What I Thought Was Silence

Elizabeth Dewberry

I’VE always struggled with the idea that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. As a child, I was told that Bible verse meant, very simply, that Jesus was the Word, who had been there from the beginning, and Jesus was with God the Father, and he also was God. Just substitute “Jesus” for “Word,” and that’s all you need to know about that. Jesus as Word made flesh means that he’s the mouthpiece for God. Whatever he says is God’s word, because he’s God. This is somewhat informative, as far as it goes, but at that point in my life—my whole childhood, I mean—I couldn’t explain, even to myself, that the reasoning behind this interpretation was circular and therefore not fully satisfying to me because it left the central question unanswered. What was the word that was there in the beginning? The idea of Jesus being a word, the Word, especially coming out of a culture in which the name of God was the only word that could not be spoken—or, for that matter, even written—left an unarticulated question unanswered for me. Why not, for example, “In the beginning was the light, and the light was with God, and the light was God”? How about “love” or “grace” or “truth”? You could have told me that Jesus was any or all of those things made flesh and I would have said, “Okay.”

But no, it’s the Word. What does that say about the nature of God? And what does it say about the nature of words?

Flash forward to the end of this essay: those questions remain unanswered. I don’t want to raise expectations that I’m going to solve a theological mystery that has haunted me for most of my life. But I do have a few thoughts on the subject, and maybe they won’t explain what John meant when he wrote that Bible verse, but my hope is that they’ll illuminate something I’ve come to understand about the importance of words. And of God.

When I was a child, it was widely believed, at least in my neighborhood, that language was what separated us from the animals. And what was so important about being separate from animals was our collective need for affirmation, in light of Darwinian theory, that we humans have souls. We’re more than just highly evolved animals. We’re made in the image of God. Proof being: words.

But in the past fifteen or twenty years, scientists have become convinced that dolphins, whales, elephants, certain birds, and some species of apes also use language. If you take a crow from England and put him in the United States, the British crow, who was able to communicate with other British crows, will not be able to understand the American crows. They have that complex a learned language, with dialects. And my cat, Eddie, knows about seventy-five words, which he uses consistently and with feeling. One means, “Thanks for letting me in in a prompt and courteous manner.” Another means, “I’ve been out there meowing for twenty minutes. What does a cat have to do around here?” One means, “It’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep so why should anybody else?”

So it’s not language that separates us from the animals, and more importantly, proves we have souls.

But, to my knowledge, no animal has ever written a work of fiction. Or read one. If being different from animals proves we have souls, that is one of the primary values of fiction: it reminds us, affirms to us, that we have souls, that we have the capacity to connect to what is divine in the universe.

I was always conscious, for as long as I can remember, of words as a way of connecting to God—through prayer, of course, and by reading the Bible. I loved hearing Bible stories: Adam and Eve, Lot and his salty wife, Noah and the ark, the parables. I believed the Bible was the literal word of God, transcribed as if off a tape recorder by the people who wrote it, and one of the best things about God, in my opinion as I understood him at the time, was that he was a great storyteller.

My first novel happened the way I imagined the Bible to have been written. I mean I felt the words were being given to me, tumbling through me almost faster than I could write them down sometimes. I don’t mean to imply that I had illusions that I was writing “the word of God”—far from it—but I did feel that the words were being given to me and I was just trying to get them down. It took a long time for me to identify God as the giver. At that point in my life, I was in a hopeless, abusive marriage, but I was determined to keep the vow I’d made before God to stay married till death did us part, even if it killed me, so I was very angry—at my husband, but also at God—and I felt very guilty about feeling that anger. So I had stopped praying, because I didn’t want to lie to God, but the only things I had to say to him were things I didn’t think he’d want to hear. Like, “I asked you if I should marry this man. I prayed for a good husband throughout my entire childhood”—I really did—“and I thought you told me to marry him, so what? Were you joking? Or did you want this for me? Did you want me to go through the rest of my life being abused and not being loved?” That was what I had to say to God, but it wasn’t my idea of what anyone should say to God. So I was saying nothing to him.

