At the Run

What's in a logos?

Loosely defined as the creative word of God, I find it in John's opening prologue in the gospels. It is _ for a writer and lover of poetry _ as mysterious and entrancing a cascade of words as can be inked onto a sheet of paper.

Jean Vanier's "free translation" of the text reads:

Before all things were
the Word was
and the Word (or Wisdom) was with God (or turned towards God, in communion with God).
He was God.
Before all things were he was in communion with God.

... In him was life
and life was the light of every person
and the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness does not overcome it.

And then comes this very short phrase, which Vanier calls the "heart, the centre, the beginning and the end of the gospel."

The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.

There you have it. Jesus among us, revealing through his actions and his words/, some core aspects of God. As Vanier puts it, "God, the eternal God, Creator of the heavens and the earth, became like us, a vulnerable, mortal human being...revealing to us a way to God and to universal peace."

I can understand that. It gives me a solid glimpse into the "Who is Jesus?" question.

But to return to words, they are tricky things.

Given their potential poison, there can be temptations to become a contemplative. There's a part of all of us that wants to shun them, to flee from the words, words, words everywhere. It's not hard to relate to the desert monastics who hit the roads from the Eygptian capitals to their small huts and caves three centuries after Christ. They would teach us the power of silence as a tool to live in community.

The world could use fewer words, even if it cuts my income. My daughters would certainly think I could use fewer words, especially fewer lecturing words.

But I think it was about half way through the CIBC Run for the Cure on Sunday, Sept. 18, when Cathy and I were rounding a corner of the public gardens in Halifax, and looking at eight thousand people thundering down Brunswick Street, that I was reminded of the power of just a single word to Christian life.

Thousands upon thousands of white shirts with "Hope" printed on them, recalling breast cancer.

In a secular time, not many people would be aware of the apostle Paul's fondness for that word, or that Christian writing has helped define this word. It is a key word, significantly different from the Western world's enforced optimism.

On Feb. 11, 2005, theologian K. Robert Skerrett, talked about the meaning of hope, versus optimism, at a conference titled Claiming our Wisdom in a Dangerous Time, held in Halifax.

"I do not want to dampen anyone’s positive thinking, but I want this morning to direct your attention to experiences that may not seem initially inspiring, but that are nonetheless gracious. I want to encourage you to turn for inspiration to those experiences that rub against the grain—experiences of desire and its frustration, of suffering and loss. If this were a homily, the lection I would have in mind would be Paul’s Letter to the Romans 5:1-5. Paul writes there: "…[W]e boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. But we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering builds up [works to generate] endurance, and endurance builds up character, and character builds up hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts…"

"We hope to share in the glory of God, but that hope must be built up in us. It is not an easy hope, nor is it easily built, but it does not disappoint. To claim our wisdom in a dangerous time requires that we embrace those experiences of suffering that build up of our characters, our souls. Without them, we have no hope of sharing the glory of God."

In the Run for the Cure, you'd see on the backs of those runners, "For Nanna," or "For my sister," or "For Mom," and you knew there was some suffering going on. And in this great embodied prayer that eight thousand sweating people created, raising some $900,000, there was a single word being breathed out in response to this.

Some would live, some will find a cure, some will die.

Even grief holds hope within it, noted Skerrett, because it allowed for recognizing that we had been in the presence of another creature, who like us had lived with restraints and frustrations and happiness of life. In our sense of loss, we know something very joyful existed.

"Grief...means that you know what beauty is possible, and therefore grief always folds within it embers of praise," said Skerrett.

This fall I'm taking an Internet courst at the Atlantic School of Theology titled, "Pathways to God", which is a survey of the various traditions of prayer Christians use. Having been somewhat centred on silent and contemplative prayer, I'm finding it opens my mind to new perspectives on words, particularly where I contemplate scriptural passages and phrases for periods of time.

I have learned about Lectio Divina, the Benedictine prayer that calls for the reading of a few lines of scripture and then rereading them, and then letting them settle into your mind, gradually sinking in.

Thelma Hall wrote a book called Too Deep for Words that has divided up passages by theme, and invites you to select from them for Lectio Divina based on a perceived need on a given day. Under the section, "Discernment of Spirits" I came across, Matthew 6:22-24: "If you eye is clear, you whole body will be filled with light."

In meditatio (a stage of Lectio Divina), where I considered its meaning, I was thinking how it spoke to how we deal with words. If our eye is clear, the word will fill our body with light. If not, words lead us to darkness.

There has also been a section on Ignatian exercises, which invites us to read a passage until we can vividly imagine it, rather like becoming a character in a play. This cast my thinking back to the gift of imagination, which relies on words for its expression.

I recalled telling my children bedtime stories, and being caught up and comforted in the child's remarkable ability to fully imagine these often noble worlds. One day, years after being told the stories, one of my daughters _ then nine years old _ retold the stories she remembered to me, including one where a small mouse was given a "ring of imagination" by an elf, which allowed her to imagine all of her favourite foods laid out on a platter.

I rushed home and jotted down her story, including her concluding line: "We don't know where it (the ring) came from, but he held out his hand and a ring was on his finger. He reached with his other hand and pulled off the ring and gave it to her. 'Use it well,' he said. 'The ring of imagination gives the power to make things appear and come true.'"

Our ability to imagine the story, constructed by language, of God's world, are the result then of words, of logos.

But, still, I caution myself to be careful, be ever so careful, to pay as much attention to the silences inbetween, from which each word is born.