Without limits, we would have no feel for the infinite. Without limits, we would be freed from our longing for what lies beyond. It is precisely our inability to say God that teaches us who God is. When we run out of words, we are very near the God whose name is unsayable. The fact that we cannot say it, however, does not mean we may stop trying. The trying is essential to our humanity. It is how we push language to the limit so that we may listen to it as it falls, exploding into scripture, sonnet, story, song. All these may fail in the end to name the living God, but they fail like shooting stars.
Our words are too fragile. God’s silence is too deep. But oh, what gorgeous sounds our failures make: words flung against the silence like wine glasses pitched against the hearth. As lovely as they are, they are meant for smashing. For when they do, it is as if a little of God’s own music breaks through.
Our lives are lived in relationship to words, written and spoken, sacred and mundane. They are manna for the journey. As embodied beings we take our whole bodies with us into the act of reading, which, at its best, is spacious, full-bodied, wholehearted, and infused with the breath of life.
Biblical wisdom calls us to be countercultural - to be in the world, but not of it. To be in the world is to be socially and politically engaged, to work for the kingdom here and now, recognizing that it is within us and among us. But to be of it is to accept its terms, its currencies, its objectives and agendas as legitimate, and to allow them to delimit and sometimes determine our own. That is capitulation. And if hyperbole is not a cause, it is at least a symptom of such capitulation. It may be that the intention is to appropriate the power of ‘media speak and redirect it to good ends, but the medium does become the message, and at great cost.
God who became, as Eliot so beautifully put it, the “word within a word, unable to speak a word,” has put a measure of God’s own power into our hands and on our tongues. May we use it to good purpose.
Our words are too fragile. God’s silence is too deep. But oh, what gorgeous sounds our failures make: words flung against the silence like wine glasses pitched against the hearth. As lovely as they are, they are meant for smashing. For when they do, it is as if a little of God’s own music breaks through.
The worst betrayal of the task of theology comes when the theologian fears that the words he or she must use are not necessary. The result too often is a desperate shouting. One of the reasons I so enjoy Barth is that there is nothing desperate about his theology; rather it is a joyful celebration of the unending task of theology.
The missionary character of the church, therefore, means that the testing of the words we use as well as their grammar can never be finished. Rather the words we use, the relation between the words we use, and the character of the speaker who uses the words must be continually tested for their faithfulness to the gospel.
”Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because they can unite in the Word.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Sometimes it seems that our many words are more an expression of our doubt than our faith. It is as if we are not sure that God’s Spirit can touch the hearts of people: we have to help him out and with many words, convince others of his power. But it is precisely this wordy unbelief which quenches the fire.
