I lead an incredibly verbal life. Even while physically being unable to speak, I find myself writing thousands of words a day, both for work and for conversation. I listen to audiobooks while I exercise, and read while I eat. I rip through 400+ pages of reading a week, something I didn’t realize was unusual for an adult until a meeting in which people shared their New Year’s resolutions. Many centered on reading one book a month.
While I’m guessing the majority of you don’t live quite as wordy a life as I do, you still probably find it plenty full of words. There’s nothing wrong with this; words are vital to communication and to nailing down complex thoughts. Losing my voice (again) reminds me of the value of spoken words and how much connection we experience through them. As a gentle counterbalance to this verbosity, though, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the God we worship is too big for language to contain. Because God is too big for our language to contain, there are times when praying with words fails us. Ecclesiastes 5:2 (NIV) puts this neatly: “Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” Notice here how the emphasis is not on total silence your entire life, but on hasty, poorly-considered prayers that stretch on for paragraphs. (Perhaps you’ve been held hostage by one of these in a church service before.) Just as too many words can betray a lack of clear thinking in writing, they frequently do the same in prayer. To go deeper on this, think of it this way: words themselves are just symbols for ideas to make it possible to communicate our thoughts and experiences. Sometimes, we use too many words in order to avoid the complexity of wholeheartedly engaging with the original experience. It’s the everyday equivalent of the tourist who only sees fabulous foreign lands through the lens of their camera. In an effort to capture the experience in their photographs they end up missing out on the actual experience. Words are cameras that capture experiences, and in the capture, the original experience can be lost. How to get around this? I fully understand the irony of using words right now to discuss this in the first place. Words cannot be entirely avoided, and even the most “woke” tourist will want at least two or three photos to help remember their experience later on. That said, it is important to cultivate the habit of enjoying things on a non-verbal level (non-photographic), including God. The two most nonverbally spiritual kinds of places I know are the wilderness and the kitchen. The wilderness allows me to catch glimpses of its Creator in a concrete way without mucking about with words as much. If you were to ask me what I specifically enjoyed about a given hike or why I felt closer to God while doing it, even my own verbosity might fail. It is enough just to be in the presence of God and not overthink it. The spirituality of the kitchen for me comes from how sensory but nonverbal it is. Cooking involves handling God’s Edenic gift of food and participating in furthering that act of creation. Thought dissolves into action and experience, and while there might be a passing thought about how beautiful this batch of kale is or how much more of a spice I need to add, these aren’t necessarily processed at the language level. Observing the transformation of different ingredients into something new and better may have lessons for the spiritual life, but I absorb these things quietly, without too many words interfering. Truthfully, in the kitchen I use more numbers than words (some things do need to be measured), and even those sparingly. Silence may not be a good or desirable place to live long term (I know this too well), but it’s an important retreat to visit regularly. Even without words, you can fulfill the most essential purpose of prayer--connection with your Creator. Afterward, feel free to “capture” the experience in words, but don’t miss the experience itself. Sometimes, God just wants to be with us and our words only get in the way.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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