In Defense of Incoherence

Prayers, as I know them, are usually composed of moments of non-speaking. The things we express in prayers: repentance, gratitude, aspirations—these are the least expressed by human language. I have learned that the most heartfelt of aspirations, those we make known only to God, are expressed without any appreciable coherence. Our most honest expressions of remorse, of gratitude and of desire are revealed not in any orderly construction of phrases, but rather in Incoherence, consistent only in the underlying faith that they will be Understood.

Perhaps, the language of prayers is silence. Perhaps, its syllables are flashes of images and warmth. Perhaps, they take wing from the depths of the soul and fly through the limits of our minds, through the clouds and the stars, to a place where they are welcomed and understood. Perhaps, their disorganization is their very organization, and they defy human comprehensibility precisely because they were never ours to make sense of in the first place.

Perhaps this Incoherence is the expression of a language we have forgotten, but which refuses to be lost. It lingers in defiance like a devoted soldier, and presents itself only in prayers, as a lifeline, a conduit, to everything Divine.