Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it’s been a good year for the English language. Its team has added 690 new words and phrases to its latest edition. Scanning down the list of new words this weekend, I didn’t spot any which spoke readily into the unfolding scenes dominating our news agenda. I reached for older words like … horror … disaster … tragedy… evil. All of them powerful words which have been stress-tested over time. Nonetheless, because they have been used repeatedly to address countless terrible events, I was left feeling as if they weren’t adequate to describe what’s happening in Israel and Gaza. The theologian Barbara Brown Taylor attempts to address this inadequacy when she suggests that words have no longevity; words like horror or tragedy have been used so often they don’t work properly anymore. To use her phrase, ‘they’ve bleached themselves out.’ George Steiner, the philosopher, suggests that we are living in the aftermath of the broken covenant between the word and the world. I think he means that our words do not grip on the world as they ought and struggle to speak the truth clearly. All too often, I fear, words become dust in our mouths. We pile word on word and still we are not satisfied. Perhaps a signal of this is how we take a word like ‘horror’ and add adjectives to it in order to amplify its force and effect. Thus, I have read accounts of world-shaping tragedies like the Great War which speak of its hopeless or infinite horror. I understand why we want to emphasise that some events are worse than others. However, adding adjectives can underline the extent to which simple language fails. Does that mean we should simply shut up? The book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak. The Wisdom Tradition from which it is taken reminds us that speaking unnecessarily is the mark of a fool. Equally, however, it would be wrong to impose silence on those whose job it is to report world events or on those who need to find words to articulate their trauma or sense of injustice at what is happening to them. Words matter. While there are many who must speak out in order to address what’s going on Israel and Gaza, for others, like me, I think there may be wisdom in saying less and listening more. I find that in silent prayer I can pray more attentively and carefully for the people caught up in the tragedy unfolding before our eyes.