"Only Say the Words..."

Tom Wolfe’s new book disputes that language is a product of evolution. In fact, he questions the Big Bang and evolution altogether, although an atheist.

This notion became fodder for my morning walk. It occurred to me that language was indeed an advantageous evolutionary adaptation. Now we could say what we wanted and needed, instead of using brute force or devious machinations to seize it. Negotiation and compromise became possible; feelings and reason could be expressed; and wisdom, a combination of feelings and reason and inspiration, could be transmitted.

In the present American culture and perhaps in other contemporary cultures, it’s a challenge to remember the gift of words when words are used as weapons (weaponized, so to speak) and coming together in compromise is considered weakness. In a society in which so many of us, from our leadership to our electorate, need to be reminded to use our “inside voices,” it’s a challenge to believe words can be solutions rather than salvos.

These thoughts come to me as I also reflect on a recent conversation in the opinion pages of the newspaper about the need or benefit of learning longhand alongside print or type. Some legislators feel “the American way of life” is threatened by educators who believe script is optional, perhaps unnecessary.  While not going that far, a teacher’s letter observed that when students wrote longhand, they expressed themselves more personally. The poem in last week’s post I first wrote in longhand, so I understand that point of view.

Makes me think of the poet Lord Byron’s pen, or quill. He thought of it as an extension of himself.  In seminary, a dorm mate asked to borrow my typewriter, and though I lent it to him, I realized I felt the same way about it. As I told another student, “It was as if he asked to borrow my underwear,” to which the student replied with a laugh, “He did borrow my underwear!”

Henri Nouwen’s books are highly regarded, I believe, because he wrote so personally. And I realize the intimacy of his spiritual writing may have been partly because he wrote all of his books in a graceful longhand, having another transcribe them on a typewriter or computer.

Cursive writing keeps your hand continuously on the paper, unlike printing or typing, so there’s a unity that has both spiritual and sensual elements, like lovemaking.

When I was in high school, another student “marveled” (his word) that I viewed all my writing as a gift from God.  And to this day, I may complete a piece and “marvel” that it came out of “me.” I still believe that it is a gracious gift, this ability to put things in words, and I doubt it comes only from “me” (whatever “me” is), but something that comes from a deeper well, not mine alone.

Words helped us conceive and imagine God, so it’s not by chance that Judaism and Christianity reversed that order, and worshiped a God who called the world into being with mere words (logoi, plural of logos) in the first case and in the second, a God whose Word (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.  In Judaism, we learned and lived the words of the mitzvah (duties, good deeds), and in Christianity, the Spirit gave us the words to proclaim God’s activity in the world.

I worry, in myself as a writer, that words are not deeds, though my readers often beg to differ. Like Henri and his many words, I take comfort in the words of John of the Ladder: 

I found some consolation and encouragement in the words of one of the most stern ascetics, the seventh-century John of the Ladder, who lived for forty years a solitary life at Mount Sinai. In his chapter on discernment, step 26 of his spiritual ladder, he writes: “If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach…For perhaps, being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach” (Reaching Out, 9). 

And these further words of Henri’s: 

When we think about the people who have given us hope and have increased the strength of our soul, we might discover that they were not the advice givers, warners, or moralists, but the few who were able to articulate in words and actions the human condition in which we participate and who encourage us to face the realities of life (Reaching Out, 43).  

To paraphrase one seeking healing from Jesus, “Only say the words and I shall be healed.”

Related post:

The Right Word

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Watch Your Language!

A memorable episode of the old sitcom Frasier featured a scene from the dog Eddie’s perspective. The human conversation about him was unintelligible except when he heard his name or the few words in his vocabulary like “treat,” “walk,” “food,” and so on. A parallel scene from the father Martin’s perspective listening to his psychiatrist sons using psychological jargon revealed the same babble interspersed with words he understood.

This is the way I feel about 100 pages into Stephen Hawking’s (with Leonard Mladinow) The Grand Design. I experienced the same thing 95 pages into his book, A Brief History of Time, and I was reading the illustrated version! Suddenly everything gets more complicated as he connects QED with QCD and GUT (Grand Unified Theory), quarks and Feynman diagrams, baryons and mesons and asymptomatic freedom.

There are too many subatomic particles in the air! I can’t keep up!

I got a laugh when I mentioned in a workshop at a Unitarian Universalist Church that in Christian worship I hear traditional jargon, and say to myself, “Why did they say that? What does it mean?” My subtext is: How does it enhance the experience? Is it intelligible to an outsider?

Some like to mock Scientology’s terminology, but Christianity’s lingo is just as weird to the novice, yet because those in our culture have heard it so often, we take it in stride. I’d like to avoid specifics, because each example will offend someone for whom the phrase has taken on positive connotations. But at the risk of losing you, here goes one example…

What does it mean, for instance, to say, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost”? When I was baptized at the tender age of six and asked, just before my full body immersion, if I believed in this trio, I was stumped. I thought baptism meant I would belong to God and Jesus forever. I wasn’t certain who the Father and Son were, and I’m not sure I knew of the Holy Ghost.

I know some of you will now think, well, he was too young to be baptized, to give consent. Blessedly my pastor knew better, and told the congregation so before he dunked me. He knew I wanted Jesus in my heart and God in my life. More sophisticated theology would come later. And besides, I gave more consent than infants who are baptized.

But why do we need to do everything in the name of the Trinity? Why is it said so often, as if this incantation sacralizes everything? First, it excludes other possible manifestations or faces of God. Second, it’s an exclusively male grouping, unless you know that the Spirit is feminine in one testament and neuter in another. And why not include Mary, the mother of Jesus? Who gave God sole custody?

(I myself used to reduce the Trinity to their functionality: Creator, Reconciler, Sustainer, but that too seems unsatisfying, incomplete and much too impersonal.)

I know, I’m just being difficult, like a parishioner who puts an anonymous petty criticism in the church suggestion box.

Progressive religious intellectuals have a similar problem with holy gobbledygook. I was given an article by a scholar for publication in a magazine I edited. I could make out what was being said (I can read academese). But I thought it could have been said in a paragraph rather than the 20 pages I received, and I doubted my readers would appreciate the author’s complicated and convoluted reasoning with multi-syllabic words that sounded recently devised. So I published an intelligible excerpt!

Okay, so now I’ve offended everyone. Undoubtedly someone will say, take the beam out of your own eye before addressing the splinters in others. Mea culpa. But we need some kind of modern day Pentecost to proclaim a gospel that others can grasp. Come, Holy Spirit!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.