What Words Can Make Holy

Ian Stavens wrote the book, "Dictionary Days," several years back. Like Maggie Jackson's book, "Distracted," it illuminates the journey of the spirit at least as brightly as it does its subject. Three points Stavens has made speak directly to the journey of the heart.

Language is not, first of all, about sounds. It is about the spaces between the sounds. What is so disorienting about computer speech is that it has no sense of the spaces. Like a paint by number painting, all the shadings are correct, but the spaces have it wrong. Languages have spaces. The neophyte and the native speaker are distinguished by their use of the spaces. A sentence has insight in relation to the openings it leaves between words. I am thinking that the public discourse in our time is increasingly hot, conducted without spaces. We are willing to sacrifice deep communication because we are worried about being interrupted.

Some clutures have supervisors for their language. Some grammar teachers of my youth tried to do that with English. They failed. English resists hegemony. Our greatest dictionary, the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, in a descriptive document. It tells us what has happened with language. It does not tell how language should be. It may be that the agendas of the language supervisors among the French and the Spanish are responsible for the poverty of expression of their tongues. In comparison, the English language spews out word forms at a riotous rate.

As any comedian knows, words and timing go together. The great punch line is a work of words and of counting. Jack Benny used to wait for a punch line. It was there that the laughing began. Steve Martin's genius was to never get to the punch line. He left us with our own laughs.

It seems to me that theologians can learn a lot from these three approaches to language. Dead faith talks too much. Dead faith is dominated by the agendas of supervisors. Dead faith has no sense of timing. I wonder what life in a congregation might be like were we to give attention to these dynamics of language. I wonder. . .