Yesterday, I blogged about Hibah Shabkhez and an essay of hers about how truth can be hidden in language. This duplicity occurs in the depths of the heart when language is employed, by necessity, to blog out primitive, old-brain terror One writer, Nikos Kazantsakis had this in mind when he quipped the language is “but 26 toys soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss.” But, as the Bible teaches us, when we are a child we must “speak as a child” but as an adult we must “put away childish things” and speak as an adult. We must speak the Truth which always means we must realize that we speak as, “we see through a glass darkly.”

Here is another poet, W. R. Rodgers, grasping this same truth in the World WarTwo era:

WORDS (an excerpt)

Once words were unthinking things, signaling

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar,

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish,

Its actual ache or naked rancour.

And once they were the gangways for anger,

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires.

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise

Carried the feverish message of fact

In their effortless core.  Once they were these,

But now they are the life-like skins and screens

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae,

To terrify or tame, cynical shows

Meant only to deter or draw men on,

The tricks and tags of every demagogue,

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys,

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.