Words to the future

One of the fascinating things for anyone who reads or works with words is the connections words can establish across centuries of experience. Phrases come back to us, recalling past experience, investing moments with new meaning, helping us find a place for ourselves in the world.

"The church where we go to now" -- to steal a phrase John Terpstra uses in several of his poems -- last night brought one such example. The pastor's text came from Acts 3:1-10, and in particular Acts 3:6: "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you." It's hardly the best-known text, but it resonates for me because it is reportedly the passage that sparked the dramatic conversion of one of my forebears, Samuel Vetch Bayard, 205-odd years ago. I struggled for a long time to figure out what his experience of that passage was, and though I will never know, I have been fortunate enough to discover documents in various archives that shed light on what his conversion to a religious life meant in practical terms for him (last night's message, which you can stream here or save, offers a contemporary take).

Without those documents, my understanding of my own context and even how to live a religious life in my own day would be a little less. While each of us must find a modus vivendi appropriate to our circumstances, words have an ability to develop long-term patterns of life that ultimately make for a living culture. Tradition, in this sense, is less the thing that binds us than the foundation we build upon. To quote Terpstra at length,

The church where we go to now
is, and is not, the church
of our fathers and mothers.
The old words do not come easily,
here, the songs have faded and frayed,
they have been crushed and ground
by the lives of our forebears,
the weight of history.

The preacher is not innocent.
She is both fearful and full of joy.
She would unburden us,
but the slim silver sliver that she guides
will prick
as it moves through,
and there is blood in the pattern,
the page, on the hand,
as well as healing,
just as there was for our mothers and fathers.

(from "Needlecraft," in Brendan Luck)

Journalism lends itself more often to cliché and stereotype than blood-threaded pages, but it's the blood that underlies even some of our most sluggish thoughts. Bringing it alive, infusing it with the energy of our own experience and insights is the challenge. Knowing our context is a starting point; now, what has it prepared us to do?