Lately I’ve been mostly silent. Out of words – oftentimes out of thoughts. I’m used to taking the hard times in stride – one disappointment, grief or loss at a time. But these days they come too quickly, each hard on the heels of the one before. I barely catch my breath when a new day dawns and knocks the wind clear out of me.
And I hate watching those I love hurt. Several times in the last few months I have helplessly listened to my husband cry himself to sleep – over a mom lost, a dad sick, a daughter. Then a few days back, the phone rings and his brother now lies fighting for his life in a Boston hospital. A mystery illness that comes out of nowhere – a suddenly. The kind that knocks your feet out from under you and beats you bloody. The doctors are puzzled; the brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, friends – and his father – are stunned, fearful, angry, grieved. Again.
I pray mostly without words, because my heart is numb – and words are simply not enough. I sink into the great silence that is God. Aimlessly, I thumb through a book and stumble on a Walter Rauschenbusch poem from 1918 – and, gratefully,
I find words.
The Little Gate to God
In the castle of my soul
Is a little postern gate,
Whereat, when I enter,
I am in the presence of God.
In a moment, in the turning of a thought,
I am where God is.
This is a fact.
This world of ours has length and breadth,
A superficial and horizontal world.
When I am with God,
I look deep down and high up,
And all is changed.
The world of men is mad of jangling noises,
with God it is a great silence.
But that silence is a melody
Sweet as the contentment of love,
Thrilling as a touch of flame.
In this world my days are few
And full of trouble.
I strive and have not;
I seek and find not;
I ask and learn not.
Its joys are so fleeting,
Its pains are so enduring.
I am in doubt if life be worth living.
When I enter into God,
all life has a meaning
Without asking, I know;
My desires are even now fulfilled,
My fever is gone
In the great quiet of God.
My troubles are but pebbles on the road,
My joys are like the everlasting hills,
So it is when I step through the gate of prayer
From time into eternity.
When I am in the consciousness of God
Those whom I love
Have a mystic value.
They shine, as if a light were glowing within them.
Even those who frown on me
And love me not
Seem part of a great scheme of good.
(Or else they seem like stray bumble bees
Buzzing at a window,
Headed the wrong way, yet seeking the light.)
So it is when my soul steps through the postern gate
Into the presence of God.
Big things become small, and small things become great.
The near becomes far, and the future is near.
The lowly and despised is shot through with glory,
And most of human power and greatness
Seems as full of infernal iniquities
As a carcass is full of maggots.
God is the substance of all revolutions;
When I am in him, I am in the Kingdom of God
And the Fatherland of my soul.
Is it strange that I love God?
And when I come back through the gate,
Do you wonder that I carry memories with me.
And my eyes are hot with unshed tears for what I see.
And I feel like a stranger and a homeless man
where the poor are wasted for gain,
Where rivers run red,
And where God’s sunlight is darkened by lies?
May God’s sunlight shine again. Thy kingdom come, God!
Walter Rauschenbusch
Theologian and Pastor
1918
Photo Credit: Silence by Tory Byrne, USA
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