The Second Great Silence

“M ware China” I saw, even as I began to pour my morning cup of tea, and realized that it was the bottom of the mug! I inverted the cup just in time and poured the hot tea into the open and waiting interior. But even as I poured, I knew that this particular morning, I should have poured that hot liquid onto the bottom of the cup, and it should have splashed onto my hand, and into the worn fabric of my faded jeans turning them fresh blue, sticking to the flesh above my knee, burning, making me pull my arm back, spilling tea on the floor now, and my sock getting wet, and my foot pulling back too late, and I yell God damn it, and the tears begin to flow, because it is this particular morning. 

I sit now in reality, taking a sip of tea from the righted-just-in-time mug, in reality that is somehow less real than that imagined tea-spill, that reminder of how things go when things go wrong, when one thing after another just goes wrong.

Easter Saturday was the day that Danny and I would look at our Easter Baskets, the smell of the chocolate giving flesh to the concept “near occasion of sin” that we would learn by rote in religion class at St. Mary’s. The nearer you got to that chocolate bunny, the harder it was to resist. We seemed to alternate in our lustful advances, each brother watching the other, vicariously enjoying the other’s approach, salivating together, knowing that the really heavy day, Good Friday, was over, but you couldn’t eat the candy until Easter. Easter Saturday was this the longest day in the year, even longer than the last day of school.

But on this particular morning this humorous memory is merely a bright thread in a dull fabric of days-after-dyings, the silence where there had been sound, of absence when there had been presence, of un, of non, of saying was instead of is, and stopping for a moment the first time it happens, but getting used to it.  So on this particular morning it was not surprising to me that the tears came, in the gift of that almost-inverted mug, when my imagination took me into the place where I really am, into the Great Silence that is emptiness and the beginning of grief. But it was surprising that the anger flashed out, the rage.

I pour another cup of tea and sit back, away from the keyboard. I turn off the light and listen to the robin singing to the dawn I cannot yet see. I wonder at the persistence of evil, at the politics and ego and greed that finds innocent victims even as I ponder. It is during a slow walk in the dawn birdsong that I realize it. I need God risen. This admiration for a Jesus willing to die for love, this desire to emulate him is not enough. The rage that erupted in me over and imagined teas spill shows me that I need him not merely to accept death, but to defeat it. I need someone to care with me amidst all the need in the world, so I will not resort to rage, or hide in indifference.

I need to see the stone rolled away. I need hope.


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.