WORDS OF SPIRIT AND LIFE |
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In recent days, I have been taking Father Edmund Campion’s latest book, Lines of my life, to lunch with me. What a delight! We are privileged to have Ed as one of our Madonna writers, of course, because his words are so full of wisdom, beautifully put together, and always speak to the heart.
As I munched thoughtfully on my sandwich the other day I was struck by the lines:
‘Reading Michael McKernan’s new book on Australian prisoners of war in the war against Japan, This War Never Ends, I kept wanting to cry. The horror and brutality are diminished only by the prisoners’ gritty endurance. After the first necessary chapter on life in the camps and on the Burma Railway I thought, well, that’s over, now the tears can stop. But then, he turned to those waiting at home and the experiences of the first returnees; the harrowing went on. Well, I thought, as I finished the middle chapter of the book, about the slow liberation of the camps, that’s got that over—no more tears. Wrong: the tears kept coming until the very last page.’
Words have the power to move and sustain us. When reading these splendid lines from Ed Campion’s journal of a year, I was reminded of a compliment paid to me by a parent whose last son was finishing at the school where I was Head for several years. She wrote: ‘I may not remember all you said, but I know how you made me feel—valued.’ Those words touched my heart.
Early in 2003 I had some sabbatical leave and was privileged to discover the writings of an American author, Kathleen Norris.
Talking about the ‘sparks’ in the Sunday Scripture readings, she commented on ‘the power of words to continually astonish and invigorate us, and even to surpass human understanding’. When we write ‘from the centre’, as she calls it—about what matters to us most—words ‘will take us places we do not want to go’.
No less a person than famous film director Steven Spielberg called on us at one time to ‘renew our romance with the written word’. In the same vein, social commentator Phillip Adams has said that it is sad to see our computers increase in capacity while minds diminish. To lose a word is to lose an idea.
Adams
continues: ‘Many words die of old age, while others expire through
misuse, but more and more language shrivels through neglect’. In
this context I find very helpful the Aboriginal idea of ‘Songlines’,
about which Bruce Chatwin writes in his book of the same name:
‘Each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and … these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as "ways" of communication between the most far-flung tribes.
"A Song", Arkady said, "was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across the country."
"And would a man on ‘Walkabout’ always be travelling down one of the Songlines?"
"Yes!".’
Isn’t this a beautiful description of what we parents and teachers, all of us in our own way, are trying to do for our young people? Are we not trying to scatter a trail of words and musical lines for them along the line of our footprints in life?
Not all words carry great power, of course, and some do not always gain in translation. I am told, for example, that the saying ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, when translated into Russian, emerges as ‘The vodka is strong, but the meat is off’. Similarly, when there was a growth of interest in cricket during the early 1990s, in Germany of all places, there was a certain lack of crispness in the German Dictionary’s ausgeschlagen während der Schlagmann zu langsam seinen Lauf machte translation for ‘run out’.
In August 2002, the Loreto Sisters and their many friends around Australia lost a great woman in Deirdre Rofe IBVM. When preaching at Mass celebrating her 25th anniversary as a Loreto nun in 1987, I commented on her powers as a wordsmith. She wrote in response: ‘I could rejoice in your emphasis on words. They do mean a lot to me and in the often fragile interaction between human beings, they can so easily build up or destroy.’
How true this is! Just as a narrow focus on dogma can so easily become the enemy of the spirit, so too a simplicity of writing from the heart can inspire and grow God’s life in us.
Cardinal Basil Hume once told the story of how a prominent Christian’s view of God was revolutionised by a visit to an old lady. She pointed out to him a text on her wall: ‘Thou, God, seest me’, and said to him, ‘You see those words: they do not mean God is always watching you to see what you are doing wrong, they mean he loves you so much that he cannot take his eyes off you’.
To say that words have spirit and life is to say that they have the power of a ‘word made flesh’. When many of his disciples found the words of Jesus had too sharp an edge, and so abandoned him, Jesus asked the twelve apostles whether they would move off too. ‘To whom shall we go, Lord?’, Peter answered on their behalf. ‘You have the words of eternal life.’
Kathleen Norris reminds us that language ‘used truly, not mere talk, neither propaganda, nor chatter, has real power. Its words are allowed to be themselves, to bless or curse, wound or heal’. Our words will be wiser than we are, will be even more powerful, if they are sourced in Jesus, the Word of God, the Word made flesh.
Christopher Gleeson SJ
