I was raised in a faith that was based on a book full of words. At times it exploded with prescience and resonances in the life I was becoming, at others it fell flat or rang false, but its education in languaging experience held merit. When I say “raised” I mean inculcated and immersed. I learned terms and their arrangements by “heart” or memory and rote – as principles and rules for interpreting world and self. Childhood learning has a way of patterning subsequent life, and it comes back to me again and again when world overwhelms and skips past my reason plopping its bulky finger on “play.” I woke to it this morning and I listened. This is what I heard:
The Word: A Commentary
“In the beginning was the Word
the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
(the same) was with God in the beginning.
Through (the Word) all things came into being,
not one thing came into being except through (the Word)”
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Gospel of John 1:1-3 –
The light comes on and I see that you are there. I can describe you now, move toward you, interact with more knowledge and intention. I now see the table and chair on my right, between us to the side, underneath the window which is covered and which I had not known to be there, nor the “outside” or beyond, even the gap of it, the doorways, the thresholds, until the light came. On.
I had not known the cat nor dog that made their sounds of presence, like your voice and breath I sensed, until the space of living was enlightened.
The Writer’s gospel, the good news, about language and mystery and its use to shed light. Brings to awareness, aids comprehension, might even be said to bring into being (for its users) all that comes to register as existent in its own particular way.
Emotions and landscapes, persons and things. The self, once considered in words, takes on. Until that moment all is inchoate, unformed, a mix of sensations unlocalized like innumerable living points in air. The Word(s) direct and give shape, question and expose. Let there be light.
Whatever rudimentary forms of communication prevail, among cells, among plants, among animals and stars, this light, language, the words and ideas, is the light of humankind. The life of its persons.
This is a gospel that I can believe in, bearing itself out in experience. As one’s vocabulary expands to circumstances and situations, life begins to seem understood, seen-through, engaged, if only in the duration of the verbal processing.
Linking the field like fenceposts and wires, the word traverses the between and the voids or the opens, like light reflecting matter, whether in the subtlety of the atmospheric layers or the gleam of a yellow school bus. It is there, I am here, we become. Same registering difference, word requiring letter and sense, being: being-with.
And so the surface grows scribbled. Notated, defined, addendum’d and erased. The living word, in action as much as its participants, adjusting, accounting, enumerating; revise and repeat. Expand. Express.
It is the territory between exterior/interior, centripetal/centrifugal, ever breathed into the void, calling to and called by. Ever beginning, the become of all things. As we segment times and spaces, sense duration and bounds, so the Word moves along with each complex, reporting, revising,
Recall. The naming of ocean and air – what were they before but a void exhibiting difference? The animals, people, feelings and actions – unknown variations – “behaviors” and “appearances” – then light.
It has come into the world. Avail yourselves of it. Turn on the lights – and read, and write. Bring what is (for you) into being. In the beginning, the Word, and at its end, the beginning. There is always more word for the void.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 