Petrichor [Or, Music to the Words]





Petrichor [Or, Music to the Words]--July 6, 2016

"We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ..." [Ephesians 4:14-15]

There are things in the world that are waiting for words to name them. 

And once there is a name, a word, your perception is changed forever.

Let me tell you about one.  Let me tell you about "petrichor." 

In 1964, two scientists coined a new word for the smell of the earth after a rain.  The word comes the old Greek roots for rock "petr-" and for old mythical notion of "ichor," the blood that flowed through the veins of the old gods.  It's a lovely word, for an even lovelier smell--that lush, earthy, fresh smell the earth gives off when the water finally comes after a long dry spell.

Now, I am sure that you have smelled that scent before.  But my guess is that without a word for it, without a name for it, it's not the sort of thing that readily comes to your mind.  We struggle for ways to get across the reality from our lived experience, and so we end up with awkward and clumsy phrases like, "you know... the smell of the ground after it rains for the first time in a while."  Those kinds of lengthy phrases come close, but something gets lost in translation between the immediate experience and a long, winding phrase like that to describe it. By the end of the phrase you forget what it was you were trying to smell in your memory.  That's why a lovely little word like "petrichor" helps me, at least, to be right there on the front porch smelling that scent every time I think of the concept.  It brings it right to my memory, because there is a word for it now.  Prior to my learning that word, the smell had always been there, but my brain didn't quite register exactly what I was experiencing.  I needed the word to make it vivid in my memory.

So, the point of all of that is to say that when we come across a reality that doesn't have a word for it, sometimes it's better to invent a new word to help our brains wrap themselves around the concept, so that we will see the world more deeply and fully than we had before.

And that brings me to these verses from Ephesians, because there is a beautiful, elegant single word in Greek that is lurking underneath the English phrase "speaking the truth in love," that we just don't have a good word for in my own mother tongue.  Our English translations try their best with "speaking the truth," but the epistle itself has a curious little word that takes the word "truth" and makes it a verb.  If we were going to try to be literal, we might invent the word "truthing" to get the idea across.

Here's why I think that's a critical difference.  The original has the idea that truth is not just something you SAY, but something you DO.  If we were listening to a choir performing Barber's "Agnus Dei" and my summary report of the experience was "We heard someone recite the text of Agnus Dei," you would say that I had missed the full depth of what was going on.  Yes, words are there, but reciting or speaking is rather different than singing.  Singing brings a whole universe of beauty to the words.  Singing brings interpretation, performance, emotion, and pleasure in ways that go far beyond the power of just reading words out loud. 

If I read Ephesians 4:15 and just hear "speaking the truth in love," I will probably end up hearing it as a rehash of the old moral, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," a lesson that may well fit in a book of etiquette for pleasantries around strangers, but doesn't come close to the radical kind of love and honesty that Christians are called to practice.  It's not just about "telling the truth," as though "the truth" is just factually accurate information.  We have all spent plenty of our lives listening to politicians make pronouncements or recitations of statistics that, while in some technical sense are factual, are used in distorted ways to make them mean whatever the speechwriter wants them to mean.  The truth is not just a list of facts you can recite, any more than Barber's Angus Dei is just a rehash of the old Latin liturgical text "Lamb of God."  The truth is something you do, like a song is something you sing.  The truth is something you live as well as something you can recite.

So maybe we need a word for that, maybe even "truthing," so that we no longer hear these words from Ephesians as just a reminder not to lie.  It's about more than just not lying.  It's about living our lives in a way that is consonant with the Good News of Jesus, so that our actions do not betray the factually correct words we recite.  When we speak about the forgiving grace of Jesus but then act in ways that hold grudges, we are not truthing in love.  When we talk about how God loved us when we were enemies and strangers but then do not act in ways that embrace enemies and strangers ourselves, we are not truthing in love.  When we mouth words about how important the Bible is, but then ignore the Scriptures' call to us to provide for our neighbor, to turn the other cheek, to walk the extra mile, to care for the foreigner, and to bind up the brokenhearted, then we are not truthing  in love--we are merely reciting words without the music they were meant to have.

N. Gordon Cosby offered this insight on the connection between our words and the lives than flesh them out:  "No matter how varied and rich our experiences, how honored we've been, how great our acheivements, we will have missed what life was all about if we do not become love... I think one of the great failures of ministers like myself is that we have exhorted people to love, and we have deplored the lack of love in the world, yet we have not become love.  We have not know how to instruct our own souls in the art of loving."

I don't know how many times I wandered past this verse before, without getting it that the writer of Ephesians has more than lip service in mind.  The Christian faith is not merely about reciting correct factual beliefs about God, and then doing it with a polite but distant smile on it that we call "love." It is about our actions, our attitudes, our habits, and our choices all being in line with what we say we believe.  THAT is "truthing in love."  I didn't realize how much I had been missing out on in that sentence because I didn't have a word for what it was trying to describe.  It was like having been out on the porch after a summer storm and not letting the scent of petrichor register at all, because my brain couldn't capture the concept without a word for it.

Well, now we have a word for both: for the rich, fresh smell after the rain, and for a life that is lived truthfully in love.  In this day, let us put reality to the things we say.  Let us put music to the words.

Lord Jesus, make us to be people who live the truth as well as speaking it.