I know that one reason I am excited to learn new sounds and words and hopefully even new languages is that I am hoping to somehow find the vehicle to say the things I want to say.
I think this is why I read, too.
Some days a storm of ideas, questions, doubts, joys, hopes rages inside me. Some days just a sunset sets it off. Or a moon. Or a word or a color. Or a child's laugh. Or the shadows that whisper that summer is surrendering to fall. And I think, "if I could just find the word -- the words -- to set this down, to say this to somebody, something even, even just a piece of paper -- then this storm would be calm."
As if a word could calm a storm.
. . .
But that's just it.
Words don't calm storms.
The Word calms storms.
And that's where the hopelessness of trying to find the right words becomes hope.
Hope in the true Word.
Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, Book II, Chapter 4
What is a poet?
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.
His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror in his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music.
And men crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again"; that is as much as to say: "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before, for the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious."
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
Frederick Lehman, "The Love of God"
2 comments:
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14
"The word which God sent to the the children of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ - He is Lord of all - that word you know, which was proclaimed throughout all Judea, and began from Galilee after the baptism which John preached: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, Who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him." Acts 10: 36-38
May our 'words' however we end up expressing them, be 'fleshed' out in not only the verbal expression of them but in the way we 'do' good and work at bringing healing to all who are oppressed by the devil. For God is with us and He works in the power of His Holy Spirit to conform us into the image of His Son, so that we might bring glory to Jesus, both in the words we say and the things we do.
"...for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure."
Uncle Don
Amen!
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