Only within honesty’s stark silence can grief be heard: No matter whether mild or severe, it still disables. Psyche bleeds.

So I tell myself while sitting in the comfort of my study, a grey-spitting rain slicking the windows and moistening shrubs. Again, I descend into silence and seek to dredge up words from this stinking morass putrefying my spirit and keeping it in bondage. I am not alone—the experience is global. Commentators enunciate the niceties of escalating fractures deepening the rifts, but offer no response to move beyond their deadly sway.

Yet, words have been eluding me like oil drops rimming dishwater in a sink. Alone, I’m powerless. More prayer is critical for this process—within pain patiently endured comes new understanding and compassion for others.

In the long ago past, others have suffered such brokenness; among them, artists found outlets for their grief in literature, music, dance, sculpture, painting, and other art forms. The lessons are still there: Sophocles, the Hebrew prophets, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, J. S. Bach, Picasso’s Guernica, Solzhenitsyn, Martha Graham, and thousands of others.

The glitch continues, for which there are no quick fixes. It is still raining.