“With Sighs Too Deep for Words”: On Praying With the Victims in Haiti

What to say? We have had over a month now to reflect upon this question since the massive earthquake—measured at 7.0—struck the heart of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the capital of one of the world’s poorest, most destitute, and, historically, most sordidly oppressed nations. Of course, many things have been said during the interim, ranging everywhere from the religiously inane and morally callous to the most scientifically rational and humanly empathetic. Geologists have reminded us of their prescience—that we were forewarned of that for which naturally we should have been prepared. Economists, politicians, and human aid agencies have been quick to point out that there are powers at work here far more complex than the forces of nature—that “recovery” for the Haitians will require responding to years of political and economic abuse at the hands of the international community with a strong commitment to the rebuilding of Haiti’s infrastructure by way of a multilateral, coordinated effort from national governments, private companies, and world banks. And of course, religious leaders, pastors, and theologians have amply fed our all-too-human need to ask “Where is God in all of this? Where was God in the earthquake?” with well-thought-out explanations and resolutions for why an all-powerful and all-loving God could sovereignly allow this to happen, or for why such tragic events like the earthquake in Haiti require us to free ourselves from the idea of an all-powerful God in order finally to experience God as all-loving, or for why it is impious even to be talking “about” God at such a time.

As a trained theologian, I tend to agree with the latter position (about which I will have more to say later), but it is important here to pause and to recognize the perceived need for all this talk to which I’ve been referring. We are, after all, in the language of the Western tradition homo sapiens; we are beings animated, it seems, by a wisdom that seeks to know and to understand with as much comprehensiveness and coherence as possible. And so when what little coherence we have come to make of our world gets shattered by such events as the earthquake of January 12, it is understandable that we should look to those who are in the know for words of wisdom, as if from on high, as it were. I say “as if from on high” because it is almost certainly the felt loss (however prolonged) of an all-loving or all-powerful (or both) “God”—the typically symbolic name we use to give coherence to that little bit of the world of which we cannot make sense¹—that we seek to make up for with all of the words (religious or otherwise) that we allow to come pouring from our mouths and into our ears in the wake of such a tragedy.

Perhaps there is an observation to be made here, one analogous to the one made by Rowan Williams after September 11, viz, when it comes to all the noise and talk that follows such a disaster, our words about “God” cannot but fail, theologically speaking. Theologically, then, we must look for ways in which the hiatus that religious language takes at such moments creates a void—Williams calls it a “breathing space”—into which the Spirit might enter freely, such that God might be “rediscovered” anew, that is, “heard or seen where there aren’t yet words for him.”² What I am suggesting is that if we are going to go on speaking of God, as distinguished from merely speakingabout God, in the wake of the events of January 12, we shall have to relearn the language of prayer. We shall have to learn a peculiarly wordless kind of language, a language that speaks to God by way of an outgoing action that is open to and waits vulnerably upon the free coming of God. To relearn such a language, we shall have to be humble enough to forget for just this moment at least that we are homo sapiens, to admit that we as human beings were created to be vulnerable and open before God, to admit “that you and I are homo precarius.”³ And that will require that our lives be given over to those who are in the most precarious and vulnerable position of all. In this case, that will require us to find our words and actions yielded to the victims of this tragic event, so as there to abide with them, in such a manner as to learn cruciformly to inhabit their loss and disorder in a way that moves at one and the same time into the new life of resurrection.

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In the days immediately following the Haiti earthquake, news reports of the number dead and injured reached into the hundreds of thousands (as I write, the death toll appears just to have surpassed 230,000), and greater clarity as to the social, political, and economic realities of Haiti’s tragic situation began to emerge. Here we have a nation with a jobless rate that hovers between 60 and 70 percent, a faulty tax system that has enslaved the working population to the economic elite, a history of U.S. opposition to trade unions and wage increases, as well as a history of refusal on the part of the “developed” West to provide direct aid to a democratically elected government. But it is the indelible images of the victims in the immediate aftermath of the quake that have remained with me most of all these past weeks. These images have come to us, for the most part, in the form of simple wordless photographs: there is the image of streets strewn with corpses, over which bleeding survivors must step so as to escape further harm; there is the image of the parent, sibling, or friend, herself bleeding, struggling to wrench her child, sister, or brother from the clutches of the rubble; there is the image of the crying child whose one unpatched eye betrays the loneliness of an orphan; there is the image of the widow clutching the dead body of her husband in her arms, gasping, as if unsure whether or not—or from where—the next breath will come.

