Words with feeling - Chris Gleeson SJ

Very few evangelisers or bearers of good news are as influential as Macca of a Sunday morning on the ABC. On Mothers Day recently I was listening to him when he took a call from a lady who rang with the following message: ‘I want to say “Happy Mothers Day” to all those mothers whose disabled children are unable to say this greeting to them’. It was one of those moments of grace, when the heart is moved by words that reveal God’s abiding presence amongst us.

it reminded me of another story which a dear friend of mine shared with me earlier this year. She was in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales attending a 21st birthday party, often a low point in our social calendar, but this celebration was a 21st with a difference. The young man being celebrated had suffered cerebral palsy from birth and could not speak.

During the speeches at the celebrations a young woman friend of the host. with a similar affliction but still able to talk, kept exclaiming down the back of the village hall: ‘I want to speak. I want to speak’. When she finally was invited to take the floor, she moved the hearts of the assembled guests in saying, ‘My friend George has so many words in him and he can’t get them out. I am speaking for him. I love him very much’.

Even though I did not have first hand experience of this story, it moved me very much. Words are so powerful, but they do have a double edge. They have the capacity to build people up or put them down. We need to be very careful with our words—both those we write and those we say. Emailed words are like the speeding arrow; you can never get them back.

Some of the words inside us are destructive and should remain there. Words of put-down, for example, should be kept down deep inside us. Others, like those of praise, love and gratitude—‘Thank you’ are the two most neglected words in our vocabulary—are so constructive and positive that they should be released and given wings. They are life-giving and life-enlarging words. They are moments of grace. After all, we refer to Jesus as God’s Word, do we not?

If we are not careful, some words become tired with over use and need to be rehabilitated. Those masters of the weary cliché, sports commentators, remind us of this in the media every day. They are not alone, however. Some of our own church language, in official documents, homilies and newsletters, can be criticised for the same deficiency.

Timothy Radcliffe, former Master General of the Dominican order and splendid author, has written in his latest book, What is the point of being a Christian?: ‘If we cherish the Word of God, then we should reverence all words, knowing their power to hurt or heal … So Christians should be recognisable in how we use words, attentive to their exact meaning, careful with them because they can be like knives that cut’. It is little wonder, therefore, that St Augustine could say that words are ‘precious cups of meaning’.

In a fine article entitled ‘Words and Worries’, Kevin Seasoltz OSB claims that ‘to say something is to do something … When a person says “I promise you” or “I trust you” or “I love you”, those words have power if they are spoken sincerely. Something that is hidden within the human heart is given external existence; it is released through speech into time and space. When we speak words, we actually discover and create our human identities and in turn we call forth words from each other. In a sense we create each other through our words’.

During a retreat I was directing earlier this year, one of the retreatants paid me a wonderful compliment when she said, ‘I love the editorials in Madonna. You write with such feeling’. By sharing our stories and experiences, we are engaging our listeners in something that has moved our hearts, transformed and transfigured them. Stories build bridges between us.

From a seminar on theology and story in 1992, I can remember John Shea’s words that ‘we are the story that God tells. Our very lives are the words that come from his mouth’. When we cherish the power of words we can see God as a storyteller. Indeed Jewish novelist, Elie Wiesel, wrote once that ‘God made man because he loves stories’.

We are all born into families that are communities of stories and storytellers, and we learn who we are through the stories we embrace as our own. Our own story is sacred ground, Caroline Jones once said, and telling it connects us in a most profound way to our hearers.

In brief, words and the stories they convey have the power to uplift and transform, to carry hope and new life. Rod Cameron’s beautiful verse captures this very well:

If human hope is like a bird in flight
Then story is the air. It’s where we live.
Story fuels the fires of the mind
For when we find our theme, we find ourselves.
It is God who speaks into the story of our lives
For God is the meaning maker of the world.