The Power and Beauty of Language

I find not infrequently that the diverse books that I read converge on themes or ideas that I had not anticipated. The last couple of weeks this has occurred between two books I am now reading, The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson and Grace Is Where I Live: The Landscape of Faith & Writing by John Leax.

Both authors have tremendous respect for words and the power of words and language. Peterson, for example writes,

Words are holy--all words. But words are also vulnerable to corruption, debased into blasphemies, trivialized into gossip...Language is previous to and foundational for all that is...Words are essential and words are holy wherever and whenever we use them. Words are inherently holy regardless of their employment, whether we are making up a shopping list, making conversation with an acquaintance on a street corner, praying in the name of Jesus, asking for directions to the bus station, reading the prophet Isaiah, or writing a letter to our congress woman. We do well to reverence them, to be careful in our use of them, to be alarmed at their desecration, to take responsibility for using them accurately and prayerfully (66-67).

John Leax writes, "Language is the soil in which message grows. Poets must care about message, but they must first be stewards of language. The message is like a seed. It must fall into the ground and die before it can be born into a poem" (30).

I don't think that we consider words holy, or that we consider ourselves as stewards of language. But as I ponder these passages, I increasingly believe that we are stewards of the language whether we are poets or not. Words are holy. In this context the admonition in James about our speech makes even more sense:

This is scary: You can tame a tiger, but you can't tame a tongue--it's never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. Curses and blessings out of the same mouth!
My friends, this can't go on. A spring doesn't gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it/ Apple trees don't bear strawberries, do they? Raspberry bushes don't bear apples, do they? You're not going to dip into a polluted mud hole and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you (3:7-12, The Message)?

Imagine what are speaking and writing would be like if we really believed that words are holy and that we are stewards of language.