Were one to put an audio track to these wordless images—and there is some raw video footage of the immediate aftermath—it is uncertain as to whether one would hear anything that is to be straightforwardly understood at all. One would hear words, of course, shouts and cries of broken French and Creole that would no doubt be intelligible to the trained ear. But beyond these words we would hear—if we are given the ears to hear—in these shouts and cries the sounds of prayers being uttered with “sighs to deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). For what these victims are speaking in these shouts and cries is something of a spiritual tongue, a divine language; that is, they speak with tongues that can only be understood through the Spirit of love, which binds us to these victims in lived solidarity. If we shall so allow ourselves by the power of the Spirit to be given over to a lived solidarity with this victimized and long-oppressed people, then perhaps we shall be given to hear in their shouts and cries the rawest, purest form of the language of prayer.

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I believe this to be the case; I believe that our proper response to the devastation in Haiti in the days to come will be bound up with how it is that we not only pray for but more importantly with these oppressed victims. But I don’t think that such a belief means much outside of a recognition that prayer—as fundamentally the invocation of God—is inseparable from obedient human action. Ora et labora—“pray and work,” as Karl Barth reminds us.⁴

At the heart of all Christian prayer is the cry “Thy kingdom come!” It is with this cry that we move out into the action that speaks to God by waiting upon the free coming of God. It is with this cry that we speak to and for the coming again of Christ—that decisive action of God by which the powers and principalities of this world are to be subverted and creation is to be opened anew to its revolutionary transformation into new life. In prayer, we come to participate in this revolutionary transformation. Thus, Barth says, the action to which Christians are called by Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is a specific kind of revolt.⁵ Specifically, the Christian prays in “revolt against all the oppression and suppression of humans by the lordship of the lordless powers,” against those powers that have gained their lordship by virtue of their refusal of humanity’s and creation’s relationship to God.⁶ At the same time, the Christian prayer of revolt is rooted in an equally specific kind ofhope. The Christian acts against the lordship of the lordless powers not so as to win her own freedom from their rule (as if by some equally autonomous power), but rather in the recognition that she has been implicated in a struggle that refuses their rule as false and illusory, in recognition that she has already been liberated from their rule in the original revolution of Christ’s cross and resurrection.⁷ For Christians to cry, “Thy kingdom come!” in revolt against the lordless powers is to act “in the sphere of freedom” from the powers which “is already given to them here and now on this side of the fulfillment of the prayer.”⁸⁹ Prayer, Barth is saying, should make revolutionaries of us all. Indeed, what kind of an invocation of God’s kingdom would it be if it did not testify through specific ways of working and living and loving to the path through and out from under the lordless powers—cosmic, political, and religious alike—that enslave the powerless poor by presuming to deny the resurrection of the crucified?

And yet, we must be clear: such prayer, such living and working and loving, is born out of, not apart from, the crucible of lived solidarity with those victims who have been rendered powerless by these lordless powers. Whatever else we might say about the geological causes and the religious significance of the January 12 earthquake, surely we must resist any interpretation of this event—either as mere cosmic chance or as the outworking of some inscrutable divine will—that refuses ways of living and working with the Haitian that affirm again the goodness of creation. It may be groaning in enslavement to powers hostile to God, but creation is nevertheless there to be received anew as gift and sign of God’s coming new creation. Whatever else we might say about the impoverished working conditions, crippled health-care system, and gross economic oppression of the Haitian people that this tragic event has made all the more apparent, surely we must resist any benevolent posturing that presumes to offer economic and medical aid while leaving these exploitative structures in place. Whatever else we might say about the covert political alliances that have suppressed Haitian democracy, limited Haitian immigration to the United States, and curtailed Haitian economic “growth” for the sake of the increased wealth of the Western international superpowers, surely we must resist any sloganeering cries for equal rights and economic development that leave unchallenged the hegemonic politics of the West whose ideology creates the very space for such sloganeering.

