my Church, but at my uncomfortable self here. I also think, in addition to popular narratives of the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps vintage, descriptions of contemporary role models of all genders, as inspiring as they might be, or writers attempting to give voices to the voiceless, as compelling as that might be, we make room for the voiceless actually to have a turn to speak for themselves. Even if they speak only of their own weariness, they are the ones we need to hear, especially if we have been compliant in sapping their energy away.        

On Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, in fact, on most Sundays throughout the year, I attend liturgies presented in various small Eucharistic communities, all of which have men, women, and other gendered presiding. Zoom has even let these originally local small groups gather in people from across the country and even the world. In all cases, we share in praying the liturgy, and our own stories, reflections, and ideas make up the homilies. We represent ourselves, and we speak for ourselves. All of us are granted the privilege, the visibility, the resources, the time, the space, and the confidence to speak – within, of course, the parameters of time constraints and consideration for others. (At the end of liturgy, those who want to continue are invited to do so.) In a world of ritual, Word, prayer, Eucharist, and blessing, we make room for each other.

This model is not perfect, but it is, almost universally, energizing…and equalizing…and that is, most certainly, a beginning.

I began with the quote from Joan Chittister asking us: “Am I able to trust that the tombs of my life are all gateways to resurrection?” I thought I was going to continue by reflecting on that question. Instead, I was pulled toward a concern for all of those who are still silently in their tombs. We need all of our resurrections if we are to have our own.