Where Words Come From

Deuteronomy 30:11-14                                                                                           
Mark 7:1-2, 5-9, 14-20 

9 October, 2005
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, NC

The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain of Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts

It’s a privilege and a joy to stand with you in this courageous and beloved community of faith and to listen together for the word of God.  Your pastor is one of the stars I steer by – so I know how much Word and words must mean to you.  Thinking about standing here, with him and with you this morning, set me to thinking about Word and about the speaking of words … and that led me to think of sharing with you a poem that intrigues and puzzles and touches me…

Words

Where do words come from?
From what rubbing of sounds are they born
on what flint do they light their wicks
what winds brought them into our mouths

Their past is the rustling of stifled silences
the trumpeting of molten elements
the grunting of stagnant waters

Sometimes
they grip each other with a cry
expand into lamentations
become mist on the windows of dead houses
crystallize into chips of grief on dead lips
attach themselves to a fallen star
dig their hole in nothingness
breathe out strayed souls

Words are rocky tears
the keys to the first doors
they grumble in caverns
lend their ruckus to storms
their silence to bread that’s ovened alive

Venus Khoury-Ghata 
[translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker]

 

Where do words come from?

Do they gestate in the wombs of dictionaries and thesauruses, to be midwived into this world by the gentle hands of English teachers? Do they ebb and flow through cables and gush out of screens? Do words precipitate out of the very air we breathe, full as it is with radio waves and television signals and cell phone calls? …Or do they keep their watch over us silently, like stars, sometimes invisible, sometimes sharp and clear as beacons?

Where do words come from, when they are the words that name the truest things we know – the words by which we change the shape of the world we live in? Words like: “I promise…” or “I will be there” or  “Don’t be afraid…” or “I forgive you…” or “I wonder…”   And where do the words come from by which we tell the hardest truths we ever have to tell? Words like: “This must change” or “I am responsible” or “This is unjust” or “I was mistaken” or “Something is wrong here…”   What winds bring words like those into our mouths? What con-spiracy of God’s breath and ours gives them life?

And what happens to a word unspoken? What happens to the truths that need to be named when instead the words suffocate – when instead the words “crystallize into chips of grief on dead lips”?  What happens to the words we choose not to speak? And what happens to us when we stifle words that need to be spoken?

These may sound like arcane, English-class sorts of questions – or like flights of poetic fancy. But, when you think about it, they’re really the kinds of questions Jesus inhabited with us. Questions like “Who is my neighbor?” and “What profit is it to gain the whole world but lose one’s soul?”  The Word came to dwell among us – the Word was, and is, very near to us – to help us find words, and ways to live them. These kinds of questions are our daily bread in these particular and often painful times. And religion offers no safety from them. The tranquility and beauty of this place on an autumn morning are only part of the truth about the life of the spirit: just below the surface, always, are the questions we live: What needs to be said? Where does the courage to say these things come from? These questions are the molten elements of discipleship. And what happens when, instead, we choose not to speak them – to remain silent?

Harold Bloom, I think it was, said that “religion is the spilling of poetry.” (This is a definition of religion, by the way, that makes a lot more sense to some of my student friends than all the doctrine in the world. They’re proud of their “spirituality” – but horrified at the thought of being called “religious.”  Words, words, words…)  But maybe even the decent and orderly Presbyterians manage to spill a little poetry now and then. Our Westminster Catechism begins with a question and answer that are equal parts poetry and ethics: “What is the chief end of humanity? The chief end of humanity is to glorify and enjoy God forever.”  This is the Word we spill, splashing it as a sign on the doorposts of our house and on our gates. This is the Word that the heavens are telling, according to the Psalmist. We breathe it in – breathe in beauty, and hope, and joy - then breathe out mercy and lovingkindness and forbearance. Day to day pours out speech – even the day itself is full of Word and spilling poetry.   And we ponder it day by day  and breath by breath, with heart and soul and mind, and we teach it to our children, and think of it when we lie down and when we rise.

We talk sometimes about the difficulty of “putting things into words”. And in one sense, of course, putting things into words is not a very satisfying activity – because sometimes so many of the truest things seem to lie beyond the reach of words, and because sometimes talk is cheap. But our religion teaches us how much power words have – and how much they matter. In the oldest stories we tell about this world, God creates with words – God utters things into being. In the Genesis story, Adam uses words to make relationships: God brings each living thing to Adam to see what he would call it – “and whatever Adam called each living creature,” that was how it would be known. The prophets, Isaiah and Amos and Jeremiah and the rest, hone an edge onto words, and wield them to cut and to mend the ways of our living together that need the surgical intervention of conscience. And in the fullness of time, God risked putting into Word the truth that would set us free. Jesus, the mot juste of God, used words to disclose to people the miracle of their healing – “see, your faith has made you well” – and showed how much power they have to wound or to welcome – “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.”