If this is what solidarity with the oppressed and victimized Haitian people calls us to resist, to revolt against, what then, one might ask, are those ways of living and working and loving that constitute the “obedient human action” of one who prays, “Thy kingdom come”? To begin with, we shall have to be obedient to the command of God to go—to be with these people, indeed, to live with these people and to have these people live with us(whether permanently or for a time). We must be willing to work with these people and to love these concretely broken bodies (the immense significance of the word concrete here does not escape me) and this specific space of broken earth. And as we go, we shall have to ask how to receive again the goodness of creation by rediscovering a distinctively liturgical agrarianism for a people whose population is 75 percent rural. As we go, we shall have to ask what kinds of economic and business ventures promote healthy and faithful city dwelling in the midst of Haiti’s now-impoverished urban centers. As we go, we shall have to ask what kinds of living and loving and working together will continue to feed and clothe the illegal Haitian immigrants when, in eighteen months, their temporary asylums have expired.

These are the questions that all manner of disciplined experts are asking in some way, on some level. But we must recognize that to ask these questions in the mode and posture of Christian prayer is to ask these questions differently. For to ask these questions in the mode of prayer is to be humble enough to admit that we do not know the answers to these questions in advance, that we are not, after all, the homo sapiens we think we are. To ask these questions in the mode of prayer is for once to be silent just long enough to be obediently open to—to “hear toward”¹⁰—the ways in which these questions take specific shape in the broken speech and painful cries of this victimized and oppressed people. To ask these questions in the mode of prayer is for once to be vulnerable enough to find that the precariousness of these persons’ very lives is to be borne in solidarity with them. To ask these questions in the mode of prayer is to discover ways unseen in which we might be called to live and to work and to love with these oppressed persons, to go to them and to pray with them, and in doing so, to become homo precarius.

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I said at the outset of this essay that perhaps what we need above all else is to refuse to speak theologically about God in the wake of catastrophes such as the Haiti earthquake. (I do not think that theological language is ever as such about God; but in times like these, when theology seems especially tempted to go on holiday, we need all the more to be reminded that it is not such.) I suggest instead that if we should go on speaking of God, we shall have to relearn the language of prayer, relearn what it means to speak toGod in the mode of actively waiting upon God and the grace of God’s free coming.¹¹

This is dangerous. To pray in this way, to actively wait upon God, is inevitably to not be in control.¹² Yet such lack of control is precisely what is required of us if we are to find ourselves thrown into solidarity with the suffering and oppressed victims of this tragic event. Such lack of control is precisely what those indelible images of the victims bespeak. Such lack of control is precisely what makes of their shouts and cries a tongue not to be understood, a groaning of “sighs too deep for words” that is nothing if not sheer, raw prayer. It is precisely such lack of control that makes these people appear to us to live, in that moment, by the Spirit alone. And so it is precisely this lack of control that makes us to hear in these shouts and cries a divine language, the language of the Spirit that binds us to them in love.

Where was God in the earthquake? It is a question I hoped to avoid, but I have been hearing it from every corner of my life this past month. It is a question that, again, we must not approach as if speaking theologicallyabout God, but in prayer, in the language of speaking to God in active waiting for God’s coming. Perhaps, then, we shall find that the “where” of God is the space opened by this prayer itself—indeed, God’s Spirit is the breath that alone opens this space of prayer. God is in the shouts and cries of this oppressed people and in the hopeful laboring of going to and prayingwith this oppressed people that their shouts and cries call forth from us. God is in those cries, in that going, and in that labor, as the power of the Holy Spirit draws us into the very work of prayer that took Christ to the cross, subverting the lordless powers by making of the cross a way out of death into new life. And so now we go. We work. We pray.