Ordinary Words

Umbrella, light, landscape, sky –
There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary.

Is how Deng Ming Dao puts it to open up his section for the day. And Buechner for the same day:

“[My English class] was a course less in literature than in language and the great power that language has to move and in some measure even to transform the human heart.”

And it all returns me to paradox: at the same time our language is inherently limiting; yet it is all we have to communicate with. It is especially limiting here where written (implying distance or separation) language is used.

And at the same time that we are stuck (doomed, to be precise) to a restrictive form of communication: “the sacred lies in the ordinary.” God lies in every steaming, putrid, foul piece of drivel that oozes out of our filthy mouths. He rests within every one of our words. He did, in fact, become: The Word. He became, to us, a metaphor, as all things everywhere are.

What is a word if nothing more than an allusion marker to another deeper meaning? And what is that meaning without a maker to the meaning? On both ends – in no way am I about to condone post-modernism and it’s foolish and deceptive “it all lies in the interpreters perception” stance. Nay, both the speaker and the listener take the word and infer it to mean and be something that they both think the other understands.

Right now, I hope in faith that you and I are talking around the same thing.

In riddles, He spoke, in parables. In metaphors and allusions – just like the rotten, stuck rest of us. Because He KNEW that the only way to convey something, would be to talk around it with ordinary situations and objects with the purest (bad pun) hopes of us getting it.