field work: Wordiness & the word, part 2 the wild places
Henri Nouwen , from The Way of the Heart, said: “recently I was driving through Los Angeles, and suddenly I had the strange sensation of driving through a huge dictionary. Wherever I looked there were words trying to take my eyes from the road. They said, “use me, take me, buy me, drink me, smell me, touch me, kiss me, sleep with me.”
In such a world who can maintain respect for words?
Nouwen goes on... “Teachers speak to students for six, twelve, eighteen, and sometimes twenty four years. But the students often emerge from the experience with the feeling, “they were just words”. Preachers preach their sermons week after week and year after year. But their parishioners remain the same and often think, “they are just words”. Politicians...give speeches and make statements... but those listening say “they are just words”. Our heightened verbal ability, which enables us to make many distinctions, has sometimes become a poor substitute for a single-minded commitment to the Word who is life.
God’s very expression of His profound Being was given to us in Jesus—the Word-- who dwelt in human frailty and cruelty among us, and resides within us by invitation and welcome. He spoke the words for us to heal, to draw us out of noise and worthless wordiness to a quality of genuineness, restfulness and peace not known by the world. He also left us his Spirit in our very bodies, and uses his still, small voice to speak words of truth into our souls.
Frederick Buechner says the Spirit, working through the Word... “sets echoes going the way a choir in a great cathedral does, only it is we who become the cathedral and in us that the words echo.” “Before the gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of our own lives. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. “Be silent and know that I am God”, saith the Lord. [Psalm 46:10.] Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out. Out of silence let the only real news come...”
Wendell Berry has written of the value of listening in solitude, discovering, as if we were made for it, something that removes neediness, then yields wisdom and generosity… “we enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. One returns from solitude laden with gifts.”
James Finley suggests that we only hear our truest inner self come forth from silence: And so we must come to recognize and acknowledge our false self, but even more to acknowledge the true self that sleeps within us like Lazarus in the tomb waiting for the voice of Jesus to awaken us to life. No one knows what first stirs in the tombs of those awakened by God’s incessant call.
The inner self is precisely the self which cannot be tricked or manipulated by anyone, even the devil. He (the true self) is like a very shy wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is peaceful, in silence, when he is untroubled and alone. He cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because he responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom. —-Thomas Merton
First written as a ‘Godsighting’ by Pat Harrison, March 18th, 2008
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