Over the Christmas holiday, I let myself stay up late and watch movies with my parents. This privilege was possible only because my husband would go to bed at a normal time and get up with our crazy children so that I could sleep in. He understands that my family lives in the relativity time zone. Time passes, but the rate changes depending on the needs of the moment.

One evening I watched I Heard the Bells with my parents. It’s the story of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and how he came to write the poem, “Christmas Bells,” which became one of my favorite hymns 25 years ago when I was a freshman in college. Maybe it was because I was just finishing my Philosophy 215 course, The Philosophy of Religion, that I noted the arguments for and against the existence of God in those verses. Or maybe it was the fact that I lived right by Bell Tower, so I could relate to the line, “Then rang the bells more loud and deep.”

Whatever it was, this hymn spoke to me. I had felt the weight of doubt so much already in my life–doubt in myself, doubt in my purpose, doubt that I would find my way in this world. It had never occurred to me that the author of something so resonant could have felt any of those things himself. I thought of him as a sort of isolated guy, like Thoreau: someone acquainted with society and the idea of family but who didn’t really need all of that noise interfering with the simple life he celebrated.

Anyway, without giving away what happens in the movie, I have a poem of my own to share. It won’t become a hymn or the subject of a movie, but the thoughts leading to it had been playing out in my head for a while. When Longfellow lost his wife in the movie, I heard my thoughts take on a rhyme and meter that I mostly stuck to.

The Silence within You

Your heart beats on, his vigil keeping

With no regard for why you’re weeping

What? Did none tell the old, loy’l soldier

That she is gone, you cannot hold her?

The sound is strange that greets your ears

As hands press ‘gainst your tide of tears

Some beast within prepares to roar,

“Dear God, what’s all this torture for?”

Curled o’er in grief’s empty embrace,

You clutch your hair, you hide your face

“She’s gone!” the silence screams, and you

Cry out, “God, please, take me, too!”

But sound drums on inside that space

Where ears give every thrum its place

A steady hum of life keeps flowing

It pounds and pounds, no death bestowing

“Don’t make me stay here all alone!

Why make delay when she’s my home?”

Your breath holds still so lungs won’t fill,

Then rushes in against your will

A thudding pulse insists on feeding

This body you’re no longer needing

And silence still won’t answer, but listens,

For its small part within life’s rhythm

Between the beats a gift is hidden

A silence you enter as you are bidden

Each time your heart beats, it isn’t complete

Until you find life in the thought of your wife

The silence may gape its jaws wide for a moment

And offer dead stillness that mocks God’s atonement

But hold fast, my brother, and no silence dread

For there in Love’s stillness is when your heart’s fed.

[Title comes from “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I admire their lead singer for his courage to live what he believes, no matter how imperfectly he does it. Not all battles are fought by soldiers. Some are fought by writers.]