I was in graduate school at the time, studying for my orals, and when I had to read really boring books, I would reward myself with an M&M at the bottom of every page. And at some point, I realized that I didn’t deserve the M&M because although my eyes had passed over every word on the page, I hadn’t taken in one of them. I was hearing words in my head, and they were drowning out the words I was trying to hear on the page. So I would run to the computer that I’d gotten to write my dissertation on and put down the words in my head—just dumped them there—so that I could focus on the words on the page.

Those words eventually became my first novel, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died, which is about a woman in an abusive marriage whose husband uses her faith against her. Unlike me, she gets pregnant from a gang rape where one of the rapists is her husband, gives birth, and gives the baby up for adoption. Unlike my husband, hers dies, and she tells her story into a Dictaphone as a way of trying to preserve her sanity. She gets very angry with God—cusses at him, which I would never have allowed myself to do in a million years. I didn’t expect the novel to be published, because everybody will be happy to tell you your first novel will be rejected, so I didn’t worry about what other people would think about her anger with God—or the subsequent cuss words. I worried about what God would think of it. And I’m not sure what’s a more accurate way of saying this: whether I decided God would survive, or realized it, or simply took a leap that was based on the unformed, unarticulated idea that either God could handle this woman’s anger and maybe even allow for some kind of healing, or he couldn’t, which of course, being God, surely he could, so either way, he didn’t need me to protect him. So I allowed myself to be true to the voice in my head—it was her anger, not mine—and all I was trying to do at that point was to get it out of my head. And I wrote what I thought was a completely fictional story about a woman who I convinced myself was very different from me—different level of education, different specific set of marital problems, though I empathized with her, based on my own problems, different job, different apartment, lived in a different city. Though she did live in Birmingham, where I grew up. Went to the same kindergarten I did. Shared a few childhood memories with me. Her husband had different hair and a different profession from my husband. So that’s what you call fiction.

And I let this woman say her piece.

I cannot identify exactly when I first realized that writing that book had been an act of prayer. It was long after the fact of writing it that I was able to articulate it in those terms. I’m very reluctant to say this because I’ve seen too many times when somebody says they’ve got the word straight from God, and it’s this: give me your money, wear this kind of clothing, fight this battle, kill those infidels. But in a very private way, it was God speaking to me, through me, listening to my feelings, connecting to my soul, keeping me alive. And I had no idea that was what was happening at the time. My marriage was as bad as ever and getting worse, and I still had it in my head that if God were going to intervene in my life, he would fix that. The idea that he would intervene in my life by communing with me—that had never occurred to me.

So I understood on some level that something extraordinary was happening, but I didn’t tell anybody, including my husband, that I was writing a novel. I didn’t even think of it as a novel. And looking back, this strikes me as odd, because I’m normally a very introspective person, but I never once stopped to figure out what was happening when I “got” that voice. The only reason I can imagine I didn’t think it out was that it was a little scary. It was a powerful experience, and it didn’t fit into my definition of what happened to normal, sane people.

Well, the book got published, which put a strange new pressure on the marriage, partly because of the reviews. I remember one in particular that said the reviewer just wanted to shake this woman and say, “Get out! Now!” And suddenly I knew there were people out there who, if they knew my situation, would want to shake me and say, “Get out! Now!” I would go to readings and conferences, and during the book signings, women would tell me the most amazing stories about their lives, which paralleled my character’s in one way or another. Sometimes they’d still be in their abusive marriages, sometimes they would have gotten out, sometimes they’d still have a relationship with God, sometimes they’d have given up on that, sometimes they’d still be churchgoers, sometimes they would have found a way of worshipping outside the church. And I began to see in them a whole host of alternate futures for myself.

But I still wasn’t willing to leave my marriage, and I still didn’t think of myself as a person who prayed. On the day my agent sold my book, I said a very heartfelt thanks to God, but I still didn’t believe that God would want to listen to what else I had to say. In the Psalms, David complains over and over again, and quite eloquently, that he feels God has abandoned him—“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted in the midst of my bowels.” That’s Psalm 22:14, by the way. But by verse 22, eight verses later, he’s praising God. By verse 24, he says that when he cried unto God, God heard. I felt that way, poured out like water, my heart melted. But where David usually pretty much gets over it after a paragraph or so, I’d been feeling that way for years. If I had thought that I could complain for a couple hundred words and then find myself saying, and meaning, that God had lifted me up, healed my wounds, and—why not?—even smitten an enemy or two, I would have started praying. But I didn’t see that happening.

