I recently enjoyed reading Michael Ward’s essay, ‘Imagine There’s No Heaven? C.S. Lewis on Making Space for Faith’ in a book of collected essays called The Story of the Cosmos: How the Heavens Declare the Glory of God while at my friend’s the Clarkson‘s house. Ward said when we lose good language we say more and more about less and less. In the last paragraph of the essay he points out how good words give us the ability to believe and imagine and hope. When we lose good words we lose access to belief’s power to envision hopefully towards God’s promised realities. 

Specifically, he writes about what is most often called Lewis’s Space Trilogy and how the misnomer is particularly unfortunate, since one of the points of the Trilogy is to recover for our imaginations the discarded image of the heavens over against that of mere space. My copy of the trilogy is branded as the Space Trilogy, but many have suggested it should be called “The Ransom Trilogy”.  

Ransom, the main character, realizes himself in the first book, while en route to Mars on a spaceship, that  

“A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring look down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declare the glory – the, 

             

                                              “happy climbs that ly 

                                Where day never shuts his eye 

                                Up in the broad fields of the sky.” 

You can hear in that passage Ransom realizing that something as seemingly innocuous as a single word, in this case, space vs heavens, totally changed the way he thought and felt about the realm beyond the earth’s atmosphere. He goes so far as to say that this single word shaped in the modern imagination a nightmare. The word space fills our imaginations with a terrifying, cold emptiness. In contrast, Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy tells a story that fills our mind’s eye with a glorious heavenly fullness: a bustling, blooming field of radiance. That is what the heavens truly are. 

I heard Eugene Peterson say once that he was doing his best to weed out words that choked fruitful thinking in his mind. He said he had come to hate the word “dysfunctional” when used in reference to persons, since it’s a machine word. Machines are functional or dysfunctional. People, on the other hand, are hurt, sad, grief-stricken, or glad, grateful, hilarious. Peterson suggests that when we make a habit of using machine language on people, our seeing and thinking changes, and we begin to treat people like machines. For instance, do I want to fix my friend’s dysfunctions with my mental screwdriver, my intellectual toolkit? Or care for their wounded hearts with my hands, prayers, and words? Does the difference in language change the way you feel, in this case? 

Marilyn Chandler McIntyre in her book, “Caring for words in a culture of lies” says that “as words fall into disuse the experiences they articulate become less accessible.” To cite a specific example, McIntyre looks at the word “felicity”. When was the last time you heard someone use that word to refer to a particular species of happiness? It’s pretty rare these days. McIntyre points out, 

“This kind of considered happiness, pursued with a clear eye toward economic stability, compatible temperament, and self-control, contrasts sharply with the kind of happiness marketed in movies that focus on falling in love against all odds, throwing caution to the winds, following the passions, and losing oneself in a rush of sensation.” 

You can see how a fruitful word  like “felicity” sown in the imagination would be inconvenient in a culture of consumerism, since felicity is a breed of happiness borne of careful consideration and wisdom, rather than impetuous acquisition. The marketers might be careful to remove such a word, if possible, in order to cut consumers off from any awareness of another way of imagining happiness that would interfere with their particular brand. 

Expanded vocabulary then, sets the table with good food. Words help populate our imaginations with possibility.  

McIntyre tells a story about being in a classroom and asking students to describe how they felt. When a student used the word, “angry”, she asked, “can you find a more precise word? For instance, are you frustrated, infuriated, seething, offended, hurt, incensed?” Can you feel how better words help us, not mainly to sound impressive, but to actually gain greater access to our own hearts and articulate to others the state of our souls with deeper specificity. Have you ever searched for the perfect word to describe how you felt, and felt instant relief when a friend offers just the right one, “yes! That’s it, that’s what I feel!” you might say. Good words empower us to identify and locate ourselves in reality. 

Sometimes, I think of cuss words (or curse words, if you’re not from the American South) and wonder what makes them problematic? What harm do they do, if any? In light of what we’ve just mentioned, cuss words are all blunt impact without much articulated substance. We are reduced to brutal grunts, and that means we don’t really know what we feel because we can’t bring into focus the imaginative outlines that allow us to perceive and participate in those feelings with understanding.  Maybe there are times when cuss words really do assist us emotionally in expressing ourselves, but long-term habituated usage seems to atrophy our ability to identify and express what we really feel. Human feeling and engagement with the world is very rich and complex, and when we lose vocabulary we lose the means whereby we engage in and benefit from that richness. I wonder if cuss words are problematic primarily because they are a kind of language that is especially weak? Are they shortcuts that don’t get us anywhere?

When we take the time to patiently search for the right words, to take the long way, our journey of perception and discovery of meaning and our involvement in it brings important details into focus. 

This is a fascinating conversation to me, and one that could go on for many episodes, but I should wrap up. Here at the beginning of season two of “One Thousand Words” I want to reorient myself to the purpose of this podcast and these essays. From my experience, words really do, in some mysterious way, give us a means by which to participate in reality, or to be cut off from it. If we lie, we are directing our hearers (including ourselves) away from what is real. Words can cut or heal, bruise or brighten. Good language can bring us into richer relationship with our own souls and the souls of those we yearn to know more deeply in love. My aim and prayer, as we begin this second season of “One Thousand Words” is that this will be a place to find words that make “life that is truly life” available to any pilgrim with ears to hear who stops along the way to listen.