S2:E1 – Good Words

Описание: Good Words



by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpr...










I recently enjoyed reading Michael Ward (http://www.michaelward.net/writing/es...) ’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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073...) 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 (https://www.amazon.com/Trilogy-Perela...) 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 (https://www.amazon.com/Caring-Words-C...) ” 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...