God's Native Language

My neighbor lost his dog. Peaches ran away. He looked everywhere from his house to the highway. He finally went home. He was sick.

He found his wife putting on lipstick. How could he tell her? Peaches was his wedding gift to her a year earlier. She was the child of a couple who would be childless.

He stood behind her in the bathroom frozen in grief. He saw himself in the mirror with his mouth open trying to speak, but only a sound came out---a tiny cry of a sound. A sound anyone would miss. A sound only a dog might hear.

When she heard it she turned and said, “What?”

She put her hand to the side of his face, and said, “What is it, baby?”

Things happen that push us back to a place before vowels and consonants. Back behind where words come from. We are speechless. Literally.

In 1982, I stumbled onto something by accident that shattered everything. The noise that came out of me was prehistoric. The next day, and for several weeks, there were no words. The men in white coats came and took me where I did not want to go.

St. Paul writes that there is a language understood only to God---groanings too deep for words.

It is God’s native language.