The lead piece is from "Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. In this book she takes many of the words and images of the faith and attempts to put some reality and life to them.
GOD-TALK
When God-talk is speech that is not of this world, it is a false language. In a religion that celebrates the Incarnation - the joining together of the human and the divine - a spiritualized jargon that does not ground itself in the five senses should be anathema. But the human tendency to dis-incarnate language is a strong one. I used to wonder if Jesus Christ, with all of the early metaphors he customarily employed, would marvel at the letters my beloved grandmother Norris would send me when I was in college... I was both fascinated and repelled by language that, while it insisted that it was telling a personal story, had almost nothing of the personal, or even the human it it. It seemed as if my grandmother's considerable geo had been subsumed, imperfectly, into "Jesus" this and "Jesus" that. The heavyweight theological words were a code I could not crack; evidently they spoke only to the "saved."
Every group of religious folk carry around such language. It can and it does become a barrier especially if the words are not connected to life. The book from which these quotes have been taken is Norris' attempt to bring theological and biblical language to life. Sometimes that take quite a bit of work because the words are so tied up with "another world or place." I find that an unfortunate result of using God-Talk that doesn't keep being redefined and made incarnate, is that we begin to sound like a secret society...a people who are in the "know." You may have heard people who seem to speak in patterns. I know that I use the image of the "reign of God" quite a bit. Some people are taught a pattern in prayer in which they "just want to ask..." There will always be a degree of God-talk that will permeate the lives of the faithful. We must be diligent in our translation so that the Lord of all can truly be that.
Connection: It is a good practice to ask people to explain what they mean by certain words in the God-Talk vocabulary. The same words very often don't mean the same thing to different people. They can be quite like code words. This questioning will help even outside the realm of God-Talk. Work vocabulary can be quite the same.
Lord God bind us together that the life you bring to us may be a light for all people. Remind us to bring to life the words we speak that all may come to see your love. Amen.
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