A beautiful reflection from 'Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl', which I've been reading in conjunction with my personal devotions, and a stunning bunch of clouds behind our house from a few years ago.
' I began to feel like a world among worlds, understanding the divine language of creation but unable to speak it myself.
I knew what God was saying. He gave me eyes so that I might see Him say it. He gave me ears so I could pick up the rhythms and clatters and rhymes. My tongue can taste these words, the water, the pine needles, even the log that held me, but I cannot say them. We have given them names, shortcutting them with smaller sounds that fit in our mouths.
Tree, I say, and you know what I mean. ...Tree, God says, and there is one. But he doesn't say the word tree; He says the tree itself. He needs no shortcut.
...Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. ...Human language is our attempt at navigating God's language...
See that thing?
What thing?
That huge pile of stone that climbs to where the air gets thin?
Yes. It has a lot of syllables.
Let's call it a mountain, okay? When I say mountain, that's what I mean. It'll be easier than building one every time.
Is it supposed to blow up?
Let's call it a volcano.
...But our words fall short. They're just noises in the air and flat ink on a page. ...We imitate God's words but our noises are insufficient. So we doodle in the margins, children working to capture the Sistine Chapel with finger paints on a paper plate. What else can we do? '
(--N.D. Wilson, 'Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl -
Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World')
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