Logophile

A few weeks ago, I took a young friend, Hannah, to see "Golden Compass." I had read the books years ago, but really wanted to see it because of the perverse adolescent in me. Around when the movie first came out, I received an e-mail from a friend that said something along the lines of "Don't go see the Golden Compass. The author is an atheist and trying to turn children away from God." Let's go! How, I wondered, can we be so naive to think a movie can have such an impression.

And then two of the bazillion fun trailers before "Golden Compass" played were based on two other books, "Spiderwick Papers" and "Inkheart," both of which, at their core, explore the power of words and books and the scary and eye-opening places they can take us. I remembered the different physical and emotional reactions I had reading Aristotle and Kant in college - brain fatigue but also a dizziness. Readng Neitszche, I learned that the Nazi party was influenced by his ideas. Last weekend, while in Nashville, I saw "The Great Debators," a movie about a debate team at a small black college in Texas during the Jim Crow Laws. Two of the debate team speeches brought me to tears. Thinking back over the last year and a half, there are many hurtful words that bubble to the surface unexpectantly. The wounds are closing but still have a haunting ache. I have often marveled that after the fall God gave Adam the ability to name all the animals, to set words to everything he saw and that God changed the single langauge of those who built the tower of Babble so that the builders could not communicate.

My love of books and words is partly because of the power of words to relay emotion, to portray a world we've never been in (have you ever been reading a book that takes places in a snow storm, looked up and found sunny skies and wondered why it wasn't snowing?), to let us enter another's life. My difficulty in expressing things verbally comes from the power of words, the inability to edit my speech and the impact a misspoken word, an emotional but untrue statement can have on the listener. "Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison." (James 3:5-8) I have a fear of what words might reveal to another about my heart and what will be done with my heart once it's laid bear for another to see.

I had a mental argument as to whether "The Golden Compass" was really so dangerous that an e-mail campaign should be launched against it (a similar campaign was launched against "Harry Poter" at many churches in the south while I lived there) or whether I could pooh, pooh it. We are bombarded by so many words throughout our day, throw them off like worn out socks throughout the day, are they really so powerful? After the movie, Hannah and I got in the car and talked about the movie. Rumor was that in the last book the series God is killed. We talked about what could be God in the movie and whether it was the God we know.

Words are powerful. There is no doubt. But the ability to think about words we hear and read and speak (do old words haunt us? are we controlled by others' words? do we speak words of love and truth or fire and dishonesty? do we blindly hear and see words? do we appreciate words in our life?) is another gift given to us and one more powerful than the use of words.