Waiting for the Word

By Abigail Carroll

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“How did it happen?” asked the olive oil merchant at the market.

“Did illness take his voice?” asked the baker from behind a display of loaves.

“Did he swallow something cursed?” asked the goatherd, selling butter and cheese.

“It was an angel,” Elizabeth explained. “An angel in the temple.”

“An angel?” asked the spice dealer. “How do you know?”

“I knew it even before he opened his mouth. When he came back from the temple, he had the shining of Moses about him, but in a frightful way. He didn’t eat for three days.”

Indeed, because fear of angels is not enough to cure a soul, I went mute. When I opened my mouth, my throat did not work. My breath was dry. For nine months and nine days I shaped no word with my tongue. I learned to wave and point. I made good use of a tablet and chalk. I was reduced to an infant, except for the fact that even my weeping was without sound. Such was the price of standing in the Holy Place with a doubting heart.

At first, I was trapped in shock. Who was the high priest Zechariah without a voice? What good was the wisdom of my years without a tongue?

Soon, I gave up. I did not even scrawl letters with chalk. If I could have shaped a sound, I would have moaned and moaned. My whole being was a silent, wallowing complaint.

After some days, though, I noticed a strange thing. The low cackling of the morning fire, the gentle pouring of water—I had begun to hear these things in a different way. And the voices of people became more than mere chatter. They took on life: the neighbors’ children playing, priests reciting Torah, Elizabeth’s small laughter.

“My love,” whispered Elizabeth one morning, pressing my hand to her aproned middle. She was carrying our child. The veil of silence did not lift, but in that moment, it changed. In that moment, I knew the Silencer and the Giver were one and the same.
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And so I learned to wait. There was much to wait for: the coming of our child and the hoped-for coming back of my voice. The wonder of it, which emerged like the slow unveiling of a mountain shrouded in mist, was that somehow none of this was about me. It was not about us. What I mean is, something was dawning. Someone greater than Moses was coming, and it seemed my silence was strangely announcing his advent. Messiah was not far. In the cavern of my silence, the Word who spoke into being all that is and was and ever will be was preparing to speak.

* * *
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“My Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise,” chanted the temple priests a few weeks after my encounter with the angel.

As the Psalm echoed against the stone of the temple walls, I noticed a priest in his sashed tunic steal a glance my way. The irony of the words was not lost on him. Nor was it lost on me.

At the close of the prayers, an older priest laid his hand on my shoulder and spoke in a pebbled voice the wisdom of Job: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.”

The younger priest beside him blurted out, “Without your voice, the prayers simply are not the same!”

What is prayer? I thought. There is worship in spoken words, but worship also in a bow. There is worship in a song, but greater worship in the God-ward living of a life. The prayers that had once danced on my lips now seeped into my sinews and bones. Just as our treasured son was growing in Elizabeth’s womb, so a new way of praying was growing in me.

The quiet, at first a dark wasteland, had become a welcome wilderness. I had been exodused from the slavery of my role, my name, my success. And in the solitude of that desert I heard for the first time the low, continuous thrumming of my heart—its own prayer. These small intercessions ticked the long afternoons while I sat under the olive or lay down to rest.

To my surprise, I found myself grateful for things I had never given thanks for in the past, and with a depth of gratitude I did not know could be mine.

Blessed are you, O Lord, God of the Universe, for the taste of almonds and salt, by which we delight in your goodness.

Blessed are you, O Lord, God of the Universe, for a new generation, through which you write your story onto time.
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Blessed are you, O Lord, God of the Universe, for every uncountable star in the mystery of Abraham’s vast sky.

​* * *
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One day, Elizabeth’s young cousin from Nazareth appeared—she, too, expecting. The sound my dear wife made at her arrival was that of a giddy child. And from the next room, I heard something I’d never heard before: my wife prophesying. For the child in her cousin’s womb was no ordinary child. John danced in Elizabeth’s womb at the encounter, just as David once danced before the ark.

That evening, while Elizabeth chopped cucumbers and onions, Mary spoke of an angel visiting her in a flurry of fearful light.

“The room grew bright,” Mary said. “I heard a voice like water, and it spoke my name.”

“Go on,” Elizabeth said, smiling with attentive delight.

“‘How could I tell Joseph my son was God’s Son? I planned to hold the secret for a little while, but when he saw me, he knew at once I was no longer who I had been.”

Mary looked downward.

“He did not understand?” Elizabeth offered, interpreting Mary’s gaze.

“He drew up the papers for divorce,” Mary explained. “I was about to be alone with child. But then he had a dream, and everything changed.”

Elizabeth reached over and squeezed Mary’s hand as one who understood. “The Lord has made a way.”

Mary nodded. “Nothing is impossible with God.”

As Mary spoke, words from Isaiah entered my mind. I could not fend off the prophet’s age-old declarations descending on me like a flock of laughing doves. Could Isaiah’s vision be coming to pass? I motioned for my tablet and scrawled from memory the 700-year-old promise: The Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child. She will give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us”. 

​Elizabeth stopped chopping, and we sat in a pondering stillness as dusk turned to night.

* * *
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A week and a day after our dear son’s birth, when the morning of his circumcision arrived, many people came to share in the radiance of our joy. They came also because they were curious. How could it be that gray-haired Elizabeth had delivered a strapping newborn with wild dark eyes? And what did it portend that the child’s father had exited the temple on the Day of Atonement, mute, bizarrely unable to utter so much as a sigh?

“His name shall be Zechariah, like his father,” my brother declared.

“Good health, long life to young Zechariah!” declared the family and neighbors who were present to bear witness.

Elizabeth raised her hand to quiet the jubilation.

“That is not our wish,” she said firmly. "We have chosen the name John.”

A hush fell on the group.

“John?” asked the Rabbi hesitantly.

“Ridiculous! There is no John in the family line,” blurted my brother.

“Laughable!” chimed in his wife.

“Absurd!” added a neighbor with creased brow.

Custom is strong and slow to change, but I put an end to their fussing. I scratched in bold, forceful letters on my tablet the name the angel had given.

Then, in the time it takes for a roll of thunder to follow desert lightning’s blinding flash, the words on the tablet became alive. They were like a spring deep in me suddenly swelling into a river that coursed powerfully through my lips.

“John! His name is John! By the decree of the Lord’s angel, his name is John!”

For the first time in nearly a year, I heard my own voice, and it startled me into praise. Over and over, the sudden river of sound coming out of me shaped my son’s name, and the name of my wife, and the name of my God. As I declared these things, my voice lifted me close to the One who had taken it away.

Someone gasped. Someone stared. Someone raised their hand and shouted a blessing. There was dancing. We laughed deep and hard with joy.
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That night, when the festivities were complete and I lay with Elizabeth, our warm, smooth-skinned child between, I stayed awake long, listening to his breath. I thought of days past and of days yet to come, and I felt no reason to speak, no urge to render a sound in the quiet, lampless dark. Soft was the coo of roosting doves, uncountable the stars in the mystery of Abraham’s vast sky.

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Abigail Carroll is author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days like Water, Habitation of Wonder, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have been anthologised in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope as well as in Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. Her work of nonfiction, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, was a finalist for the Zócolo Public Square Prize. She lives and writes in Vermont. Find her at www.abigail-carroll.com.