The Flood and the Words 

After tragedy, we race toward facts first. How many dead now? How many feet did the river rise? And in how many minutes?! We itch for explanation. Where exactly is the flood plain? How long has it been since it has rained like this? And what kind of warnings did people receive? Understanding bleeds toward blame. What was the make-up of the weather service staff? What does DOGE have to do with it? And what role did climate change play?

These questions are important. Journalists work to save future lives by asking them. And some amount of attention from the rest of us is required if these aspirations toward accountability are to become reality. But at some point, for most of us, our effort to remain dutifully informed blurs into a cycle of doomscroll and despair — and yet we keep reading. To tourniquet our heart off from the pain feels worse, feels unfaithful, feels cowardly, so instead we shovel piles of words upon words into the pit of grief, as if doing so is going to make a tragedy like this any less bottomless in its incomprehensibility. At worst, the “duty to stay informed” is doing little more than covering over the covert attempts of our subconscious to find reasons that this would have never happened to us, sustaining us with illusions that future suffering is within our ability to avoid.

Christians race towards theological words: towards scripture, to the op-eds on the problem of evil that make the rounds again, to prayers posted to social media. Local pastors write sermons and pastoral letters to try to wrap some semblance of sense around it all. But the religious heart carries no special immunity to heartache. And when out of one side of our mouth we say, “I want an answer to why these children died,” it inevitably turns out we’re not that interested in listening to anyone who attempts to provide us with one, for out of the other we just want to scream.

I’m a pastor in central Texas, shepherd to a few hundred people. It anecdotally seems that every single of one of my congregation is a cousin of ______, former classmate of ______, sister to the godmother of someone who lost someone in the flood. For three Sundays our pews have been trembling. And I have been a mess of all of the above. I have pinged back and forth between feverish monitoring and walled-off denial, while professionally I’ve offered words, too many words, and then lost sleep over their flimsiness. I have hated myself as a parent for ever complaining about the spareness of summer-time childcare hours. I have thanked God that my children are not old enough to go to sleepaway camp and then been pained with guilt for that gratitude.

Over these last two weeks, I’ve done that thing I sometimes do when I need to yell at God, when I need to feel pain in the body so that pain in the soul can begin to metabolize: I put in my headphones, and I went for a run.

Singer-songwriter Jon Guerra has a new album that is based on the words of Christ — creatively titled Jesus — full of lyrical meditations on words we might consider running towards more than any other in a moment like this. I carry his songs with me as varieties of medicine. But there’s a track in the middle of the album that struck me with searing grace and that I thought the rest of us might do well to consider in a time like this — one that offered me an alternative to all of the above because it’s a song that doesn’t have any words at all.

It’s a track titled “The Death of Lazarus,” which is nothing other than layered violin over simple piano. We read across the words “Jesus wept” in less than a second. But this track invites us to stay with those words that aren’t really words for two spacious minutes. And in those two minutes, we are offered not an answer, but a balm. No resolution, but a prayer too deep for words. The strings soar with aching pathos on top of the unambiguous solidity of keyed chords. The minor key temporarily resolves — a sweet memory rising from the ashes of sorrow, a glimpse of heavenly reunion — and falls back to heartache again, a mournfulness ascending, groaning towards something it can see but not reach. The track stands alone, but its remedy is clearer when listening to the album front to back — it’s words, words, words, then one is stopped by a gnawing, enchanting speechlessness.

When confronted with death, with pure tragedy, it turns out Christ had no words to offer at all. He had only tears. He offered only silence. He abides beside the grieving, beside us, not to help us understand, but to show us we’re not the only ones crying. Such is the charism of music without words to hold us within the mysteries of the unexplainable — in victory and in crushing defeat. If you have found yourself living a hair’s breadth from breakdown, know that when you weep, you don’t do so alone; that indeed, there is a music to our tears. And the one who set the melody is Christ.