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My last two days at St. Columba’s are filled with rain and a wordlessness that feels like it’s sunk into my bone marrow and made a home there.
I can’t speak, even when silence isn’t required, and I have no desire to. There is no word I can produce, no sound I can utter, that will give adequate shape to what I feel inside. Which is elemental, which is tectonic. I have the feeling that if I speak, I will scream, and if I scream, I will never stop screaming.
I’ve practiced listening and silence for so long—long enough that it’s become easy and natural and pleasant. But this is the first time it’s ever felt necessary.
I can pray though. I don’t feel soothed or elucidated by it or anything like that, but I still do it anyway. The liturgy—the psalms, the hymns, the Eucharist in the
