True Words

True words

We began our Artist in Residence program provoked by Mysterious Words – story that poses more questions than it answers, parables that hint, challenge, invite, rather than tell it plain.

During the week, Jude has held space for many to play with words, to find the life in them and reflect on life with them. Words have been mysterious, no doubt, and we have also found some true words.

Words that speak meaning

Words that heal and give hope

Words that show love

Words that evoke, nurture, generate life

And we’re not done yet – tomorrow night’s Poet’s Corner, and a second memoir workshop fill out a rich residency indeed.

Briefly, having heard the Psalm for the day, I want to water the roots of the true words that guide our living, when we choose to align ourselves with Holy One, Mysterious and True.

As we listen to Psalm 19 today, we are reminded that true words are true sometimes because of what is not spoken – when words are not uttered, yet Creation speaks truly; when music plays and speaks to our inmost being; when a poem’s words hold space for silence between them, and the silence speaks …

Words, with power, with truth, evoke for us in the Christian tradition a power, a deep enduring truth: Divine Word, Wisdom, Voice.

This Voice, this Wisdom, speaks life into words, and speaks us into life, from the beginning of all things and through every day.

Behind Psalm 19 and its celebration of Divine commands, regulations, judgements, and instruction is Torah. Most often in English this Hebrew word is rendered ‘Law’, but better, perhaps, is ‘instruction’, or ‘teaching’ – Torah is guidance for living.

On the lectionary for churches to hear this week alongside Psalm 19 are the Ten Commandments Moses receives from Holy One for the people.  These are the core, perhaps, of Torah, teaching, instruction in the Way of Holy One. Those commandments echo between the lines of the Psalm, the Ten, and the whole breadth of Torah – which is

Five Books at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

and the spoken interpretation and application of what is written – Oral Torah and midrash, for example.

These are the true words that guide the people into fulness of life

the Torah, the teaching, the instruction, the Wisdom

Ten commandments that are summed up in their first two,

Love Holy One only, and with all you have and are

and, the true words that are so like the true words found in so many of humanity’s religious and philosophical traditions: love one another as you love your own self

Love – the truest Word (with capital and without) we could hear, speak, enact.

Can’t you hear it in the song Creation sings, to which Psalm 19 and other poets point us? Gratitude, life, joy: love. I know I felt that true word in the words we wrote and spoke this week. May it ever be so.

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