I haven’t thought much about “words” having a temperature, yet for sure we have reached a boiling point in the civil. social, and political discourse over these past days and months. Many are fearful of how dangerous words and speech have become and will become in the next few months, and beyond. The writer and novelist Salman Rushdie, is a master of words. In his most recent book, published earlier this year Knife Meditations after an Attempted Murder he recounts the moment he was stabbed many times as he prepared to present a lecture. Prior to the ‘Contents’ page Rushdie places words from Samuel Beckett – We are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday – a line found throughout the book. It comes from Samuel Beckett’s Proust and the fuller quote reads “There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday, because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us… We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday” Please ponder these words in the context of our society today. My previous post spoke of the winding path of words, today’s post is a caution in our use of words and comes from Malcolm Guite
What if every word we say
Never ends or fades away,
Gathers volume gathers way
Drums and dins us with dismay
Surges on some dreadful day
When we cannot get away
Whelms us till we drown?
What if not a word is lost,
What if every word we cast
Cruel, cunning, cold, accurst,
Every word we cut and paste
Echoes to us from the past
Fares and finds us first and last
Haunts and hunts us down?
What if every murmuration,
Every otiose oration
Every blogger’s obfuscation,
Every Facebook fabrication
Every tweeted titivation,
Every oath and imprecation,
Insidious insinuation,
Every verbal aberration
Unexamined asservation
Idiotic iteration,
Every facile explanation,
Drags us to the ground?
What if each polite evasion
Every word of defamation,
Insults made by implication,
Querulous prevarication,
Compromise in convocation,
Propaganda for the nation,
False or flattering persuasion,
Blackmail and manipulation,
Simulated desperation
Grows to such reverberation
That it shakes our own foundation,
Shakes and brings us down?
Better that some words be lost,
Better that they should not last,
Tongues of fire and violence.
O Word through whom the world is blessed,
Word in whom all words are graced,
Do not bring us to the test,
Give our clamant voices rest,
And the rest is silence Malcolm Guite: The Singing Bowl
Prayer:
We turn to you
O Lord, remembering
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God.
We give thanks that the Word
became flesh.
To you O Word, hear our prayers
even as we speak in silence. Amen.
Prayers, Poems, and Christian Ponderings 
I think of the expression, sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me, and realize the absurdity in those words. Perhaps originally meant to give us strength and courage in the face of unkindness, everyone has experienced the sting of words, as well as the difficulty in trying to forget them. It seems that words have both temperature and texture; warm and tender greetings from a friend, cold and harsh remarks between politicians, hot and rough as expressed in anger. And as of late, we have all witnessed the sheer power of words, for either gathering or losing political strength, whether spoken in truth or not. I am reminded of my mother’s gentle warning to “always choose your words carefully for once spoken you cannot take them back”.
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