The Silence

The Silence

You ask me to continue kneeling and calling you Lord, but I need you to answer this: where were you when everything tore apart? You watched children being born into loveless rooms, and you watched mothers dig the graves of their own children. You stood by as the good people broke down and the cruel ones rose to power, never once coming down from your quiet skies. What exactly were you watching for? Was it some grander plan, a test, or a lesson that only you are capable of understanding?

It is a remarkably neat game you play. When there is beauty, it is attributed to your grace, but when there is horror, we are told it is part of a plan we simply cannot trace. You readily accept the praise when miracles happen, but the moment pain draws near, you claim our human minds are just too small to comprehend your ways. What kind of god requires excuses for the weapon?

The priests tell us you gave us free will. Yet, if you already knew every single step we would take before it ever happened, was any choice actually mine, or was it just a word? You created me knowing exactly how I would fall and bleed, and then you punished me for following the very nature you planted inside me. You call that justice, but I call it design—a systemic cruelty dressed up in language and called divine.

Explain the starvation, the hatred, and the slow progression of disease. Explain the child who learns what pain feels like before they even learn how to beg for help. Explain the lifelong prayers that meet absolutely nothing but silence, and the blade that folds its hands around the victim. Ironically, your silence is the very miracle people praise, because silence can easily be reinterpreted as deep wisdom rather than a total void.

The truth is, we built your face because looking up at an entirely empty sky was far too vast and terrifying for our frightened minds to endure. We simply could not bear the thought that death is final, or that lightning has no conscious purpose when it strikes. So, we invented judges, fathers, and thrones in the clouds, and we waited for centuries to hear a softer, gentler tone.

But perhaps the silence itself is the only actual word. Perhaps there is no cosmic courtroom waiting for us, and no final truth will ever be heard. Some people suffer, die, and never learn the reason why, because the universe ultimately owes absolutely nothing to our cries.

If you do exist, then answer this one last plea: why gift us consciousness alongside agony? Why teach the human heart how to love, only to let it break? Why plant a sense of hope within us that you already knew you would forsake? People love to say that without the dark, the light could not be known, but that is a sentence only darkness would claim. If suffering is truly required to achieve the good, then goodness itself may not be as righteous as it should be.

Age after age, we continue to speak into the quiet, and we call our own echo holy. We call the echo sage. But  the most unbearable thought of all is this: there was never anyone there to hear the call in the first place.