Our words

After Psalm 139:4

We work with words,

speak them, shout them,

murmur them, shape them,

play with them, use them.

Before a single word emerges

from our lips, before

a single word is spoken,

before a single word touches

our tongues, before a single word

is thought into existence,

we know it, wholly and

completely. We know the words

that come from our heads,

the words that come

from our hearts, the words

that come.

Each of them.

All of them.

Photograph by Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Words and deeds

After Romans 4

Words and deeds

cast aside by faith

achievements cast aside

by faith

accomplishments cast aside

by faith

all cast aside, meaningless

without faith, a chasing

after the wind. Without faith

we are nothing. With faith

we are everything.

The difference is not us.

Words and deeds flow from faith

and not the reverse because

faith is the alpha and omega

faith is the cornerstone

faith is the impetus

faith is the original impulse

for all that follows

the mustard seed for all

that grows

and it is given

it is planted.

Photograph by Lukas Budimaier via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies”

One of my responsibilities at The High Calling is serving as Twitter editor, and at the rertreat I livetweeted the speakers. If you’ve ever livetweeted before, and particularly when a speech or discussion runs an hour or more, you know you have to pay close attention to the speaker’s words. Livetweeting is not a verbatim transcription, but it’s close. (If you’re interested, you can read the entire retreat Twitter stream – the hashtag is #hcretreat.)

At the November High Calling retreat at Laity Lodge in the hill country of Texas, one of the speakers was Marilyn McEntyre, professor of Medical Humanities at the University of California (UC)  – Davis and the Joint Medical Program of UC-Berkeley and UC-San Francisco. The author of five books of poems and books on poetry, how to read a text, reading, and teaching literature and medicine, she was there to talk with us about how to be a steward of words.

Words need stewards? Yes, indeed they do, McEntyre said. Language is a gift, a treasure, and we hold it in trust.

I livetweeted both of McEntyre’s presentations. In a sense, I was channeling what she was saying. I was so drawn in that at the first break I downloaded to my Kindle the book she was drawing upon – Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. I finished reading it before the end of the retreat.

It’s a wonderful book, published in 2009 and based on lecutes she gave at Princeton Theological Seminary. McEntyre cares deeply about language and words, and how we misuse both. She particularly faults the language of marketing and the language of public discourse for confusing, disguising intent, and misappropriating language for their own ends. She also discusses how words fall into disuse, left forgotten in old novels and essays, their meanings obscure.

But instead of a book of complain and expose, she instead offers twelve strategies for how to reclaim words and language, how to be good stewards of words. Each strategy has its own chapter.

Love words. Tell the truth. Don’t tolerate lies. Read well. Stay in conversation. Share stories. Love the long sentence (a favorite chapter – with suggestions on how to read Faulkner). Practice poetry. Attend to translation. Play. Pray. Cherish silence.

Marilyn McEntyre

At the retreat, we had the benefit of engaging in a series of exercises that provided examples of what McEntyre means when she says we are to be stewards of words. Many of them centered on poetry, suggesting that the practice of poetry may be more practical than most people think.

If I have a quibble with her presentations and the book, it is a minor one – it’s too easy these days to criticize how corporations and government abuse language (and they do). And it’s too easy to overlook some of the worst abusers of language – like universities, speech codes designed to ensure no one is offended by anyone saying anything, the news media, and the education establishment. (When I spent time as the communications director for an urban school district, I learned very early to be immediately suspicious of anyone who promoted themselves or their agendas by talking about “it’s for the good of the children.” That was a code phrase – and it meant that what was being said really had nothing to do with the good of the children.)

My minor complaint aside, the book is full of value, not only for writers and speakers but also for anyone who cares about language. It’s especially important for writers, though, and as I looked around the room at the retreat, I saw writers furiously taking notes.

And it was a double delight to hear McEntyre speak in a quiet voice full of passion for her subject, and follow with reading Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.

Photograph by Darren Lewis via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

The Un-Magic of Words

Most of my career has been in corporate communications, for several companies and as an independent consultant. It’s been an uneasy relationship, not the least for what may seem an odd and small thing.

Words.

It’s always been something of a mystery for me, and for 40+ years, why so many of the people I’ve worked with appear to have a fixation (bordering on mania) on words – finding exactly the right word, or saying something exactly the right way, as if the words by themselves contained a power that would explain and persuade.

