Even When He Is Silent

Notes on faith without evidence, the Cologne cellar, and what we inscribe on walls we expect no one to read

I believe in the sun.

The Inscription

Somewhere in Cologne, in the years when hiding was the only form of hope, someone wrote on a cellar wall:

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.

I believe in love even when feeling it not.

I believe in God even when He is silent.

Three lines. Anonymous. Undated. Found after the war, after the liberation, after whatever happened to the person who carved or scratched or penciled these words in the dark.

We don’t know if they survived. That’s the first thing to understand. The words exist; the writer may not. The inscription outlasted the hand that made it, which is both the nature of writing and, in this case, the entire wound.

I’ve been thinking about this text for months now. Not the theology of it—though we’ll get to that—but the act. The sheer improbability of stopping, in the middle of hiding for your life, to leave words on a wall. What compels a person to do this? What did they think would happen?

What Walls Remember

Humans have always written on walls. Lascaux. Pompeii. The Berlin Wall. Bathroom stalls in dive bars. We write where we need to be remembered, or where we need to remember ourselves.

But this was different. This wasn’t a message for posterity—posterity was precisely what had been stolen. There would be no posterity if the Reich succeeded. This was a message for the dark itself. For the silence that pressed in from all sides. For the God who had apparently stopped answering.

I think about the cellar. The smell of it—damp, cold, the mineral scent of stone. The sounds from above: boots, perhaps. Or nothing, which was worse, because nothing meant waiting. And waiting. The particular horror of hiding is that survival requires stillness, erasure, becoming nobody. You live by pretending you don’t exist.

And in that non-existence, someone took the time to assert existence. To say: I believe. Three times.

Not: I know. Not: I have been told. The verb is precise: believe. Which acknowledges the absence of proof. Which admits the sun is not shining, the love is not felt, the God is not speaking. And still. And still.

The Structure of the Impossible

The poem—if we can call it that—has an architecture worth examining.

Each line follows the same pattern: I believe in X even when Y. The even when is doing all the work. It acknowledges the counterevidence. It says: I see what you see. I know what you know. And yet.

This is not denial. This is not optimism. This is something harder to name—a faith that looks directly at the darkness and refuses to conclude from it.

The sun is not shining. This is a fact. The love is not felt. Also a fact. God is silent. Undeniable.

But the sun exists independent of whether I can see it. Love exists independent of whether I currently feel it. God—if there is a God—exists independent of whether He responds to prayer.

This is the logic of the cellar. This is what someone worked out in the dark, perhaps over days, perhaps in a single desperate hour. A theology of absence that affirms presence.

What Silence Means

I have been thinking about silence lately. Not the good kind—not the meditation-retreat, turn-off-your-phone kind. The other kind. The silence that settles when the world has decided you don’t matter.

There is a silence when the institutions meant to protect you look away. A silence when your neighbors pretend not to see. A silence when the law becomes the instrument of harm rather than the shield against it.

We live in a time of such silences. The bureaucratic silence that answers asylum seekers. The judicial silence that answers children in cages. The legislative silence that answers another mass grave, another exposed atrocity, another video we all saw and then somehow forgot.

The God of Cologne isn’t the only one not speaking. The whole apparatus we built to prevent the cellar—the international laws, the human rights tribunals, the never-again machinery—has gone quiet too.

And so the question the inscription poses is not just theological. It’s practical: What do you believe when the evidence is against you? What do you hold onto when the hands that should hold you have let go?

The Problem of Theodicy

Theologians have a word for the question of why God permits suffering: theodicy. It comes from the Greek theos (god) and dike (justice). The justice of God. The attempt to explain why the One who could stop the horror doesn’t.

After the Holocaust, theodicy became either impossible or obscene, depending on who you asked. Some rabbis declared that God had died in the camps. Others insisted that faith required no explanation—that to demand reasons was itself a failure of belief. Still others developed elaborate frameworks: the suffering was a test, a purification, a mystery beyond human understanding.

The inscription makes no such arguments. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t justify. It doesn’t claim to understand why God is silent.

It just notices the silence and believes anyway.

This is either the deepest wisdom or the most terrible delusion. I cannot decide which. Some days I think the person in the cellar had access to something I can’t reach—a faith that transcends circumstance. Other days I think they were simply doing what humans do: telling ourselves stories to survive the unsurvivable. The story doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.

The Cellar and the Century

We call the twentieth century the age of atrocity, as if atrocity were new. It wasn’t—we just industrialized it. Made it efficient. Applied modern logistics to ancient hatreds.

The Cologne cellar was one of hundreds, thousands. Jews hiding in barns, in attics, in false walls, in the spaces between spaces. Some survived. Most didn’t. The survival rate for hidden Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe was perhaps one in ten. Perhaps less. We don’t have good numbers because the dead don’t fill out surveys.

What I keep returning to is this: someone in that one-in-ten darkness wrote about faith. Not a prayer—the words aren’t addressed to God. Not a plea—there’s no request, no bargaining. Just three statements of belief, structured like a creed, left on a wall that might never be seen.

