A Collection of Words

Why I think hard words are important and sacred

“Where language is weak, theology is weakened.” -Walking on Water, Madeline L Engle

You have distilled things into facts, systemized knowledge? Good for you. What a time saver. Please send me the paraphrased Dickens, I am low on kindling and the fires of my rage need to be fed. I have yelled at a dinner party once about a modern paraphrase of Charles Dickens, for children of course. We have lost too much.

Have we begun to realize all the time saved by quick solid answers has been left without a point. Why save time when there are no mysteries left to explore? When you keep safe in the world you understand, you have so much extra time on your hands it’s depressing. Wonder has died. Let’s not mention faith, that’s for the helpless.

Why do so much? Why run after mountain chickadees and fill our shelves with thrifted Stevenson and why plant seeds every spring?

Why read so much? The heavy hard books that wind around the history of parliaments and assume you have all the time in the world to discuss the textures and the tastes? The books with scenes set in chapters, not seconds?

Why should keep embracing life and sentences that ramble and wind around instead of sticking to the point? Why have a metaphor when you can have a mantra? Why learn calculus when the cost of eggs is the real math problem? Why read poetry every day when AI is alive and well?

Because the verses hold whole worlds and enhance our experience of existing.

Because experience is the only path to excellence. Because it’s a feast. But also because there is no such thing as secular education. If we have killed mystery and wonder, we are left with nothing but artificial intelligence, lava chicken, chicken jockey, and nonsense words. Our religious experiences depend on apologetics and fossil dating. How predictable is our God? Have I upset your sola scriptura?

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.” -Walking on Water, Madeline L Engle

How big is God, anyway? Can you find Him in the words you read, or are you being safe and sticking to what you know? I think I’m too old now to believe miracles have ceased.

“We’re told that the new Prayer Book is meant to be in “the language of the people.” But which people? And in language which is left after a century of war, all dwindled and shrivelled? Are we supposed to bring our language down to the lowest common denominator in order to be “meaningful”? And, if we want to make the language contemporary, why not just cut out the thy and say, “And with your spirit?” Why are we afraid of the word spirit? Does it remind us of baffling and incomprehensible and fearful things like the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and the Passover, those mighty acts of God which we forget how to understand because our childlike creativity has been corrupted and diminished?” - Walking on Water, Madeline L’ Engle