The Power of Words

The bulky birthday package took its time coming from California, laden with homemade cards, photos, book, and poems by Basil and Luke, school assignments included for this grateful grandmother.

Both grandsons chose nature as image bearer for their words.

Made me want to send copies to the Taunter-in-Chief, who to our planet’s peril, considers climate change fake news.

Well, back to word power, like this poem from Mary Oliver’s collection, Felicity:

I Wake Close to Morning

“Why do people keep asking to see

God’s identity papers

when the darkness opening into morning

is more than enough?

Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.

Think of Sheba approaching

the kingdom of Solomon.

Do you think she had to ask,

‘Is this the place?’ “

On the POWER OF WORDS, Frederick Buechner wrote in his June 28th meditation from Listening to Your LIfe:

“That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity to become incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental, and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and  dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.”

To all who enter the fray armed only with well-chosen words, whether Grandsons, Buechner, Mary Oliver, Baalam’s donkey (Numbers 22), teachers, preachers, diplomats, journalists or unnamed scribes, “Thanks be to God for you.”

As my Norwegian grandmother often exhorted me, “Tink about your vords. Dey matter.”

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