A Word is a Key

“When a man hands you a key, this has a certain meaning. A word is a key. A word is an action. Subtract the action, and the meaning has not been expressed. Moreover, each man is a word. As you are a word to me.”

…“Let us say … that you and I live on opposite sides of a street and that this street divides two different worlds that are incomprehensible to each other. Let us say that I hand you the key to my door, and you hand me the key to your door. We open our doors and there we are—we are gazing into the interior of each other’s homes. Is it not a blessing?”

…“True speech is seeing as one. The union of silence and the union of true words that flow from such silence. This union is an expansion of vision.”

…“A thing is not truly said unless the speaker is willing to offer his own blood as surety for the words that come from his mouth or pen. The blood need not flow literally, but the willingness to let it flow is essential for authenticity. In the uncertainties of life, the spilling of our blood may be demanded of us, or it may not. That is not our decision. Our act of choice is to be willing.”

“So you believe that what a man says must be backed up with his life.”

“Yes, if it is to have authority. This is why we must take care with our words. A word changes existence. We must protect the purity of language, for it carries the sacred from one to another.”

“…if symbols are corrupted, concepts are corrupted, and then we lose the ability to understand things as they are. Then we become more vulnerable to the deformation of our perceptions.”

“And thus our actions”…

…“The degradation of language is a symptom”…

…“Language can give us prayer and poetry and song and words of love to offer to another. Yet language can fall to the lowest level, like a noble servant put to degraded uses to increase the master’s profit. By reducing him to the lowest level of service, the master in fact degrades himself more than his servant.”

…“Language can give us prayer and poetry, shouts and cursing”, he continued in a subdued voice. “But it is not the source of prayer, poetry, shouts, or cursing. There is the voice of the soul that comes before spoken words. I think we can experience this pure tongue of the soul without words.”

…“A state of pure being is speaking and listening simultaneously.”

….“I have felt this rarely in my life, mostly when I was a very young child”... “Time slowed then, a sense of wonder expanded. Angels sent messages, poured out over the world. One had only to look up to see it, to hear it, to receive the messages. But childhood ends. Reality conquers all.”

“Childhood should not end” … “It should take a more mature form, but its innocence should not cease.”

“I agree. It should not. But it does.”

“Can you not find it again? It is everywhere—all around us. It can be sparked by the flow through the air of wheeling pigeons; or the colors flowing across the ever-changing sky; or the flow of ideas from one’s lips to the ear of another when you know that your word is spoken in the central current and heard in the central current and returned in the central current.”

“The current of what? That is the question—of what? Water? Traffic? Noise?”

“Fire. The current of holy fire.”

~Michael O’Brien (from Sophia House)