Words, words, words

Imagine God singing this from My Fair Lady:

Words, words, words,
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through
First from him, now from you --
Is that all you blighters can do?
Don't talk of stars burning above,
If you're in love, show me!

Near the rise of meeting recently, a Friend spoke about the difficulty of finding any words to express ineffable spiritual truths, and his discovery of some words which come closer, for him, than any others.  Then he recited a sonnet in Italian.  Thanks to Spanish cognates, I understood “paradise” and “spring” and perhaps “love” but nothing more.  It was enough.  The Friend’s passionate sincerity was vibrant in every tone of his voice, and afterward we remained in a deep gathered silence.

That same evening, a dear young friend told me of her hurt when someone posted on Facebook, out of context, something she had said in a private conversation.  Several people she doesn’t know at all posted nasty, hostile responses.  We’ve all seen things like that online from time to time; people read the words without personal interaction, they react in words, and quarrels flare easily.

Chapter 3 of the letter of James begins with a diatribe against the tongue, “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”  But that was written when oral communication was all most people had; books were expensive, handwritten rarities, and of course there was no Facebook.  Nowadays, we have many more media of communication, and all are subject to misuse.  A modern version of James should probably speak of the evils of “words” or  perhaps “language” (which derives from the Latin lingua, tongue.) 

Among the pitfalls of words, the anecdotes with which I started highlight two:  the impossibility of fully expressing many deep experiences — spiritual, aesthetic, emotional — and the way words (particularly gossip and slander) can be used to harm other people.  There is another pitfall, however, which is important in our spiritual lives.  We tend to fix on specific words or phrases, without context, and invest them with meaning and value far beyond what they actually say.  Sometimes, those words are lifted out of the Bible, such as the antisemitic use of “let his blood be upon us” (Matthew 27:25).  Sometimes, they are creedal formulas such as “personal Lord and Savior.”  One of my pet peeves is the modern liberal Quaker use of “that of God in every one” as if it summed up all Quaker belief (which it does not), without knowing its quite different meaning in the original context (available in full at www.tractassociation.org/tracts/friends-ministry/).

Religious liberals sometimes critique “bibliolatry” — making an idol out of the Bible.  No one worships the physical book, which is made of paper and ink and glue, but the words written there, or rather our human interpretation of those words, can indeed become an idol, something which we honor as if it were God.  But liberals are not immune to logolatry (veneration of words).  We need to be wary of our limited human interpretations of spiritual realities far beyond words. 

Because I am a “word person” who loves words and uses them with professional skill, I must keep reminding myself how inadequate they are, and how dangerous.  There is a wonderful story about Thomas Aquinas, that near the end of his life he had a spiritual experience (not described) during Mass, and after that he stopped writing.  When someone asked why, he said, "After what I have experienced, all my words are straw."