Speaking 1

For my own edification and amusement, I will try to articulate some positive principles on how to speak words of life and light. 

1.  Speak them from a place of exceptional love and mercy. 

I don't think this principle is that controversial.  I am not into proof texting, but 1 Cor 13 pretty much puts love as primary and anything done without love as inconsequential.  The rub will be in defining love.  Most of us would have a difficult time operationalizing what it means to speak words from a place of love.

In Luke 6, Jesus talked about about typical and exceptional types of love.  One is so easy that even folks like Tony Saprano and Ben Linus do it as a matter of course.  The other is exceptional and, by definition, not easy and routine.  It is a type of love that has it origins in God himself.  It has to be accessed.  It has something to do with dying to what Thomas Merton calls the False Self, the self that Jesus said we needed to lose and Paul said we need to lay aside.  Speaking words from a place of exceptional love will require the ability to access the Merton's True Self or Paul's New Self, that "inner sanctuary of the soul, where the Light Within never fades, but burns, a perpetual flame, where the wells of living water of divine revelation rise up continuously, day by day and hour by hour, steady and transfiguring" (I love these words from Thomas Kelly).  I think some simple, honest reflection reveals that this is not an automatic process and difficult to do.

Speaking words of life and light is less about being "bold" or "unashamed," or, is it fair to say, even speaking about Jesus or the four spiritual laws, and more about putting preeminence on learning to "drop into" that place within us that is the well spring of exceptional love.  Do we know how to do this?  I don't want to make this harder than it needs to be, nor do I want to make it seems so easy we need not attend to it.  The currents working against our ability to do this are strong.  Like most things spiritual, I assume it involves seeking. 



All this is well and good, but drama is more interesting than ideas.  Next, I will post some drama.