Happy Feast of the Word of God!!!

Here is a reflection I read last night by Henri Nouwen:

“We live in a world where words are cheap. Words engulf us. In advertisements, on billboards and traffic signs, in pamphlets, booklets, and book, on blackboards, overhead projectors, flip-charts, screens, and newsrunners. Words move, flicker, turn around, grow bigger, brighter and fatter. They are presented to us in all sizes and colors–but finally we say, “Well, they are just words.” Increased in number, words have decreased in value. Their main value seems to be informational. Words inform us. We need words in order to know what to do or how to do it, where to go and how to get there.

It is not surprising, then, that the words in the Eucharist are listened to mostly as words that inform us. They tell us a story, they instruct, they admonish. Since most of us have heard these words before, they seldom touch us deeply. Often we scarcely pay attention to them; they have become too familiar. We don’t expect to be surprised or touched. We listen to them as to “the same old story’--wheter read from a book or spoken from a pulpit.

The tragedy is that the word then loses its sacramental quality. The Word of God is sacramental. That means it is sacred, and as a sacred word it makes present what it indicates. When Jesus spoke to the two sad travelers on the road and explained to them the words of scriptures that were about himself he became present to them. With his words he did much more than simply make them think of him, or instruct them about himself, or inspire them with his memory. Through his words he became really present to them. This is what we mean by the sacramental quality of the word. The word creates what it expresses. The Word of God is always sacramental. In the book of Genesis we are told that God created the world, but in Hebrew the words for “speaking” and for “creating” are the same word. Literally translated it says, “God spoke light and light was,” For God speaking is creating. When we say that God’s word is sacred, we mean that God’s word is full of God’s presence. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus became present through his word, and it was that presence that transformed sadness into joy and mourning into dancing. This is what happens in every Eucharist. The word that is read and spoken wants to lead us into God’s presence and transform our hearts and minds. Often we think about the word as an exhortation to go out and change our lives. But the full power of the word lies, not in how we apply it to our lives after we have heard it, but in its transforming power that does its divine work as we listen.

Henri Nouwen, With Burning Hearts, 54-55