Songs Sung to a God Who Says Nothing Back

You typed those words looking for lyrics, for the sound of a god who keeps still. I know that hunger. It is the hunger for a voice that will not come. I remember a poem handed to me once, years before I understood what it was, dated in the raw margin of a cold month. Its lines climbed through the senses one at a time, deliberate as a staircase. It began with something coming in the dark, a fear that had shape but no face, a figure moving toward a bed. Then hearing gave way to seeing, seeing to smell, smell to touch, touch to taste, each sense named and offered like a small confession. There was the breath of another body drawing near. There was the sudden waking of conscience, the name spoken aloud, the ache to repent, the strange wish to bleed and climb higher toward grace. A young woman wrote it and pressed it into my hands as if to say, here is my soul mid-fall, catch it if you can. I did not catch it. I held it the way you hold something burning, aware of the heat, unwilling to be marked by it. When you search for the words of a silent god, you are, I think, doing what she did on that page: singing into a room you fear is empty, half-hoping something breathes back. The scene sits in the ninth chapter of a book I wrote called Confessions to the Empty Chair, and the empty chair of that title is the whole trouble laid bare. She sang to me. I sat there like the chair itself, present and unresponding, a man who had trained himself to give nothing away. The god of silence in her poem, and in your search, is not cruel exactly. He simply does not interrupt. He lets the singer keep singing, verse after verse, until the singer hears her own voice change in her own throat. That is what frightened me most. Not her desire, which was ordinary and human and warm. It was the way her desire exposed a freedom I had kept safely theoretical, a freedom I had never actually tested against a living person who wanted me. I had told myself I was safe behind my rules. Her poem loosened a beam I had believed was holding up the house. I felt the floor tilt under me and I gripped the frame of my own detachment with both hands. And I did nothing, which is its own kind of answer, the coldest one available to a man who could still speak and chose not to.

I had done what I believed was the decent thing. I told her plainly, in transparent words, that I could not let the thing between us grow roots. I asked her, gently, to stop the small affections, the hugs, the light kisses, before they carried us somewhere neither of us could take back. She said she understood. She continued. I have turned this over for years and I still do not fully understand what I was doing when I spoke that warning. I thought I was being honest. I was being honest. But there is a way of confessing your own coldness that makes a man strangely magnetic, and I suspect some part of me already knew it and used it. Tell a person you cannot love them, and you have handed them a locked room they now want desperately to enter. My warning became her invitation. My honesty became a dare she could not resist reading as a game. This is the vertigo I want you to feel with me, because it is the same vertigo hiding under your search for a silent god’s words. When you sing toward a voice that will not answer, you are testing whether your own singing can draw a response from what seems like emptiness. She was testing me the same way. I let her fail. I told myself her failure was her free choice and not my doing at all. Was it? The older man writing this is not sure the younger one gets to be so clean about it. She was a friend, closer than almost anyone in my life at that point apart from one other. I did not want to break her heart. And yet I watched it break with the cool attention of a man taking notes, marking the tears, filing them somewhere behind my ribs. I dread saying what I really did with those tears, but I will say it. I collected them. Each woman’s grief became a small offering laid before an older loss, a love already buried, and each offering thickened something around my chest that I can only call ice. I did not soften in her warmth. I hardened against it. That is the horror of being the one who is looked at and refuses to look back. She saw me. She sang toward me with her whole face open. And I made my silence into a wall she mistook for a mystery worth solving, when it was only a locked room with nothing living inside. The god of silence, it turns out, can be a man who has decided that saying nothing keeps him powerful. It does not keep him powerful. It keeps him alone, and teaches him to call the aloneness a virtue.

Here is the thought that finally broke my defense, though it took me years to hear it as anything but pride. I once caught myself thinking that where Christ turned water into wine, I turned tears into ice. I meant it almost proudly at the time, the way a wounded man admires the scars he shows off. Now it reads like an indictment I wrote against myself without noticing my own hand. The miracle at the wedding made poverty into abundance, made a lack into joy, made the plain water leap up into celebration and gladness. I did the exact reverse of that. I took living warmth, a young woman’s real feeling, her poem climbing rung by rung toward grace and repentance, and I cooled it into something hard and dead in my hands. I performed the opposite of a miracle and called it strength. I told myself this was fidelity, that every frozen thing I made was another stone laid on the grave of the love I had lost, proof I would not betray the dead by loving the living. But that is not fidelity. That is a slow murder committed against the present in the name of the past, dressed up as grief so I would not have to see it for what it was.

A song sung to silence is not answered; it is accompanied by the One who lets you finish it in the dark.

