Our Mouth Shall Show Forth Thy Praise

Hello, everyone,

I apologise for the too-long absence from this blog, and especially to those whose unmoderated comments were not published because I was not taking care of the blog - I finally moderated them, so Ky, Clint (welcome to the blog, if you have not given up on it due to my negligence), and Lee, your responses are now posted.

In this post, I hope to explain why I have not posted lately, why I find it difficult to post, and why (hopefully) I will be posting more in the future.

To begin, I have realised that, the further one gets into the world of academia (or maybe just the study of English), the more difficult it is to speak. What I mean by this is that one becomes increasingly aware that the things one is saying could be misinterpreted, and so one becomes very silent, lest both Christians and seculars put words into one's mouth, or one writes in the annoyingly unencryptable prose that you can find in many of my prior posts. For example, I once thought that it was enough to simply assert one's Christianity on a university campus - to say that one was a Christian was tantamount to preaching the gospel. But I soon realized that the term Christian has numerous different meanings - when I use the word Christian, for example, I am talking about someone seeking to follow Christ, as revealed in the Bible and interpreted in a community (the church) which has hung together for the past two thousand years. However, when other people hear the word Christian, they often associate it with certain (right wing) political stances, modes of reading that contain no nuance whatsoever, and, in general, a person unreflectively clinging to fragments of a childhood myth. Thus, in preaching the gospel, I not only had to state my position as a Christian, but, in some way, convey the context and definition of my usage of the word, lest others take my message for something that it is not. But it became difficult because, the farther I went, the more I discovered the difficulty of such a task, and the more I opted for silence rather than a word of hope lobbed into a field of linguistic chaos that would inevitably misdefine it and tear it to bits.

I had not really realised my position, however, until a conversation I had with my good friend, the Queen of West Procrastination. She happened to be in town on the day of my MA thesis defence, and therefore came to witness it. From an academic perspective, the defence went well, but, I was rather happier with what QWP said she saw in my defence. Apparently, I was not only defending my thesis, but was also having a positive spiritual influence on my committee, and was proposing things that challenged academia to conform to a higher standard of discourse. I do not say this because I wish to brag about it, but rather because I want to talk about how relieved I felt when I got the chance to say what I actually wanted to say, about God, academics, and the Bible, without feeling like I needed to hide my position behind a bushel of guarded linguistic and philosophical nuance. It was even more encouraging that everyone (including the adamant atheist on my committee) liked what I had to say, even if they didn't wholly agree with me.

After my defence, QWP and I parsed what had happened, and why I suddenly felt the freedom of a blocked stream when the dam that has been maintaining its stagnance (is that a word?) suddenly bursts. During this conversation, I realised that what made me feel so free was not so much the fact that my defence was successful (although it helped), but rather the sense that I was doing precisely what God designed me to do. I realised that I need to be more vocal about things God has shown me, not because I am superior to anyone else, but because God has given me a vocation, and has designed me to take joy in that vocation.

After this conversation, I was thinking of my profound fear of vocalising things, and I realised that, in the bible, time and again, God's servants are always afraid to speak, and God always has to convince them otherwise. Both Jeremiah and Moses feel inadequate to bear God's message, and Christ anticipates the fear of his disciples when he tells them that he will give them words to say when they are accused by others. In fact, this is what we see at Pentecost - Christ's disciples, focussed inward in a relatively small prayer group, suddenly become eloquent about Christ. But I think that I have found the passage about Zecheriah, John the Baptist's father, to be most meaningful. Intriguingly enough, Z is unable to speak as a result of his skepticism regarding the angel's message - typologically, we can see the same principle working in our own society - we are skeptical about everything, and we are unable to speak (postmoderns might call this the "fear of the text"). Intriguingly enough, Z's lack of speech is cured when he opens his mouth to praise God at the birth of his son. Perhaps we can see in this that the cure for a contemporary, skepticism-induced dumbness is praise and thanks directed toward God. As the Anglican Book of Common Prayer would say in its marvellous liturgical synthesis of scripture, "Oh, Lord open thou our lips/And our mouth shall show forth thy praise."