Maybe that’s the point. The belief isn’t for God. It’s for the believer. A way of remaining human in conditions designed to deny your humanity. A way of saying I am still here when everything conspires to erase you.

The Contemporary Cellar

I want to be careful here. Comparisons to the Holocaust are almost always wrong—too facile, too inflammatory, too quick to claim equivalence where none exists. The industrial murder of six million Jews was singular, and to compare casual hardships to it is to diminish what happened.

But.

The conditions that created the cellar—the bureaucratic classification of human beings, the legal stripping of rights, the neighbors who looked away, the silence of the world—those conditions are not singular. They repeat. They are repeating now.

There are people hiding today. Undocumented immigrants in church basements, waiting for the raid that may or may not come. Refugees in smugglers’ trucks, crossing borders that will kill them if the journey doesn’t. Dissidents in hotel rooms, watching the door.

I don’t know if they write on walls. I don’t know what faith looks like when you’re waiting for ICE, or crossing the Mediterranean, or reading your name on a government list. But I know the silence is there. The same silence. The silence of institutions that could help and don’t. The silence of populations that know and prefer not to.

Even when He is silent.

What the Inscription Doesn’t Say

Notice what’s missing from the three lines.

There’s no anger. No accusation. No why have you forsaken me, though the author had every right. The silence is acknowledged but not protested. It simply is. Like the sun behind clouds, like love unfelt, like a God who doesn’t answer.

This is not the faith of Job, who argued with God, demanded explanations, shook his fist at the heavens. It’s not the faith of the Psalms, which alternate between praise and complaint. It’s something quieter. A faith that has accepted silence as the condition of believing.

I find this almost unbearable. The restraint of it. The refusal to rage.

Perhaps rage was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Perhaps in the cellar, with boots above, any noise was death. Perhaps the absence of protest is itself a form of protest—a refusal to let the silence break them.

Or perhaps by the time you write on walls, you’ve moved past anger into something else. Something I don’t have a word for. A kind of faith that exists only after other faiths have been stripped away.

The Survivor’s Silence

Not everyone who hid survived. And not everyone who survived spoke.

Primo Levi wrote. Elie Wiesel wrote. But many survivors said nothing for years, decades, the rest of their lives. They married, raised children, built businesses, attended family dinners, and never mentioned the cellar, the camp, the walk through the woods with SS on either side.

Their children grew up with a different kind of silence. The silence that lives in a house where questions aren’t asked, where the past is a room no one enters, where you learn early that some stories are not for telling.

I think of this when I read the inscription. Someone wanted to speak. Someone thought words mattered enough to leave them. But most of the hidden wrote nothing, or wrote things that were never found, or survived and then chose silence for the rest of their lives.

The inscription is what remains. Not representative, not typical. Exceptional. The one message that made it through.

This is what history is: the fragments that survived, mistaken for the whole.

The Inheritance

My grandmother was eleven when they put her on a boat. Scotland, destitute—the poverty that comes after the land is taken, when staying means starving and leaving means whatever leaving means for a child alone on the ocean.

What happened to her—I won’t say where or when or by whom, because she never said. She carried the silence her whole life, and the child that came from what was done to her, and the shame that attaches to girls when men are the ones who should be ashamed.

She became a nurse. Front line. Three wars.

I think about this when I read the Cologne inscription. What faith looked like for her. Whether she believed in the sun when it wasn’t shining—or whether she just kept walking in the dark, doing the next thing that needed doing, tending to the bleeding because bleeding was something she understood.

She never wrote on walls. Never left inscriptions. Whatever was inside her, she kept private. But she showed up. Three wars. The faith of action when speech is impossible. The belief in something—duty, service, the body in front of you that needs tending—even when feeling it not.

She’s gone now. The questions I didn’t ask are permanently unanswerable. The silence she carried became the silence I inherited—the particular quiet of a family where certain rooms are never entered, certain years never mentioned, certain words never spoken.

I grew up in the penumbra of that silence. Learned not to ask. Learned to read the pauses, the subject changes, the sudden need to do dishes when certain topics arose. Learned that survival sometimes looks like silence, and silence sometimes looks like strength, and strength sometimes looks like an old woman who won’t talk about the boat but will talk you through a wound, will show you how to stop the bleeding, will teach you what she learned in the wars about keeping people alive.

I believe in love even when feeling it not.

What could love have meant to her? After what was done? And yet she raised a child, tended strangers, kept showing up. That’s its own creed. Its own inscription on the wall of a life.

Kim André Arnesen Listens

In 2012, the Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen encountered these three lines. What he heard in them, what moved him to compose, is between him and the silence.

The piece he created—Even When He Is Silent, scored for chorus and strings—does something that commentary cannot. It enters the text from below, lifts it, suspends it in time. The three statements become a round, voices entering one after another, the phrases overlapping so that I believe is always sounding somewhere, even as other voices reach silent, not shining, feeling it not.

I listened to it for the first time in a cathedral, though I’m not a cathedral person. The acoustics did what acoustics do—made the sound seem to come from everywhere, from the stone itself, from the air. The sopranos climbed toward sun and love while the basses anchored silent, and for a few minutes I understood something I couldn’t have understood from reading alone.

