I have always been a lover of words. When I was a young boy, my mother’s older bachelor brother used to visit us in the States from Panama where he lived and take me for long walks to feed the ducks down at the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. On our way we would pass through the campus of a small liberal arts college which he called The College of Musical Knowledge. Now, fifty-some years on, I still remember that musical phrase and the play of words on the tongue. On my birthday of the year I started high school, that same uncle gave me The American Heritage Dictionary which I still have, use, and love because it has the etymologies of the words and it is like a trail of breadcrumbs leading home. In a letter I once read but have not been able to locate since, wordsmith Emily Dickinson wrote that there are some words so special, so noble, that any discerning person knows the appropriate gesture in their presence is to tip one’s hat.
Welsh bard Dylan Thomas said he became a poet because from a young age he loved words, their shaped and colored sounds long before he knew their meanings and understood their implications:
what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grownups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noise of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a windowpane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. . . . I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colors the words cast on my eyes. . . . I tumbled for words at once.
Any lover of words and their double and multiple-meanings will appreciate the irony in the fact that in the 3rd and 4th century purposeful wanderers would seek out words from those who consciously used them so little. Pilgrims would venture out into the Egyptian wilderness to seek counsel from desert fathers and mothers who had gone there to offer single-hearted devotion to God. Some were said to have the gift of “reading souls” and all were revered as sages, so it became a practice for spiritual seekers to make the journey into the desert to ask, “If you would be so kind, Abba, would you give me a word of life?” or “If you would be so good, Amma, speak to us a word that we might be edified.” Or simply, “Teacher, give us a word.”
Mind you, the pilgrims were not asking literally for “a” word, a quick-fix word or one magic word. Nor were they so much asking for a word with the monk as they were asking to receive a word from the monk. They were seeking guidance, wise counsel, some natural but poignant truth that they needed or yearned for at that time in their life, some sapient morsel that would be soul food for their days.
Sometimes when pilgrims asked, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into or what was about to get into them. The monk was less the originator of the word than a vessel or conduit for it. Depending on the seeker, the circumstances, the monk, and the Spirit, what the monk offered might be simple and direct or enigmatic and in need of further pondering. It might console, challenge, nourish, bewilder, encourage, affirm, upset, or break wide open the attentive listener. The last line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” comes to mind: “You must change your life” or the end line of Antonio Machado’s poem “The Wind One Brilliant Day“: “What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?” or the final line in Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” which begins with the question “What happens to a dream deferred?” and after offering several possible answers ends with the charged thought, “Or does it explode?”
I’m no desert sage. But I do love and tumble for words. And there are plenty of jackasses who have carried and delivered more important and valuable goods to persons in need. I give you the four-legged friend who carried Myriam of Nazareth and her sacred cargo to Bethlehem. So with that justification in mind, in the spirit of Lectio Divina, friendship, and the love of words—the sounds they make, the mysteries and meanings they hold, the silence and struggles from which they come, and the power they have to move us– from time to time I will bring you, wise ones, a few thoughts about a particular word. I do so in the hopes that the word and brief reflection might be a catalyst to your own pondering, and that your pondering might infer a conversation between us, you agreeing or disagreeing, subtracting or adding to my thoughts. Who knows, maybe the word will not just be food for thought but food for action as well.♦