A Secret

(For my Bapuji and Beiji)

I’m going to tell you a secret. Because I think you’re ready to understand.

When you kneel down at night to say your prayers, when you bow your head to bless your food, when you’re driving in the winter and hit a patch of ice and instinctively cry out for someone to steady the car as it slips toward a spin—God doesn’t actually understand the words you are saying.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pray. God loves it when you pray. God loves the sound of your voice. God loves seeing that you’re turned in his direction. His heart turns back to you every single time. But the God you’re praying to is the God of Israel. He’s a God who feels quite at home while watching over ewes, helping them safely birth their lambs. God is not originally from the world you live in now.

He’s a bit of a stranger here. His sense of time is still synced to the sprouting and swelling of barley and wheat, of dates and olives and grapes. He’s been content enough to follow the winding paths of faith out of his old patch of hill country by the sea, but God speaks a forgotten dialect of Hebrew. He can feel when someone calls him father, and he’s fascinated by the rhythms of all the languages his kids have picked up, but he’s an immigrant in all the places we’ve called him.

You tell me that doesn’t make sense, that God is omniscient? Well, the word omniscient is Greek. It’s not in his vocabulary at all.

God’s real gift is attention. Maybe he’s leaned on it a little too much. He gets by so well paying attention to what we’re doing and how we’re feeling that he doesn’t have to figure out what we say. Maybe a less attentive God would have learned at least a few major languages by now, so that he could argue with us in Latin and classical Chinese and seventeenth-century French. A different God would probably just learn English. That’s what the world economy expects.

Our God knows you’re never too old to learn. And he could definitely take lessons. But it’s not like he needs a job. And he’s been so busy. When he hears you cry out in panic on that icy road, he sees the ice. He guides your hands back into a path where you have traction. And he doesn’t need to understand your self-justifications to notice when other parts of your life are spinning out of control. If you let him, he’ll always nudge you back into some stabilizing friction.

He knows when you’re sick. Long before the day when you’ll complain to him about that pain in your abdomen, he’s already trying to prepare you for the moment when doctors will perform a scan, find the tumor, share the diagnosis. You speak English and the doctors’ words will sound strange and distant even to you. God won’t tell you in words that you’ll make it through this. But it’s not language that’s going to get you through the worst times anyway. It’s someone who loves you, reaching out to take your hand.

God knows when you’re lonely. You usually don’t. You think you’re not hardworking enough or talented enough, likeable enough, virtuous enough, attractive enough. You go on and on to God about your goals and your weaknesses and your silent shames. He doesn’t understand all that. But he understands you. He knows what you need before you try in vain to ask.

The times when God most wishes he spoke English are the times when he wouldn’t know what to say. The times when you’re praying so hard for something but it’s just not meant to be. The times when a wish you held dear is shriveling and he can see it’s going to die and he can see it’s going to take a piece of you with it. The times when someone hurts you, terribly, and you go over it all in your mind again and again wondering what you could have done differently—and that’s exactly the wrong question but it’s also the only question that gives you any sense of control. In many of these moments, God is as silent as the ashes left when the fire dies down. If he could, he would be silent in English, in your language, so that you could know that it’s not an absent silence but an active silence. A stilling of the soul of the universe in solidarity with your distress. A witness. God is never quite so focused on you as when he doesn’t speak.

And when the hardest times are over, when your dark nights pass into new dawns? God doesn’t want to leave. So he doesn’t study English. He hangs around with you instead. He strokes your hair when you pour your heart out at night. He sits beside you while you do your homework because sometimes you just need someone else around to keep at it. He smiles when you turn to him and babble incoherently after winning a game or taking a test. And when you cook, he’s basking in the aromas that drift across your kitchen. He likes watching your mind and hands at work; his joy makes the whole meal holy.

The part when you bow your head is just a chance for you to catch up to the blessing God already left there.

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Art by Kazimir Malevich, “Prayer,” 1913.