Which brings us, along with a group of religious authorities, to gather around Jesus in one of their many disputes about who gets the last word about words. We come in in the middle of an argument about the washing of hands before a meal – which sounds pretty trivial until you remember that in Jesus’ time issues of table manners and table fellowship were, quite literally, what issues of sexuality are in ours. The idea of eating with the wrong people, or eating in anything but the customary way, was scandalous and horrifying. Isn’t it wrong, they want to know, to abandon the way things have always been done? Hasn’t the last word already been spoken on how we should be living?

Jesus’ teaching is both comforting and startling. The things that put us in the greatest danger, he says, are not the things imposed on us from the outside – not the trends or the traditions, not even the influences and manipulations of all the words that swirl around us in the air. But the gravest danger, he says, lies within. The things that soil us come from the place where words come from. There may be wars and rumors of wars raging all around us – war may be the way we’ve always resolved our widest arguments – but when war comes fromtheheart, then is the warrior truly defiled. There may be degradation and lust and abuse and idolatry on every screen and channel – but when they seep into the heart and displace the upwelling there of Godly love, that’s when the disease is life-threatening. The words that come out of our mouths – like the actions that issue from our limbs – have the real power to ruin us, if they are not the words of justice and compassion. The silences that come out of us have the real power to distort us beyond recognition, when they are the silences rooted in our failures of courage for the telling of hard and costly truths.

A friend of mine, a Dominican priest, puts a finer point on it. Good people, he says, are more likely to be tempted by what is best about them than by what is worst. In a world that badly needs change, how many times have we good people let the warm glow of our acts of charity exempt us from the disturbing risk of speaking a word about the changes that need to be made so that the need for charity is permanently replaced by the constancy of justice? In a church that badly needs to demonstrate its integrity, how many times have we good people let our communal struggle to discern the truth find its way into words that wound the body of Christ?

These days our society is locked in some very public, very high-stakes struggles about words. What do they mean – words like peace, or marriage, or freedom, or safety? Factions have words pinned breathless and suffocating between them. Sometimes – as the poet says – sometimes words grip each other with a cry, and the flint on which they light their wicks is lamentation and longing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, conflicts have become wars fought in our name – and yet most churches can find few words to speak about it. Sometimes, as the poet says, words become mist on the windows of dead houses.

In our Presbyterian denomination, for more than a decade we’ve been playing out our own acrimonious version of the war of words about questions of ordination, leadership, sexuality, unity – which are matters of importance to a great many people. Biblical theologian Richard Hays writes that it’ll be a great day when the headline coming out of a General Assembly reads, “[Presbyterians] table sex debate, call nation to repent of war”?1  It’s hard to put such a painful truth into words. What words could possibly ruffle the stifled silences of the past, and trumpet the molten elements of our repentance, our anguish, our hunger and thirst for righteousness?

The Theological Task Force that has just finished its work for our General Assembly (and, thereby, just begun our work!) is asking us to find words to speak to each other across the divides of our wars of words. They are asking us to have the experience as a whole church that they have had together these four years: to reach more deeply into the molten elements within us, where words come from, than we are accustomed to reaching – and to believe that we will find there a word of grace for each other.

One of my most precious colleagues in this huge leap of faith speaks about this challenge in words that have come to be engraved in me. In the church we don’t choose our work, she says. We do the work that falls to us. Because not to do this work would be to lose our integrity. Not to do this work would mean to give away our voices – and once they’re lost, some people would never be able to find their voices again.

Where do the words come from? Do they keep their watch silently, always close at hand, waiting for us to summon them for the work that falls to us, the work that now has to be done? Perhaps they are there all along – perhaps the breath to float them on is there all along – waiting only for the prophetic will to speak the truths that will cleanse us of the defilement of silence. Words like: “I’m worried” … or “I’m sorry” … or “We were mistaken” … or “We were arrogant” … or “Please forgive us” … or “Let us start again.”  They are rocky tears, those words. They are, in time, the preamble to the ruckus of storms, to be sure. They are the keys to the first doors. The words we say will not always be heard. But we say them anyway, because in the church we do not choose our work; we do the work that is given to us to do. Part of the work we have been given is the work of Adam: speaking the names of things, by which we will know them – names like sister, brother, neighbor, child of God. We find it in ourselves to speak the words because, no matter what else may happen, we must not let the words be taken from us by which we name the deepest and widest truths that make our living possible. This is the work that has been given to us, now. And, in the strong company of Jesus, it is not too hard for us – neither is it far away. It is not up in heaven, nor across the sea. No, the word is very near to us. It is in our mouths and in our hearts and on our breath, and we can speak it and live it. With his help.