This is the script for my Thought For The Day, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this morning.
I was once investigated for blasphemy. Back in the late 1990s, I wrote something that a conservative Christian group objected to. There followed 18 months of enquiries by the police before the case was dropped. I breathed a sigh of relief. But the experience left me with a slightly jumpy sense of the power of words. They can get you into a lot of trouble.
Blasphemy is no longer a law in this country, but words clearly still matter. At the centre of many news stories are conflicts about words.
For instance, today is the European Day of Languages, a prompt from the Council of Europe to celebrate the multiple ways in which words are spoken across the continent. Which is good. But remembering that variety of languages is, of course, also to remember social tensions, global stresses and political trouble.
Another troubled word story concerns the dramatic drop in that enjoyment of words called reading. The decline is causing something of a moral panic.
Or again: there is the mix of threat and possibility promised by Large Language Models, the AIs that consume words even faster than electricity and water. The great minds behind the AIs regularly remark that they don’t quite know why the algorithms are working so well. My bet is that the power of words provides at least part of an answer.
For words have an extraordinary nature: they live, have a soul, you might say. Religious traditions are a great help here because they frequently stress that words are not just fancy forms of grunts and squeaks. Rather, they possess nothing less than divine qualities.
Christian theology majors on the Greek term, Logos - Logos meaning “word” in the maximal sense: a word that can not only describe something or communicate information but is an active spiritual force. The divine Logos lives in logic, dialogue, analogies. Its presence makes the activity of speaking and hearing pretty much miraculous. Right now, though miles apart, we are in a shared field of meaning that might transport us, cajole us, move us. And you thought you were just reading an article.
Words are also powerful when abused. That was the fear behind the old notion of blasphemy which resurfaces in contemporary, secular guise: speak certain words, weaponise them, and be accused, be condemned, be cancelled.
I’ve had a taste of such a hounding and certainly don’t advocate it. Rather, be more alert to the everyday magic we deploy with words. The awareness can make us wiser about the spirits active in our lives.
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY
Thursday 8th October - Idler Drinks with Michael Pollan. The first of the new season of online weekly gatherings.
Saturday 17th October - Spiritual Fourfold London: A William Blake day pilgrimage with Mark Vernon. A chance to prepare for the bicentenary of Blake’s death in 2027.
Friday 6th November - The Christian Mysticism of William Blake, Sarum College, Salisbury.
Saturday 14th November, After Therapy Suffering in the age of Big Mental Health, Verdurin, London.
15th November, 2026 – 20th November, 2026, The Nostos Retreat, Broughton Sanctuary, Skipton.
Friday 27th November - Escaping the Cave: Plato in Art, Science and Spirituality. A day conference in Cambridge.
11th December – 13th December, Wild Christ with Martin Shaw, School of Myth, Dartmoor.
Mark, I've found that writing about my relationship with God often helps me understand what I've experienced. But I've also learned to distinguish the relationship from the words I use to describe it.
Your discussion of Logos raises an interesting question for me. When you describe words as spiritually active, do you mean what happens between people through language, or are you suggesting something about the nature of language itself?
Buechner —
John was a poet and he knew about words. He knew that all men and all women are mysteries known only to themselves until they speak a word that opens up the mystery. He knew that the words people speak have their life in them just as surely as they have their breath in them. He knew that the words people speak have dynamite in them and that a word may be all it takes to set somebody’s heart on fire or break it in two. He knew that words break silence and that the word that is spoken is the word that is heard and may even be answered. And at the beginning of the gospel he wrote a poem about the Word that God spoke.
When God speaks, things happen because the words of God aren’t just as good as his deeds, they are his deeds. When he speaks his word, John says, creation happens, and when God speaks to his creation what comes out is not ancient Hebrew or the King James Version or a sentiment suitable for framing in the pastor’s study.
What comes out is flesh.
When God wanted to say what God is all about and what man is all about it wasn’t a sound that emerged but a man.
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At their most poetic and powerful they do not say something as much as they make something happen.