Remember
those chain letters that appeared in email boxes almost as soon as
email existed? The ones that threatened
misfortune, death, or eternal loneliness if you didn’t send them on to ten
people in the next hour? Don’t worry, they
still exist, just in less vicious forms.
I was recently pulled into one on facebook, and so here I am, responding
to a friend of mine who was ranting about a comment from an article which was
ranting about the ranting response of many Christians to the suspension of Phil
Robertson from his show “Duck Dynasty”.
Go
ahead and take a moment to digest the syntax of that last sentence. I’ll wait.
Confusing,
right? I admit that I got lost in most
of the wandering of the chain. Both
pieces I read—the last two “links”, if you will—were enjoyable and had some
excellent points, and both had some lines that I skipped over, because it’s
been a long day and I don’t have much energy for theology and metaphysics. But the one that has me hooking myself onto
the end came from my friend’s rant via facebook. She wrote (originally in all caps, but I
don’t want to scream at you):
Words
are life. Or death. And your heart speaks that life. Or death.
Words kill. Words bring things into being. Scripture says God made the world that
way. He created us in his
own image; He gave us all languages,
and the ability to communicate our thoughts and
feelings to each other. Therefore, words
are important. They can move the very heart of
God through prayer. They can change the world.
As
a writer, I’m inclined to agree with her—words are my business, my daily
bread. But there’s more to it than
that. I would argue that it’s not
necessarily words that have the power she speaks of, the power to “move the
very heart of God.” I myself hardly ever
pray in words. My prayer is either
music, or it is a wordless reaching out, trying to connect myself emotionally
to a greater presence. That is the power
that we possess, the power that comes from human consciousness; words are
simply a near-physical manifestation of it.
That
being said, I agree with her wholeheartedly.
Our ability to communicate—to speak, to sing, to argue, to rant—is what
sets us apart from the rest of the world.
It is what makes it possible for us to build our own tiny worlds in our
heads, worlds that we call “selves.” It
is what makes it possible for us to reach out from those tiny worlds and get a
glimpse of what someone else’s microcosm identity looks like. That is the true power of words—to connect us
to one another and to the greater meaning in the universe around us.
Again,
a bit much for me to digest at 11:42 PM.
But it’s thinking about this kind of thing that leaves me with a sense
of wonder at being alive, and that’s never a bad thing. Honestly, I don’t think we human beings don’t
spend enough time doing that: not only being grateful to be alive, but grateful
that we know that we’re alive.
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