The Terrifying Power of Words

I sometimes wonder if I fill my world with too many words: the ones on the screen, on the page, on my tongue, in my ear. Banishing some might me do me good, but which ones? It’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Sure, I could delete Twitter, or simply never open it, but no matter how mentally involved I can get in issues about which I can do little, I cannot just turn my back on the world at large. We are at war, with battles being fought for minds and hearts, and the weapons used are words. Pretending that this is not reality has its appeal, but I want to see the bullet whizzing towards me, or at least catch the flash emanating from the gun’s muzzle.

Do words create reality? I am beginning to understand that they do. Are they supposed to, though? Does it depend upon who you ask?

None of us can create a rock, a flower, a tree, a human from nothing. Only God can do that. We need raw materials.

God speaks, and the world around us comes into being. He creates the words and their results. He has given us the ability to think in terms of words and images, and we communicate these through sounds and written shapes.

With these supplies, we build reality.

We were created with something of a god-like function. In the story of Adam’s naming of the animals, God brings the animals to Adam and waits to see what name Adam will give them. Naming is not the role of creator, but it bears a similarity.

In this same manner, we take the world and fashion it, giving it shape and purpose. A tree becomes a house; a rock becomes a tool. This becomes much more complicated when what is being made consists of words. …

Perhaps a particularly acute aspect of words is their ability to distort and misrepresent. And so, from the earliest times, there has been a prohibition against lying. …

In our culture, words cascade at a never-ending pace, many of them disincarnate without reference to anything true or real. Arguments abound. Words are spoken like weapons, used for effect and not for meaning.

It is significant that Christ describes the devil as the “father of lies.” In Genesis, he speaks the world’s first lie: “God has not said…” He is the anti-logos.

—Father Stephen Freeman

Our modern world has been fashioned from lies, untruths told so far back in time that trying to trace their origins would be an exercise in madness. We would get so entangled by the consequences of just one false statement, we’d never make our way out of the web.