Have you experienced the silence of God? It's something we feel when we're down and out, when we look at the disturbing realities of our world, whenever we reach out to God, and we don't find anything. It's hard, it hurts. In today's passage, Jesus refuses to even answer the desperate plea of a nameless gentile woman. When he finally does break his silence, he uses a racial slur to try to get her to leave him alone. It's difficult to hear, but the silence of God can offer us something. When we cannot rely on miraculous interventions from God, we have to rely on each other.