WORDS MADE FLESH

I have a fear of losing my voice. I send the words out wrapped in hooded blessing, and I try not to think about where they might end up or where they might trip and fall. I lose faith in them sometimes – I wonder if they will be kind and determined, as I mean them to be, and whether they have the strength and the wisdom to withstand a wolf. I want to tempt them to return to me, but they are already changed. They are already in somebody’s belly.

At times I feel a hand clamping over my mouth, and I don’t know whose it is – I don’t know whether to bite on my tongue or the hand. The words want to escape, but I don’t know if I am their captor or their abettor. I am thinking about ineffable, and I am asking the God words what they are even for – what is it they are trying to do?

Sometimes I have to talk with other words – listen to ones that I know are other. I need to know my neighbour. I may need to borrow some sugar – one of us may land in a ditch. I need to stand face to face with God words that I don’t like, that I don’t believe, that are written in ways that anger me or hurt. I need to feel myself trip over them and bang my head. I need to remind myself that it’s ok – it is not death, for the words to hang there abandoned, despised, rejected. I need to bear witness to how life comes forth reborn because we cannot agree to disagree.

There are words that are simply true for everybody – breathing, loving, and pain. They are blankets – they don’t need to be spoken because we already know, yet we still want to pull them around us. We share them willingly with one another, when we are cold, when we are afraid, when we love. The words become the light, the wind, the earth, the sea, wrapping us in all that we know together. The words enfold us in the safe embrace of the universe – they assure us that we are, none of us, alone.

But there are words that are intimate, timid, murmured by a solitude within us, drawn from us because we are alone. They are drawn from us while we are asleep. With the God words our soul is cut and shaped into bones. The bones are sent out to find flesh to absorb them and give them a place to live. The offering is taken – a piece of ourselves – and cupped in the hands of God. We hope that God will breathe into it. We hope we will awake to a mate.