Music doesn’t explain. It doesn’t argue. It puts you inside a feeling before thought intervenes. Arnesen’s setting takes the restraint of the original—the lack of accusation, the quiet insistence—and makes it not just bearable but beautiful. Which is its own kind of miracle.

The Problem of Beauty

Here is what troubles me about the composition, and about my response to it:

The cellar was not beautiful. Hiding is not beautiful. The terror of waiting to be found, the hunger, the inability to move or speak or exist as yourself—none of this is beautiful.

And yet Arnesen’s piece is beautiful. Undeniably. The harmonies resolve into something that sounds like peace, even though the text is about the absence of peace. The voices blend into something that sounds like comfort, even though the context was comfortless.

Is this a problem? Does beauty betray suffering? Does art that makes atrocity bearable somehow excuse atrocity?

I go back and forth. Some days I think: this is what art is for. To transmute. To take what is unbearable and make it bearable enough to hold. To give us a way to remember without being destroyed by the memory.

Other days I think: no. The cellar was unbearable. It should remain unbearable. To make it beautiful is to make it comfortable, which is to make it forgettable.

I don’t resolve this. I just notice that I cry every time I listen, and I’m not sure if the tears are for the cellar or for the beauty or for the distance between them.

What We Inscribe

The thing about walls is: they outlast us.

The words we write on them become messages to strangers, to people who will never know our names, who will encounter our scratches and carvings and wonder who we were and whether we made it.

The Cologne cellar is gone now, or absorbed into some other structure, or marked with a plaque that tourists photograph and move on. The inscription has been transcribed, translated, set to music, printed in books. It has traveled far from the wall it was written on.

But somewhere, the original still exists in whatever form it was made—scratched in stone, penciled on plaster, carved into wood. The hand that made it is dust. The voice that might have read it aloud is dust. Only the words remain.

This is writing’s particular immortality: it survives the writer. And the Cologne inscription is writing at its most essential—the act of leaving something behind when you cannot be sure you’ll survive to explain it.

Every writer does this, at some level. Every writer scratches on a wall and hopes someone will find it. But most of us write in comfort, in safety, with reasonable expectation of tomorrow. The person in the cellar had none of that.

And they wrote anyway.

The Silence Now

I write this in a season of silences.

The silence of courts that could have spoken and didn’t. The silence of allies who could have acted and haven’t. The silence of the reasonable center, waiting for someone else to go first.

I’m not in a cellar. I’m at a desk with coffee, with heat, with the luxury of abstraction. The comparison is obscene. And yet.

The structure is the same. The sun is not shining—or it’s shining somewhere else, on other people, and you can only believe it still exists. Love is not felt—or it’s felt by others, and you can only hope you’ll feel it again. God is silent—or the institutions, or the laws, or the people who promised they would help.

Even when. The phrase carries the whole weight. It acknowledges the absence. It refuses to let the absence be the conclusion.

I want to believe the way the inscription believes. I want faith without proof, hope without evidence, love even when feeling it not. But I am not in a cellar, and the wanting feels like appropriation—borrowing someone else’s extremity to dress up my ordinary despair.

So I hold the words lightly. I listen to Arnesen’s setting and let it move me without claiming to understand. I write about the inscription without pretending I could have written it.

And I wait, like everyone waits, for the silence to break.

What Remains

The sun, even when not shining, still exists. This is verifiable. The earth still orbits; the photosphere still burns; the light still travels, blocked only temporarily by clouds or rotation. The faith of the first line is, in a sense, not faith at all but knowledge dressed as belief.

Love, even when not felt, may or may not exist. This is less certain. Love is not a physical phenomenon; it has no photosphere. It exists only in the feeling and the action. To believe in it when absent is to believe in a return—that what was felt can be felt again.

God, even when silent, is the hardest case. Because God’s existence is unverifiable, the silence cannot be explained as temporary obscuration. There’s no photosphere to point to. Only the silence, and the history of the silence, and the people who insisted anyway.

Maybe that’s what faith is, finally. Not knowledge. Not even hope. Just the insistence that absence is not proof of nonexistence. That the sun behind clouds is still the sun.

The person in the cellar had every reason to stop believing. The sun had been dark for years. The love had been systematically destroyed—community, family, the ordinary kindnesses that make up a life. God had been silent through the deportations, the camps, the murders.

And still: I believe.

I don’t know if they survived. I don’t know their name, their age, their particular history. I don’t know if the faith held or broke, if they walked out of that cellar or were carried out.

I only know they wrote on a wall, and the wall kept the words, and the words found Kim André Arnesen, who gave them to voices, who gave them to air, who gave them to me, sitting in a cathedral, crying for reasons I couldn’t name.

Even when He is silent.

Even when.

My grandmother never wrote her creed on a wall. But she inscribed it on the bodies she healed, the wounds she dressed, the three wars she walked into because someone had to. Her silence was its own scripture. Her survival was its own testimony.

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.

I believe in love even when feeling it not.

I believe in the eleven-year-old girl on the boat, who became the woman who became the nurse who became the silence I inherited.

Even when. Even when. Even when.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean