“God rid me of god…” — Meister Eckhart

Doing the work of theology in partnership with trauma, is an ever more incomplete and messy conversation. As I sat through the panel discussions in our last week of class, I again heard that while we were arriving at perhaps deeper and better questions, while we unsatisfied with easy answers, in the end we were still left with more questions than answers.

This takes me yet again to Rilke’s thought on the matter:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Meister Eckhart prayed so famously that the God beyond our best notions of God, the God beyond our best theology, would continue to explode our boxes and rid of us of all our idolatry hidden as orthodoxy.

This is what trauma forces us to do.

In the presence of the witness of so many voices in the panel, we are left stammering, stuttering, and sometimes must rely on utterances that can’t be contained in our rough and rude language. Can we say anything at all?

I dare say yes.

It seems that somehow this mysterious God, who is beyond any systematic theology, is yet also present, and waiting to be known. Silence it seems is then not the end of speech…it may just be the end to our speech…and the beginning of ever more listening to the God in the void, to the God above the waters, to the God in this breath, in this moment.

Or as Rumi put it:

The rest of this must be said in silence
because of the enormous difference between light
and words that try to say light.