I want to be careful here, because the easy move would be to say God rushed in and rescued me from the cold, thawed the ice, warmed the room, set everything right. He did not. That is not how it went, and I refuse to cheapen it with a rescue that never happened. What I have come to believe instead is stranger and much quieter. God was in that room the whole time. Not stopping me. Not thawing me. Present in her tears as they fell one by one down a young face, present even in the exact moment of my refusal, walking beside a man who was using another soul as a monument to his own wound. This is the god of silence you came searching for, and he is far more real than the one who answers on demand and performs on cue. He does not interrupt the poem. He lets the singer sing all the way to the line about there being no end, and he is there in the long pause after the last word, unspoken, holding the whole broken scene without fixing a single part of it. The silence is not absence. The silence is the sound of being accompanied by One who will not spare you the consequences of your own freedom, because to spare you that would be to unmake the very self that has to bear it.

There was a trip taking shape after that, a weekend to see a great cathedral in a German city, and she wanted to come along. She promised, half-joking, not to be a pest. We laughed and let her join. I even calculated, coldly, that a third companion would keep anything from escalating between us, as though her heart were a reaction I could suppress by adjusting the conditions in the flask. Read that back and hear how monstrous the arithmetic is. I planned to walk into a house of God while managing a woman’s affection like a variable to be controlled. I would soon stand under vaulted stone raised by people who gave their whole lives to a silence they trusted absolutely, and I carried into that space a heart engineered to give nothing away. The fallout of the scene is not loud. No one dies. Nothing shatters with a crash. That is exactly what makes it so heavy to carry. The damage of this kind of coldness is quiet damage. It is a friendship slowly deformed into ritual, a poem received and never truly answered, a woman singing toward a man who had decided in advance not to hear a note of it. When you look for the lyrics of a silent god, I wonder if part of you dreads the same thing I now dread about myself. That the silence you meet is not divine at all but manufactured, a wall someone built and then called mystery to hide the emptiness behind it. I built one of those walls. I let her mistake my emptiness for depth. And the terrible thing is how well it worked, how the least available man becomes somehow the most desired, how withholding gets read as worth by the very people it starves. I was not deep. I was frozen. I had learned somewhere young that keeping people at a measured, exact distance was the only safety a person could count on. The dead love was the excuse I reached for. The real thing underneath was fear, the plain dizziness of being fully known and possibly cast aside, and so I chose to do the casting aside first, every single time, and dressed the choice up as grief. I cannot pretend I have paid any of that back. Some of the tears I collected are still, as far as I know, unmelted somewhere in the lives of the people I froze. What I can do now is name it without flinching, refuse the comfort of blaming her free choice, and admit that I was an author of her sorrow. That admission brings no comfort at all. It is closer to the lurch of standing on ground you believed was stone and feeling it shift beneath your weight.

So you came searching for the words of a god who keeps his silence, and I have handed you instead the memory of a woman who sang to me while I played that god badly. I have come to think the two are closer than they look. Her poem ended on a line about growing again, about there being no end, and I remember thinking how naive that hope was even as some buried part of me envied it fiercely. She could sing toward silence and still trust the silence held something waiting for her. I could not. I had already decided the silence was empty, and so I made myself empty to match it, cold to match a cold I only imagined. That is the trap I want to leave you standing outside of. Not by frightening you, but by telling you the plain truth I paid a real price to learn. The god of silence is real. He does not answer the way we demand he answer. He will not interrupt your fall just to prove he is standing near. But he is not the void I mistook him for all those years, the convenient excuse I used to keep every warm hand at arm’s length. He is the presence that stays through the whole unanswered verse, nearer in the dark than in any bright and easy rescue, close enough to catch what I refused to catch when it was pressed into my hands. I did not see that then. I see it now, writing at this distance, an older man reading the cold young one with grief and without the power to undo him. The scene does not close for me in resolution. It closes in a question I still carry into my prayers on my knees. What would it have cost me to answer her, to look back when she was looking straight at me, to let one beam of my careful architecture come down? Less than I feared, I think. And everything I feared, at the very same time. Both are true and I hold them together without forcing them to settle. If you are singing your own song into what feels like pure silence right now, I will not tell you it gets answered on your terms. I will tell you the silence is inhabited. I will tell you the One inside it lets you finish the whole poem, every raw and rising line of it, and does not leave. The rest of what I learned, and what it cost the people I turned to ice, lives in the pages of the book. This much I can hand you here, still warm, before I turn cold again in the telling. The god of silence was never the problem. My silence was. Sing anyway. Someone is listening in the dark.