On Language (or, Hope Is Boiling)

My brother Pat used to say that he wanted his kid's first word to be "epistemology." I don't remember what Ben's first word actually was, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. Being part Pat, he probably went with some obscure math term just to be exasperating.

Most of us begin our speaking careers with a word like "mama" or "dada." For one thing, it's physically easy to make those sounds, especially with our parents cooing them at us all the time. It's almost inevitable to associate a face you keep seeing with a sound you keep hearing. But for another thing, Mom and Dad are concrete things. You can touch them, smell them, burp up formula on their shirts. Nobody learns to talk and think by looking at pictures of Justice or Beauty or Freedom; first, we must fully comprehend The Nose and The Chin.

Now here's the interesting part. It turns out that even as we grow older and start learning about abstractions and spiritual realities, they can still only be expressed in terms of noses and chins. Every term describing a mental event, if you look closely, is a purely physical metaphor. When you experience an impulse, you're not literally being pushed. When you see someone's point, you're not literally looking at a pointed object. When you feel despair, you're not actually descending from a location called hope, and when you feel hope, you're not actually boiling or emitting smoke. What we mean by "spirit" is something totally different from the act of respiration, but the word itself simply means "breath." Look up the etymology of any abstract word you can think of, and in just a couple of steps it'll trace back to a root word referring to some everyday physical activity. It's actually kinda fun if you're into that sort of thing.

And why is this? Better question: why was it the Son, rather than the Holy Spirit or even the Father, who took flesh in the Incarnation? Because the Son is the Word, and incarnating is what words do. You have an idea. It exists inside your mind, in the realm of pure spirit, and it creates the will to act. That idea represents the Father. Then you speak the idea, you enflesh it in words, and that represents the Son. And if the words are close enough to the idea, if the Son does the will of the Father, if the love between word and idea is true, then it radiates understanding like the Spirit. Every act of speaking is fundamentally Trinitarian. And if your idea was "I'd like a ham sandwich" and the waiter brings you a ham sandwich, then your idea has gone forth into the world and borne fruit. Rejoice!

Granted, all this might be a teeny bit advanced for a toddler. But it's good to have the end game in mind.

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