"One True Word" by James Carroll

While cleaning out some old books I came across one with a poem-prayer I first came to love many years ago now; it was, I think, when I was in initial formation in the Franciscans. It was a timely discovery given today's Gospel re seed and soils and speaks to so many of the concerns I have written about here and elsewhere: the nature of persons as language events and also called to be the Word made Flesh in some sense, the New Testament idea of parrhesia or bold speech which is authentically human and inspired and empowered by God, the overwhelming saturation of our world with meaningless speech which dehumanizes us and trivializes reality; (here I think especially of the posts I recently wrote about the distinction between "friending" and befriending, as well as the fact that cell phones have become extensions of many persons' bodies and a symbol of the trivial language-events we can allow our own lives to become). There is nothing essentially new in any of this however, as James Carroll makes clear. The poem is from his book, Tender of Wishes, The Prayers of a Young Priest.

One True Word

"They were filled and began to speak in other tongues" (Acts 2:5)

We lean, tentative, anxious, together.
We summon courage and small trust,
and with dried voices dare to speak,
to unpierce ourselves, unhide the secret
with carefully chosen and just possible words.
We whisper together, we utter,
but the words are easier than we are
and they run loud and meaningless,
wind through dry grass, shambles of hope,
shod-iron feet through splintered glass.
Words even great and pregnant ones,
have grown up or shrunk or frozen
into yet another obstacle to union of sorts.
Words are yet another sentence, condemnation,
telling us dry and again how alone we are.
It is nearly time for silence always.
We are cheap words longing to be still.
We are, alternately, silence dreaming
of being spoken word however trite.
What we need, in a word, is a word
that goes both ways and can bear much use.

II

God, there is, we believe, one word
which never was trite or cheapened,
which survives the eternal attempt
to lock it into our predictable vocabulary.
That word is your Son, we believe,
spoken by You from all ever until now,
near us in the flesh of Jesus Christ.
Forgive us our making a lie of Him
on our bloody, blaspheming lips.
Speak him again and with both edges
cutting quick through our thick
and cloudy and wordy confusion.
Open our ears to hear him again,
the one pure sound, the one true word,
the one utterance in whom we, men, meet.
Quicken our tongues to speak him yet,
our one hope here for saying something
true and wise, with love and some sense.