Holy Smoke

Three comments from Monday’s blog make me want to say more about words.  “Disagree Again” is right.  Words are misused too.  Yesterday evening I was at my Tuesday post, behind the serving counter at Goodwill Inn here.  On the menu were roast pork, local broccoli, and cheesy cornbread.  On the radio was a rock and roll station with a couple of male disk-jockeys that were trying to out-cute and out-shout and out-harangue each other after every song.  As much as my Tuesday evening a get me in a groove, their blather was driving me nuts.  I felt myself distracted and tense.  I was welcomed to change the station, to another rock and roll station with just one DJ, who was not so bad.

Even as I was finishing Monday’s blog, the antithesis was forming in me: talk’s cheap.  And this morning, I write that some talk is cheap, some is

authentic, and we have the challenge and duty to distinguish one from the other.  Karl Rahner, a prolific Jesuit theologian, published millions of them.  But in one small article, he spoke of the power of what he called uhrwords, a German term that translates as primordial words, words that rise up from the ancestral ooze of our being.

Here is a contrast.  “Disagree Again” came to mind when I was wincing under the verbal barrage of those DJs.  It was such crap.  But Bill’s uhrword, his and Billie’s, rose up from the depths their love, their reflection on the year past and reverence for the one to come.  Resilience finds its way through the smoke of a house burning there in Brightmoor where they have chosen to live.  Resilience, springing back after having been pressed down, calls to Bill’s mind the Latin motto of a city that some spell D-e-s-p-a-i-r rather than D-e-t-r-o-i-t.  The smoke, a temptation to despair, is somehow transfigured by that word, resilience, that calls Bill and Billie to the depths of the love form which it emerged, which reminds them of the Source of that love, and their hands rise in oblation, a prayer of hope rising with the smoke.

I smile at the image of the Community Gardens growing in Brightmoor out of the ashes, and I think of Disagree Again’s contention that too many words are b.s..  Perhaps we are called to that challenge of discerning when words are crap and when words are authentic, and letting the crap decompose into compost in which we can plant the cuttings of the uhrwords that occur to us from time to time.

The third comment?  Joy is Joy.  Joy is a former student and fellow parishioner who is so rooted in God that she is free to be as she was named.  My name is John, which is sometimes translated “beloved of God”.  Joy reminds me of my John-ness, and my call to cut the b.s. and act like it, to respond to the uhrword that is our name, each of ours, yours too: beloved.   

No b.s.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.