Literature Analysis

Tag: god

  • What Psalms and Shakespeare Teach Us About Speaking into the Void

    What Psalms and Shakespeare Teach Us About Speaking into the Void

    What Psalms and Shakespeare Teach Us About Speaking into the Void

    Prayer as Narrative: Psalms, Shakespeare, and Lorca:

    What does Psalm 13 have in common with Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be”? More than you’d think. Both are one person speaking into the void, hoping that someone out there is listening. And whether it’s God or an empty stage, the act of speaking changes the speaker.

    Prayer at its core, is a story told toward heaven, a silent, private message sent from a soul to often, a God believed in. Sometimes it’s short, a breathless plea, and other times, it’s a long, winding argument. Whether it’s whispered or shouted, the structure of a prayer is not unlike the structure of a monologue in a play, as it is often one voice, speaking with urgency to an unseen listener who holds the power to respond or to remain silent. 

    What struck me as a reader was reading the Psalms alongside monologues of Shakespeare and Federico Garcia Lorca. The way in which both forms create intimacy, not just with the person being addressed, the reader, but also with the audience that overhears them. 

    The Structure of Psalm

    For example, Psalm 13:

    How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
     How long will you hide your face from me?

    The message starts with desperation, then moves through a series of emotional turns, lament, petition, and finally evolves to trust:

    But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
     my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

    This arc, with its raw opening, reasoning, reflection, and eventual resolution,  mirrors the way a skilled playwright would build a monologue. The speaker begins in emotional chaos, sifts through their thoughts aloud, and lands somewhere new. And even if nothing changes externally, the act of speaking reshapes the soul.

    Shakespeare’s Stage-Prayers

    Consider Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. Though not a prayer in the religious sense, it is a meditation spoken into the void, wrestling with mortality, meaning, and the afterlife:

    To die, to sleep —
     To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub.

    Almost like a psalmist, Hamlet exposes his inner life before an invisible audience, because for him, the audience is the universe itself. His words are not for the other characters, but for himself, and for us, the overhearers and the listeners.

    Shakespeare’s characters, such as the psalmists, are unafraid to let contradiction live inside a single speech. Petition and protest exist side by side, creating a textured humanity that makes us trust them, even when we disagree.

    Lorca’s Earthbound Prayers

    Federico García Lorca, with his fusion of folk tradition and poetic intensity, often crafted monologues that feel like prayers rooted in soil. In Yerma, the title character pours out her longing for a child in a way that is both intimate and cosmic:

    I want to sleep for half a year
     and wake up with a child.

    This is a petition in its most vulnerable form, a request that is physical, emotional, and spiritual at once. Like the Psalms, Lorca’s prayers are not sterile, but they are sweaty, tear-stained, and earthy. They address God, fate, or the universe in the same breath.

    Intimacy Through Overhearing

    Whether in biblical psalm, Shakespearean soliloquy, or  Lorca monologue, the audience is often a third party to a private address. This “overhearing” effect creates a unique intimacy. We are not the intended recipients of the words, yet hearing them changes us.

    In prayer, the speaker invites God into the room. In a play, the speaker invites the audience into their soul. In both, language bridges an infinite gap.

    Why It Matters

    When we think about prayer, we often imagine it as a fixed form, taking physical form in a group of bowed heads and folded hands. However, what we can take from literature is that it reminds us that prayer can be a narrative act, becoming the process of finding meaning in speaking in itself. And when we are given the opportunity to read or watch these monologues, we are reminded that overhearing vulnerability can be just as transformative as speaking it.

    Question for Readers:
     Do you think prayers are more for God or for ourselves? And when you hear a character in a play bare their soul, does it feel like a kind of prayer to you?

  • THE SILENCE OF GOD IN LITERATURE

    THE SILENCE OF GOD IN LITERATURE

    When Heaven Stays Silent: God in Elie Wiesel’s Night

    The first time I read Night, by Elie Wiesel, I didn’t expect the weight of its silence and quiet. Not the quiet we enjoy, in peace or rest, but the kind that lingers in your lungs, the kind the you feel in your bones. While Elie Wiesel’s memoir focuses on his experience through the Holocaust, it also focuses on what happens when the God you were taught to love and trust stops answering. 

    In the early chapters, Eliezer is a young and devout child immersed in Jewish learning and prayer. He seeks God earnestly the same way a child would look for his father’s face in a crowd. But as he faces the horrors of Auschwitz, the God he knew in his childhood becomes harder and harder to find. Though his prayers remain, the presence behind them starts to dwindle and vanish. 

    “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”

    This loss of belief isn’t comparable to a form of atheism in its comfortable, philosophical form, but a cry of betrayal, exuding the agony of someone who believed, and now finds himself abandoned.

    Silence as a Character

    Wiesel’s genius lies in making God’s silence feel like an active presence in the book. It’s not just that God doesn’t intervene, but his absence is so heavy it further shapes the emotional climate of the camp. Silence almost becomes a character in this sense, cold, immovable, and unyielding. 

    In one of the memoir’s most haunting moments, as a young boy is hanged and dies slowly in front of the prisoners, someone behind Wiesel asks, “Where is God now?” And the voice inside him answers: “He is hanging here on this gallows.”

    Here, silence is not just emptiness, it’s a brutal reframing of the divine. God is no longer enthroned in heaven, but brought down into the scene of suffering, bound and dying with His people. It’s a statement that is at once deeply theological and deeply blasphemous, depending on who reads it.

    Theological Echoes

    The silence of God is not unique to Wiesel’s memoir. The Psalms cry out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22 NIV) , words later echoed by Jesus on the cross. Job sits in ashes, demanding an answer from a God who speaks only after long, aching chapters of waiting.

    But in Night, there is no dramatic final speech from the whirlwind. No voice from the heavens to make sense of the pain, the silence remains unbroken. In this way, Wiesel’s text refuses the comfort that biblical narratives sometimes offer. It leaves the reader in the same unresolved tension as the survivor.

    Faith After the Silence

    Some readers interpret Night as a story of a lost faith, while others may see it as a story of a faith that has been burned down to its most fragile ember, just not yet extinguished. Wiesel himself said he never stopped believing in God, but he did lose the God he knew of his childhood. What remains is his faith stripped bare, existing in spite of God’s silence, not because of His voice.

    Perhaps that’s what makes the memoir so enduring, as it doesn’t give a direct answer, but forces readers to sit with the question, becoming a mirror for our own seasons of divine quiet.

    Why It Matters Now

    In an age where quick answers and inspirational slogans dominate the conversation about faith and our society continues to be focused on the superficialities of the world, Night offers something rare, the unflinching portrait of belief that has been through fire, reminding us that silence is part of the story of faith, not an interruption to it. To be faithful is not just to hear God clearly, but to endure in the shadow of His absence.

    Question for Readers:
     Have you ever experienced a season where God felt silent? How did it change your understanding of faith?