If you saw what effort, what tortured effort, goes into creating the simplest news release, you would understand. If you’ve participated in the most basic of organizational activities, you know what happens.

It took Trappist monk, writer, and poet Thomas Merton, by way of the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, to explain it.

I’ve been reading Williams’ A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton. It’s a collection of previously published essays by Williams, and the five essays (and a poem by Merton) fit together well. In the chapter entitled “New Words for God: Contemplation and Religious Writing,” he quotes Merton:

“It is the businessman, the propagandist, the politician, not the poet, who devoutly believes in the magic of words. For the poet, there is precisely no magic, there is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom. All magic is a ruthless venture in manipulation, a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

There it was, in all its simplicity. The uneasiness of my corporate relationships has, in part, been about how my employers and I have understood words. And we have seen them differently. I see them as Merton describes the poet seeing them; my employers have seen words as magic. When the words don’t work, when they don’t achieve the desired result, the reason must be we haven’t found the right words.

Rarely has the thought been expressed that we may be trying to get words to do something they can’t do.

It’s as if so many people in the workplace embrace “in the beginning was the word,” and stop there. Words and language aren’t magic so much as they are a means to understanding something greater.

Words are typically assigned a burden they cannot carry – to substitute for action or deeds. One CEO I worked for, and wrote quite a few speeches for, understood this. “Policy is not what you say,” he often pointed out. “Policy is what you do.”

Words don’t contain some inherent magic or power. If they did, we’d all be walking around casting spells. We can’t assemble the magic words like some shaman or witch doctor and make things happen.

Words work best when they represent something we believe, something we believe in, something we have done, something greater greater than ourselves.

Photograph by Piotr Siedlecki via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Words walk humbly

Words walk humbly,

offering themselves in place

of their letters, protected

from erasure or white-out.

I pick up a word, carelessly

dropped and disregarded;

in my hand it feels smooth

and cool, live a river stone.

Words spill from my hands,

cascading into streams and flows

of other words, others’ words,

joining wet stones on the sand,

slowly eroded by waves, and rain.

I pick up words on the sand and

send them skipping across waves,

edging into ocean’s surface sheen,

reflecting glimpses of sun’s light

slicing the day.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVersePoets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph by Fran Hogan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Words

Since Friday at about 10 a.m. Central time, it’s been a tsunami of words about what happened in Newton, Connecticut.For the first few hours, many of the words were incorrect – we experienced the hypersensitivity of the news cycle as the media tried to be first with most, watching what’s was happening on social media, competing against each other, as the horror finally unfolded behind them.

Too many words. Useless, wrong words. It took some time for the right words to begin crowding out the wrong words.

Then came the groping for understanding. What happened is unfathomable. And our human minds began reaching for something – anything – that would explain this. We need to explain this. If we can’t explain this, we are afraid it can happen again. This is the stuff of our worst nightmares, and we are afraid we will never be able to explain it, that we will never know the reason for why the gunman did what he did.

Not enough words. Too few words.

I thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, something he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Words we don’t like to hear.

We are writing blog posts, emails, poems. We are drawing pictures and posting photographs. We are offering meditations. We’re ranting against guns and video games, and we are defending guns and video games. One blogger I read suggested we stop everything and simply observe a prolonged silence.

Painful words, encouraging words. We don’t know how to comfort a father and mother whose six-year-old daughter was gunned down for no apparent reason other than a lunatic decided to do it. We don’t know how to comfort a town which lost 20 year children and seven adults.

I made myself read the names and birth years of all of the victims. I lost it when I hit the third on the list, but I made myself read through every name on the list. These were real people with hopes and dreams and problems and life and whole lives ahead. They laughed and cried and thought that this Friday would be a school day like any other school day.

No words. The fact is, words fail here. The only way to comfort is to be there and weep with the families. That may be the most important thing we can do. Very few of us know what this is like, what it is to go through something like this, something that changes you completely and forever.

We look at our own children and our grandchildren, and we tremble. We have no words here, either, but we have arms, and our arms may be what we most need. Our arms around them. Their arms around us. Our arms around each other.

Perhaps we don’t need words at all.

Photography by Anna Langova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.