Deborah Larsen Cowan
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1-18
In the beginning, I loved words. When I was small, my mother read to me. She also memorized poetry. We would go out with my father and sit in our darkened car while he made a nighttime house call. Mother would point at the moon and begin reciting a long poem such as “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes. This violent and exotic piece was my favorite; it begins:
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas….
Ever since, on certain cloudy nights, I see varieties of ghostly galleons. I became enamored of poetry, and then rhythmic sentences laden with images and metaphors. This eventually became my own practice, my professional career, my vocation.
As I grew older, I paid attention in church. Not only was the Word with God, but the Word was God. Even more mind-boggling: “…the “Word became flesh and lived among us.”
With the help of others—who ever does anything alone?—my faith later evolved to center around the mystery of the Incarnation. God is transcendent, and yet close at hand. A real Presence. Later, I began to feel dissatisfied with writing and speaking about a merely
ineffable God—according to some, trying to describe God was almost a sacrilege. That approach left me and I daresay it leaves others thinking of God as almost a blur. How do you love a blur? It’s like trying to visualize an atom or a quark. And then to hear that “God is Love” makes some people shuffle their feet. Although we have seen Love in creation and in Jesus the Christ, many can’t get that far in their thinking.
A few years ago, I read a passage by two scholars of cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson). They suggest that if we approach God by means of metaphor, our spirituality can become passionate. This is not pantheism but, rather, the Beyond-in-our-midst.
See the Presence informing trees, clouds, cats, Vermilion flycatchers, and test tubes. The details and attributes we each cherish most about things are found immeasurably in our Creator. And what of people: pilots, volunteers, virologists, housekeepers, bakers, executives, brick layers? Can they be Love in action? Gerard Manley Hopkins had a clue in terms of limbs and eyes and faces:
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
May we choose our words so that they are down to earth, image-laden, and thus affecting and effective. May we be the servants of our evolving language as mindful co-creators with and for others.
Deborah Larsen Cowan