Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor says that the heart of the Christian story is the word made flesh. Christ’s language is sacrificial love which took him to the cross
One of my favourite accounts of a happy childhood is told by Laurie Lee in his delightful book Cider with Rosie. Early on, he describes his first day at school. As a new boy in the playground for the first time, he was nervous and frightened of the noise, the size and the numbers of his fellow pupils. Going into the classroom, the teacher was busy with the other pupils. She told him to ‘sit down there for the present’. The young Laurie duly obeyed and sat down quietly in his place. When he got home he was obviously upset and disappointed. His mother asked him whether he liked the school. He told her he wasn’t going to school tomorrow. When she asked him why not, he cried and said, ‘They told me to sit there and wait for the present. I waited all day and no one gave me a present.’
That story tells a great deal about children’s understanding of language. And not just children. Words can mean different things to different people. Words can be creative and informative, beautiful and noble. They can be destructive and malicious too. Words once spoken can never be taken back. For better or worse, they take on a meaning of their own, defined and understood by the reader and listener in ways that the speaker and writer may never have intended. The countless words of radio and television, of newspapers and journals are intended to communicate information, convey truth and form opinion. The volume of words travelling back and forth by mobile phones, email and BlackBerries may well convey information.
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