So I thought God and I had reached a kind of truce. Whatever had gone wrong—whatever was going wrong—I wasn’t going to blame him. I wasn’t going to expect him to fix it, but I wasn’t going to thank him for it, either, and any praise I might have worked up would have been fatuous. Which left silence.

Or what I thought was silence.

After writing Many Things Have Happened Since He Died, I wrote one book that will never be published—wrote the whole thing from my head, as an act of the will, not an act of worship, and the characters never came to life. I still didn’t understand what had happened the first time well enough to see what the difference was. I just knew it was different. And then I started another novel, which was eventually published as Break the Heart of Me, and this time I became aware of the process of writing as an act of communion. I still didn’t think of it as communion with God, but as communion with my characters, communion with the universe, or, maybe, the alternate universe in which my characters existed, and especially, communion with words. My narrator was fragile, emotionally, spiritually—it was impossible to will her into being; she would crumble when I tried—and so I discovered, or rediscovered, that the most important element of writing fiction, for me, is listening. And when you listen and don’t hear anything—the computer screen is blank, and the words are not coming—you have to keep listening, which is an act of faith. So I began to do that because my narrator required it, though I still didn’t think of it as faith in God. I thought of it as believing in my characters, in the reality of their lives and their voices and the importance of their stories. I was vaguely aware that the only way in which fictional characters are real is in some transcendent way—their reality, if it exists, is not the reality of the words on the page. Their flesh, to the extent that they have it at all, is made out of words. Not the Word made flesh, but flesh made out of words. And though the literal things that happen to them—the events in their lives, their plots—remain fictional, they also have the capacity to transcend that literal truth and communicate universal human truth, truths of the human heart. So in that limited sense, I was becoming more aware than I had been of the spiritual dimension of what was happening.

I purposefully put that in the passive tense—“what was happening,” rather than “what I was doing”—because there is no tense that implies both, and though I was an active participant, the most important part of the process was one in which I felt that I was following my character’s lead, learning from her how to tell her story, receiving a gift.

After I finished writing Break the Heart of Me, but before it was published, I remember making one conscious prayer. I had been to a conference. I was in an airport, changing planes, passing signs with planes going to Nashville, Mexico, Los Angeles, Detroit, Memphis, and I would have preferred to go to any of those places rather than home. I wanted to get on a plane and go to a place, any place, where I could disappear and not live my own life anymore.

But I got on my plane headed for Columbus, Ohio, where I was living at the time, and to keep from bursting into tears, I started praying. I said, “God, the Bible says that if a person seeks you with all their heart, they will find you. Well, maybe you don’t think I did it with all my heart—obviously, you don’t—and maybe I wasted my heart on something else, but I don’t have anything left. I can’t try any more. So now, if you want this to happen, you find me."

I still don’t have as fast a turnaround time on my prayers as David did, but about a year later, my marriage pretty much collapsed in on itself—not violently, not dramatically, not even sadly. I’ve never kept vigil with someone who was dying a long and excruciating death, but it felt something like that to me. By the time it ended, I had already spent many years going through the stages of mourning—denial and isolation, anger, bargaining with God, and depression—and reached the final stage, acceptance. It was a loss, but it was also a relief.

I remember thinking at some point, “Nobody who loves me, including God, would want me to stay in this marriage.” And in that one thought, I realized that I had come to a new definition of love, and a new understanding of God.

I felt like I had been hanging on by my fingernails to a concept of a mean, petty, and unforgiving God. I had believed for a very long time, all my life, that if I chose to break the vow I’d made before God, I would be, in effect, divorcing God. But when I finally let go, I didn’t experience the long and terrible fall into godless chaos that I’d once expected. Instead, I found myself in a place where I’d never been before, and the amazing thing about it was that God—the same God who had been with me throughout the writing of my first two published novels—was still there. Love was still there. The possibility of connecting with other people, with God, with my own soul—it was all there.

