As most know I am dyslexic and a writer(want-a-be). I have a love hate relationship with words. One of my earliest memories is of my mother reading to me, "bible stories" and passages from, "Where the side walk ends." so when I read this quote from Pat Conroy i was deeply moved. I found myself in the passage like someone rests in their own bed after a long journey. You see, through all my hate of words, with there twisted posters and attempts to confuse, I found a love for the truth, and a desire for reality. I saw words as a sailor sees a boat. They carry us across the ageless, voiceless seas that separate people. They even make a way through our personal river Styx. On them we ride back from the dead into a land blossoming with meaning and life. Words gave me passage and my heart wings for by them I saw the world as a lover sees his love, and as God sees us all, purely, clearly, beautifully real.
Pat Conroy writes of how this same love of words came to him and he skillfully uses them to that end.
“I grew up a word-haunted boy. I felt words inside me and stored them wondrous as pearls. I mouthed them and fingered them and rolled them around my tongue.
My mother filled my bedtime hour with poetry that rang like Sanctus bells as she praised the ineffable loveliness of the English language with her Georgia-scented voice. I found that hive of words beautiful beyond all conveyance.
They clung to me and blistered my skin and made me happy to be alive in the land of crape myrtle, spot-tailed bass, and eastern diamondbacks. The precise naming of things served as my entryway into art.
The whole world could be sounded out. I could arrange each day into a tear sheet of music composed of words as pretty as flutes or the tail feathers of peacocks.
From my earliest memories, I felt impelled to form a unique relationship with the English language. I used words to fashion a world that made sense to me.”
–Pat Conroy, My Reading Life, (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 55.
Reading to your children is important, looking back, I can say it was a means of common grace on a uncommon boy. They did not just define my reality, line by line they beautified it with golden strains of meaning connecting all things in a tapestry I now call "faith". All because a mother, a book, and a boy, met every night before bed.
The word became flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)
Reading to your child can incarnate such a reality even in the most dogmatic enemy of words. It may even be God's way of preparing our little ones for the beauty of faith.
Merry Christmas --
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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