November 23, 2011

WORDS OF THANKSGIVING

As we approach the season of Thanksgiving, we might pause and give thanks for language. We take words for granted, but they are the means by which we connect our internal world with the external one. Through them we express both our emotions and our ideas. Our adjectives and adverbs help us emphasize our degrees of feeling. In a sense, we can touch one another by the breath alone.

But words shape our world as well as describe it. Without words of tense to express the past, present and future, we’d have no concept of time. Yet it is through time that we send our words as knowledge to the unborn in the hope that one day they will benefit. 

(NYTimes.com)

Without words there would be no warnings, no prophecies and no diagnoses.  Without words, we would live at a primitive level with few concepts beyond our immediate impulses, creatures driven by our passion and not by our questions. Without words we would have no laws, no justice and no societies.

I think it is no accident that the Gospel of John states that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God” (John, 1:1).

And so I send my words to you across time and space to express this single wish:  May your Thanksgiving be a joyous one.