In the beginning was the Word.
And the word was with God and the word was God.
IF a word is the tangible thing that crosses the space from one person to another, and if a word represents the wisdom, the experience, the reality and truth from one person to the ears of another person,
then a word is a power.
It has power to bring action or fear. Love or violence. It has power to incite and install and inspire. It has a power that we, that I, am too casual about.
Now,
If the Word was in the beginning, a perfect representation from God to the cosmos, of God’s world to everything else, God’s wisdom, God’s hope, God’s love, God’s creativity, God’s forbearance, God’s restoration, and God’s best idea
and if, as Christians profess, that Word is actually Christ,
Then,
any word, out of the mouth of a christian, that does not lead to the world becoming more of Christ-life -
that is,
more quiet, more gentle, more angry at injustice and forgiving of stupidity, more self-emptying, more seeing the world from below -
if any word does not lead to the world becoming more of that, then that word is a lie.
sigh.
This advent I’ve been wrestling with the destructive power of words. Before any genocide, dehumanizing words are present. Every time. We all watched in the last few years how the cruelty of leaders was idolized, as if that cruel words were a solution to the worlds hard problems.
I’ve been reading about a Ye’s horrific words about Jewish people, the nazis and..ugh….I am at such a loss that those words were spoken by a human with followers in the millions. What words can be used to diffuse the words of abased power and gross negligence?
I refused to go to a meeting of the churches this fall because I knew how words would be used. To bully a point and silence others into submission.
We live navigating huge swaths of misinformation. All the words are loud. Selling words, con-words, political words, technical words, words that reduce mystery to a problem and beauty to something marketable.
I am tired of all the words that take down life. Especially the ones out of my own mouth.
Words either open worlds up or shut them down.
So this Advent has been one of silence. Not the silence of the indifferent but the silence that piques the rest of the senses, so that I can tell where the signs of life are coming from. A silence born to watch, observe, pray, learn, grow.
The wisdom of Advent is that in a word-filled world, the truest word would comes to us in the infant. No words.
For years, quiet, quiet, quiet. Then, a word, two words, then a few more. Words that brought life. Not life up there or over the rainbow, but life. Here.
Henri Nouwen wrote, "Without silence, words lose their meaning; without listening, speaking no longer heals." What if the christian church went silent for awhile. Just stopped talking. Listened, observed, heard, grew. Is there a silence that could lead to a true word?
I was reminded of this David Whyte poem, The Winter of Listening, this week. Here is an excerpt:
“All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own.”
The practice I have needed this year is one of silence most of the time. There is a practice of not being heard that is good for those who want to move the needle of our world to a good place.
But then there is a practice, a habit, a hope in speaking bold words that open the world at just the right time. May we finally know that words have power only from the silence they grow in.