“Use words truly and well. Don’t stoop to cheap whining. Then, but only then, you’ll speak to me. Let your words change them. Don’t change your words to suit them”. (Jeremiah 15: 19)
Words, words, words. The world is choked with them, as Hamlet wearily lamented. But most of them don’t amount to much.
We talk, text, and email. Media shouts from every corner of the room and each bend in the road. Yet in the barrage of advertising and so-called reporting, little is actually communicated.
Each Sunday and feast of the church year, the transforming word echoes its challenge. It invites us to come and see in the gospels, and to repent and believe in letters of instruction. Creation testifies to it. Apocalypse mystically reveals it. And all the while this longing word is calling through the centuries, eternity waits in hushed silence for the freely rendered human response. Yours. Mine. Everybody’s.
