Spelling Magic, Casting Words, and Making Ideas Incarnate

God gave us words, and they're divine little things. Satan hates a good vocabulary, and there's a devilish plot to steal our language.

The first sign I had a problem in my head was staring blankly at a computer monitor, trying to find a word that was just out of my grasp, while writing a sermon. I never had a problem finding words, and if you were an avid reader of mine back in the day, you’re aware that if I couldn’t find the right word, I’d just whip one up.

Little did I know, this was called “word displacement” and was a symptom of Xanax consumption. Over the next few months I went to the doctor four different times, telling them of various physical ailments, but none of which concerned me as much as the inability to think correctly. As someone who has always lived and died by words, I needed them…badly.

A misdiagnosis of a vitamin D deficiency (which I indeed had, but it was not the primary source of my brain troubles) and a few embarrassing, life-changing moments later, and everything changed for the better. Acknowledging it’s indeed better has been a long, brutal journey of trusting God.

During that time period, I’ve virtually no memories except for scattered jigsaw pieces of recollection. Unpacking after our move was like Christmas; I had no idea where quite a few things came from. Looking at photographs from that 10-month era has been like an amnesiac seeing it for the first time. Xanax doesn’t typically make someone out-of-sorts, but doesn’t allow new memories to form, and so I remember little despite usually acting normally and making typically rational decisions in the moment. But the crazy thing is, I don’t remember much from three months after rehab, either. In fact, I maintained a full-time secular job in business, and remember almost nothing about those first few months. That drug rewires the brain for a good, long while.

And most surprising to me, is that after thinking my vocabulary would never return, it eventually came back as though someone had just hit a switch in my head, nearly 15 long months after I left rehab. I stopped having to focus on every word, and suddenly my old ability to speak three full words ahead of my conscious mental postulation returned in force. Our secretary at work, who at the time didn’t know my medical history, soon remarked, “Did your IQ just shoot up 30 points or something? Did you change your diet?”

No. But the cloud left my brain.

Just as memories don’t begin to form in human beings until speech starts being developed - allowing us to store memories away into the card catalogue of our brain - words and thoughts go hand in hand. Without one, it’s hard to use the other.

But that experience made me think, probably because at the time I could barely speak, of the relationship between words and thoughts. Or to put another way, how a limited or perverted vocabulary affects our ability to think adequately.

SOME IDEAS ON IDEAS

Most men have a “sparkle” when they get to talk about that one thing they’re really passionate about. And if you don’t watch them, they’ll go out of their way to talk about it if given the opportunity. For me, that thing was words. I’m sure there have been congregants who’ve had to take a deep breath and say to themselves, “Oh, no. He’s going on a rant about words again.”

Words are enchanting little things. Get a load of this…

God made things called brains, which are wrinkly muscles in our heads. And on these wrinkly muscles are circuits that fire electrical signals that communicate with each other through connections called synapses. Neurons fire these signals and they’re received by neuron transmitters, like a magical elf is operating a tiny operator switchboard. The cerebrum is separated into two parts by a fissure, called hemispheres. Those two hemispheres are each divided into four lobes. As new information requires more data memory, so instead of growing out the skull, the wrinkly muscle just gets more wrinkles, storing away the information for later.

That’s how a brain works, in layman’s terms, but how do ideas work? Literally nobody knows. As Charles Jennings, the Director of Neurotechnology at MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research admits, “Somehow… that’s producing thought.” Lol. Somehow. Behold, the wisdom of the wise.

The conversion of firing synapses shooting off electrical feedback through a series of transmitters in head wrinkles is the best science can come up with to describe what an idea is, which means we really have no idea what an idea is (an irony all its own).

Ideas, you see, are magic. And by magic, I mean divine. They are the product of God’s breath, which he gave Adam, that the beasts and creepy, crawly things don’t have. Ideas are different from instincts, like those telling animals it’s time to eat. Ideas are different from memories, which is how elephants remember their dead. Ideas are uniquely human, which is weird, because animals have head wrinkles, too.

Ideas are intangible, untouchable, unseeable, imperceptible things. But ideas, whatever they are, separate us from animals. Ideas allow us to contemplate God, philosophy, the Democratic Republic, virtue, honor, and love. That’s miraculous, for little brain transmitters to do.

SOME WORDS ON WORDS

But the problem with ideas is that, as I previously described, they are intangible, untouchable, unseeable, imperceptible things. How do the communications between the neurotransmitters in my brain get to your brain (or the other way around)? Ideas are big, but how can they become small enough to convey? Or share? Or debate?

And so God, in his miraculous wonder, chose to make a thing called “words.” These words are formed by guttural noises caused by the flexing of vocal cords in our throat. By pushing the smallest amount of air from our lungs, it comes by two long muscles in the larynx, and they reverberate like the string of a violin. And then, we get pretty good, over time, at controlling the air-flow from our lungs and the reverberation of those muscles (your brain does this, because you’re too stupid), and our tongue and lips performs some actions that make the sounds sound differently. And those are words. And then other people’s brain wrinkles interpret what our throat muscles are saying. Crazy, yeah?

Words lasso ideas, as though they were wild beasts that can be tamed. Words corral ideas. Words act as guides, or like those velvet ropes at the bank, that make ideas stay in place and be manageable. Words are supernatural. Unlike ideas, that can’t be tamed, words tame ideas. Unlike ideas, which take up no space in the physical world, words do exist in the physical world, and physical things create them.

The best I can describe the relationship between words and ideas is that if ideas were spirits, words are the medium through which they communicate. They’re psychic little buggers that make the spirit-world manifest into time and space.

And then, God in all of his genius, made the head-wrinkles devise a scheme by which words could be written down in blood, ink, or dirt, or chiseled into stone so that the head wrinkles that couldn’t be born yet wouldn’t get the words wrong, and just like that, God invented Scripture. It’s all quite mystical and beautiful.

And it’s the on the mystical part of words of which I’d like to opine. God’s fascination with words is even greater than mine. He’s quite fond of them, and even prefers them, over other forms by which he shows us what he wants to show us. Few understand the religious art-craft of wording.

All education is Hogwarts, or a variety thereof. The only question is whose magic we’re teaching. The term “spelling” comes originally from the German spellen, and then to the Anglo-French espelier, and means “to signify” or “to story” (a verb). The context is clearly that these larynx noises signify ideas. All the above originated beside the German spel, which is where we get the spel in Gospel, meaning “good story.”

But the original emphasis in the German spel is of magical connotations. From Edmund Spenser’s 1590 poem Faerie Queen…

Spell is a kind of verse or charm, that in elder times they used often to say over everything that they would have preserved: as the night-spell for thieves, and the wood-spell. And here-hence, I thinke, is named the Gospel, or Word.

Teaching kids the craft of spelling is Hogwarts 101. To teach kids how to reach into the unseen ether and lasso an intangible idea, and bring it through the veil of spiritual chaos into the world of time and space, so that the idea can be seen and heard, is a more impressive equivalent of pulling a rabbit from a hat, if only that rabbit could conquer civilizations, raise the dead, cast out devils, and makes nations rise and fall.

SPIRITUAL ATTACKS ON WORDS

Somewhere in the Heavens, between the sky immediately above us and the abode of God, there are principalities and powers of darkness. And these devils play interference with what passes between Heaven and Earth, like road bandits in the medieval woods. The ideas up there in the unseen realm, that need to be brought down here into the physical world of time and space, can change the course of human history. And those devils want to guide and direct human history. Because of this, they’re quite literally engaged in a war on words.

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