Speak Again


Dear Eugene,

Two months ago I said this to you:

"Lately I wrote a lot to you and threw away just as much. I am not happy with my sentences any more. I can't find the right prepositions, how one thing relates to another."

It wasn't because I had nothing to say.  I just had not the language.  I've lost my tongue.  Something new was emerging and the old wasn't adequate anymore.

I was struck dumb by an angel.

Then I read Rowan Williams and started to speak again:

"Where there is salvation, its name is Jesus; its grammar is the cross and the resurrection. 

(...)

And one, very paradoxical, ground of this trust lies in the fact which Christian contemplatives constantly bring before us, the fact that Christian speech is for ever entering into and re-emerging from inarticulacy. There is not one moment of dumbness or loss followed by fluency, but an unending flow back and forth between speech and silence; and if at each stage the silence and the loss and emptiness become deeper and more painful, so at each stage the recovered language is both more spare and more richly charged. Those who make facile criticisms of the nonfalsifiability of religious language might well consider this aspect of it -- its negative and self-critical response to its own constructs and models. When Christian speech is healthy, it does not allow itself an over-familiarity with, a taking for granted of its images -- its Scriptures, its art, its liturgy; it is prepared to draw back to allow them to be 'strange', questioning,and questionable."

Yours, Alex

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