Sit There and Shut Up

“If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.”

It’s happened again. News of another death, diagnosis, or some other unanticipated despair, and once you have caught your breath these familiar words echo forth, almost involuntarily, into the void: “If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.” You have said it a hundred times over the course of your life. It has been said to you. And yet every time that phrase is tinged with something that does not entirely satisfy. There is a wound, and there is an obvious need for medicine, but this well-intentioned balm inevitably falls short of the healing for which the soul yearns.

The problem is not that we don’t mean these words when we say them. They spill over with good intention. It’s that we tend to have very little imagination as to what it would actually mean for those intentions to become concrete reality. Those things that exist within our capacity to do – to run down the hall to fetch something from the Coke machine, to bring lunch or flowers, to stop by someone’s home to check on the pets – can feel insultingly small in the face of someone’s scalding pain; whereas, those things we most long to do – to heal, to reconcile, to resurrect, to remove someone’s suffering entirely – are all but guaranteed to be beyond our capacity or expertise altogether. We are left in an uncanny valley of helplessness.

Kenneth Blom, Silence 1, Oil on canvas, 2006. Used by permission.

And yet we don’t seem to have come up with anything better. To say nothing feels worse. And we don’t want to run away from the pain of someone we love, knowing that others likely will. And so, for lack of better options, we offer up this flimsy phrase. Though we know even as we speak it that our offering will probably make little difference, we hope it will be received as love nonetheless.

But we can do better.

Well, actually, “do” is precisely the problem.

In my life as a priest, I meet lots of people who are walking through various valleys of shadow and death. The couch in my study is a carousel of crisis. (This near-constant exposure is, perhaps, why I have wearied of this ubiquitous phrase more rapidly than most.) For many years, I assumed that these people coming to my study, these people in the hospital bed, these people on whatever edge, were coming to me because they wanted me to do something for them. I assumed they wanted me to give them advice. Isn’t this why I read all those shelves of books in seminary? And so that’s what I did. I held forth on the problem of evil, the nature of providence, eschatological time-keeping. And over and over again, in the aftermath of these heart-to-hearts, I began to recognize a disconcerting pattern: the depths of my wisdom failed to do much of anything to alleviate these people’s suffering, much less change their lives for the better. As the years have gone by, I have (too) slowly discovered a better approach. I do less. In fact, I do almost nothing at all. Now, as much as possible, I simply sit there and shut up.

The trouble with offering to do something – anything – is that it locks our imagination into a transactional frame of mind, which can have the effect of reinforcing the gulf between you, defining each party strictly by their respective roles of the helper and the helped. And I think this eagerness to do emerges from a particular conviction about what suffering is in the first place. We tend to think suffering is fundamentally a matter of a lack of goods – of health, of money, of luck, of wisdom. The degree to which we can be helpful is the degree to which we can assist in closing that gap. Suffering, in other words, results from occurrences in a sliding scale of misfortune, with things like the death of a loved one on one extreme and more minor inconveniences like stubbed toes and a poor night’s sleep on the other. The further one is along the scale, the more one is suffering – or so we think.

But suffering is a more complicated beast than that. I have found over time that there is something that matters far more than where someone’s particular tragedy ranks in the master list of things that can go wrong in this life. Rather, it is the degree to which they are alone with it. Which is to say, I believe the intensity of our suffering comes not so much from our lack of goods, but from a lack of company, a lack of solidarity, a lack of friends.

As the years have gone by, I have (too) slowly discovered a better approach. I do less. In fact, I do almost nothing at all. Now, as much as possible, I simply sit there and shut up.

This helps me understand what is happening in all those conversations in my study. For what is a person in a clerical collar if not someone upon whom you can safely test your loneliness. Here is someone bound by the cloth to confidentiality, who has taken vows to love and care, who surely you can trust will not judge you too hastily. Here is someone who exists so that you don’t have to be alone.

Not, of course, that folks just come out and say this. When I have asked, “What brings you here today?” those on my couch often half-apologetically stammer out some version of, “To tell you the truth, Father, I’m not totally sure.” Inevitably, sooner or later, I’m being told a sad story. It’s long. It’s short. It’s shocking. It’s mundane. Whatever the story, eventually the same vital moment always arrives, when the person on my couch will stop talking. They will look at me. They will wait.

And it is precisely in this moment that we have the opportunity to do something beautiful. We must summon all our strength and resist the urge to do anything at all – to offer advice, to offer a favor, to say anything that amounts to the words, “If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.” Instead, all we must do is hold the space. Don’t do for, just be with. Be silent. Say things like, “That sounds really painful,” and “I’m so glad that you told me” and “I wonder what feels like the hardest part of all.” And when they deflect and say something like, “Well, I know you have lots of other important things to do …” you get the gift of being able to say, “There’s nothing more important for me right now than to be with you.”

“Sit down by me and we will talk. If you are in any trouble tell it to me, and perhaps you will talk the heaviest part away” – so says the philosopher in James Stephens’s Crock of Gold to a distressed young woman he has found walking alone down the road. It really is as simple as that. And as excruciatingly difficult. The heaviest part of our suffering is being alone.

This approach takes for granted that in the face of many of life’s hardest moments, there is indeed often very little that anyone can do. No one comes to my study thinking I’m going to take their suffering away. But we need not despair at that recognition, for we can now see that we are not without alternative means of loving those who are hurting. Indeed, it turns out that what remains available is actually what the heart yearns for more than anything else: relationship. (Sam Wells provides the theological scaffolding for this argument in his book Nazareth Manifesto in amazing depth and abundance.)

Instead of considering whatever crisis is hanging in the air as a problem that needs to be solved, like a puzzle on a coffee table between you, we ought instead to be with the suffering more in the manner of gazing at a complex painting together. One’s suffering is more a mystery to be entered into together than it is a problem with a solution. We can exchange the transactional posture of face-to-face, the posture behind sentences like, “If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know,” for the posture of companionship. Suffering is something to carry side-by-side.

And in this posture, new horizons of possibility come into view. Once the whole story has been told and retold and told again, once the hardest part has been spoken, once the pain is felt in both hearts, a new kind of communion is possible. For when we are side-by-side, the sufferer need no longer be defined exclusively by his suffering. Our mutual gaze can wander elsewhere. Toward a baseball game or a deck of cards. Toward an old yearbook dusted off. Toward a walk or a pint or a film. And these myriad ways of being with someone are no longer an avoidance of the pain, a shoving down, a looking past, but they are the mountain on the other side of the valley. They are the joy that sits stubbornly alongside the despair. They are the communion in which words are not always even necessary, when all doing fades away, and with is all that matters.