thoughts about words

Everywhere I look lately, words come into my mind. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Percy keep on coming back to me, because they wrestled so much with words and meaning too.

When I am at work babysitting, and using as much creativity as I can muster to interest the twins (five years old and struggling to use any words at all) in an activity that most children would take to naturally, I think about all of the words that the children can’t say. There is such a huge gap of understanding between us without words. And every word that does come from between their garbled sounds is exciting. At their speech therapy, the therapists show the kids pictures of ordinary items, and sometimes the children are able to retrieve the right words from their minds to label the pictures, but other times they just stare and no meaning connects from the pictures to their brains. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be five years old and unable to communicate what is going on inside my mind. Whenever the girl starts screaming, I have to remind her “tell me! Tell me!” because otherwise she forgets to use words when she wants something.

Our language is so wonderful and full of words of such abstract and ambiguous meanings, which we can associate with both concrete and abstract subjects, but communication is such a broken, fragmented thing. People shout at each other when meaning doesn’t get across, or even to get their meaning across, and even then we all build walls so that words won’t penetrate. We pretend not to understand what is said, or simply ignore what is said unless we can find something in it to use. We treat words like dirt: both our own and those of others. Promises are meaningless, truth is whatever suits at the time, and memory is not reliable to speak about the past. In literature classes, we talk about degrees of reliability in narrators. It seems like we are all unreliable narrators, whether we’re talking with each other about ourselves or talking about other people. We bend words to suit our purposes.

I wonder what freedom, both from language and within language, would look like. What I mean is, freedom from language in the sense that language does not limit the meaning that we seek to describe or know; and freedom within language in the sense that words give us the means with which to wholly and satisfactorily express ourselves. I believe that Christ did not come only to redeem people, but he also is redeeming the rest of the created order like it says in Romans. The whole creation groans as it waits to be freed, and languages groan under the weight of sin as well. But the Word will redeem words.

What does it mean that Christ is the Word? I would love to hear sermons on that subject. From what I can think of right now, it seems that he is the only trustworthy and pure Word, so he is the truth made Incarnate. He not only speaks the truth, but he is truth. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around that. But I do know that God cares about words, because he chose to speak to us through the written language of the Bible and through the Word, Christ. Since God cares so much about words, and as they are a part of his creation, it seems as though the words themselves have fallen with us, twisted and in need of redemption. I feel all the time that the words I use in conversation or in writing are never adequate or careful or thoughtful enough. I'm looking forward to seeing what it is like to have every part of me made new, including my language.