This is starting to sound a little bit like a testimonial, which is not my intention at all. So to finish the story quickly, I fell in love, got married again, and it was only in that context that I was able to understand what had happened to me as I wrote those two novels as encounters with God, as worship. My point is not that I went from a bad marriage to a good one—that it’s all about men—but I went from a relationship where there was no love to one where there is love. And it is about love. It’s about connecting to the other—the other person in the marriage, but also about moving through life as a writer connecting to the universe, connecting to God, who is love. God is love, which is what connects us to each other.

Eight years passed between the publication of my second novel and my third, and during that time, I started writing plays. When I heard another playwright point out that plays had started out as acts of worship, people acting out Bible stories, Passion plays, and that she hoped her plays tapped into that tradition, something clicked for me. I was in this loving marriage, where I had been rebuilding my faith in love and therefore in God, and in that context, I began to redefine worship in a much bigger way than I had before. Worship, at its heart, is about connecting with the divine. It’s that simple, and that complicated. It can happen in church, but it can happen in a theater, and it can happen in front of the computer screen as well.

Do you remember the passage in Our Town where Rebecca Gibbs says a preacher sent a letter to a sick child and addressed it to, “Jane Crofut, the Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the mind of God”? I’ve always loved that passage, though I used to find it sort of whimsical. But there are a lot of legitimate physicists working today who think the whole field of physics is headed toward an understanding that the universe we live in is a projection of or is contained by some other, transcendent reality. Physicists are generally very reluctant to identify what that other reality is. Some say it might be another universe with another set of dimensions, but virtually all of them agree that whatever it is, it’s not limited by time and space, which suggests, to me, something eternal and omnipresent. So, what if Thornton Wilder, speaking through Rebecca Gibbs, was right, and that transcendent reality that physicists are scrambling to figure out the mathematical proof for is the mind of God? Maybe that is where we all ultimately exist, in the mind of God.

I like to think so. It explains a lot. It explains where archetypes come from, for example, much more eloquently than saying they’re part of the collective unconscious. It explains intuition, déjà vu. It also explains where fiction—and all art, for that matter—comes from.

When Jesus said that the greatest commandment was, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind,” I can’t summarize everything he meant by that, but for fiction writers, or for me anyway, it means, “Be passionately engaged with the universe. Write with all your heart, from the depths of compassion and empathy that you can find for your characters, write with all your mind, paying attention to structure and story and detail and craft, and write with all your soul, the place where God dwells and that therefore connects you, through him, to every other person in the history of this planet—those people who lived long lives, those who barely lived at all, those who lived before you, those who will come after you.” And I’m not trying to sound strange, but here’s how I see it: those whose lives are imaginary, fictional, existing on this planet primarily in the minds of their writers and readers, also dwell in the mind of God. He’s known and loved them all, and when you are writing from that space, your soul, you have the privilege and the obligation to tell the stories that are given to you as truly and as well as you can, to use those holy and awesomely powerful things called words, to create flesh, flesh that, as John described Jesus, the Word made flesh, is full of grace and truth.

Understanding writing as worship, understanding that what I’m doing when I’m writing, at my best, is connecting at the level of my soul, to the universe, to God, to everything else that is in the mind of God, including the souls of my characters and the souls of my readers—that is, for me, the basis for hope that my characters’ individual experiences can transcend their specific realities of race and gender and ethnicity and nationality and religion to express universal human truth. If that weren’t possible, if we were each stuck in our own skins, unable to enter into the lives of others, to understand their pain, to connect with their yearnings, to feel their humanity and touch their souls, I think we would eventually destroy each other. I think as long as we remain unable to realize our deepest connection to each other, we will, to that same extent, continue to go to war with each other and ignore each other’s suffering, even when that suffering reaches the levels of famines and epidemics and genocides and holocausts. But I also believe that through fiction, through words, we can transcend the limits of our own individual existences and connect in profound ways, to each other, to the universe, to God. That is what makes words holy. That is how words are like God. It’s what I hope, and pray, to do in my work. And it’s what I hope and pray for this planet.

Visit Elizabeth Dewberry as Image Artist of the Month for November '05

Issue #43 • Fall 2004