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.

CONFESSIONS

In the car, half-way home, my ten year old asks, So, what does ‘living your life for God’ even mean? Do you know? Can you explain that to me? I pounce on teachable moments. She holds the words hot in her mouth like steeped tea. My ears try to cup them as they slide over her lips onto the dashboard – she is telling. She loves to hear her voice, feel her tongue chiselling out the sounds that give form and shape to the invisible – removing everything that isn’t what should be. She’s a sculptor of words – a preacher from a zigzagged line of preachers. She knows nothing of millstones.

Talking about God is more difficult for me. I was taught the fear – I have learned to filter. My soul remembers ineffable. Syllables chant an old cradle song in my head – invisible, unknowable, unfathomable. I pick my words like raspberries, careful not to bruise. I feel brazen.

God loves me. I hear it from a stranger at my door, and I hear myself answering back Jesus like a secret code. I watch his words drop like blocks in front of me – but do I believe in God, but do I know God, but do I KNOW God as my SAVIOUR. He is building a wall. I think to say words like I’m already washed in the blood of the Lamb. My name is in The Book. I tell which on the list of approved churches I go to. I pray to shut the door – to remember don’t talk to strangers, instead of thinking about children listening and cups of cold water and about angels in disguise.

He doesn’t tell about the spill-over measures of joy like a fountain, peace like a river, love like an ocean. His words say nothing of the smoggy, enflamed, brambly, black nights of the soul.

He is asking if I am literate. But do I know my alphabet. But have I actually read a book. But do I read with comprehension.

I bite on my tongue. I want to say, Yes, brother. Yes. Yes. Yes. But you are qualifying the ineffable. You are quantifying the immeasurable. I want to say, I know what the word love means.

THE WORD

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. I wonder how many times John wrote and rewrote those words, shuffled them around, scratched them out and started over, banged his head on the table, read them aloud to himself, second guessed, edited and re-edited to get it just right. He was inspired, there’s not a doubt in my mind about that. Those words are solid rock Truth.

Words are big. They’re the stuff of beginnings. They fall firmly into the realm of stuff God does - parting waters, making the sun stand still, burning bushes, casting words across the universe. Even before nothing formed into something, God had voice and God was speaking.

I wonder if God feels the acid in the belly after the words are out there. I wonder if the Godhead ever reflects, Wow, We know so many different kinds of people, and they all know different parts of Us. There are a lot of people We really care about who actually have no idea who We even are. What We really want to say is going to seriously affect the way they think about Us, and they might not even get it. Let Us choose Our words very, very carefully. Nobody writes a story like God does, yet even God only got six chapters in before being flooded with a desire to bury the whole sorry thing under a 40 day avalanche of rain.

I feel my own words in my belly, in the back of my throat, behind my knees. I shape them carefully, I wrestle with them and yet they still come out wrong. They burn my lips and I vomit them onto strangers.

Writing is riskier than a tattoo. When you tell people you want to write, they should caution you. They should say, “Imagine you at 90. Are you going to be able to live with those words you write 50 years from now when your mind is shrivelled? When some stranger is giving you a bath in a care home, how will you feel about the written word then?” If you’re going to write something down, you have to be sure that it’s what you really want to say, that you could say it out loud to your husband or your mother or a stranger and it would still be true, and that you will still be glad you wrote it how you did even if it disappoints – even if it twists and sags and morphs over time.