I am reading Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and I want to share the boy narrator’s description of his quiet Midwestern grandfather:

Grandfather’s prayers were often very interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.

Since I deal in words, I am particularly attuned to this danger of wearing them dull. When you write and speak all day, sometimes you begin to feel, if you have an ounce of introspection in you, that you are somehow cheapening the ideas, that all your chatter is striving not to illuminate truth, but to distract from it. Sometimes you become enamored with your own turns of phrase, your own cleverness, and before long you lose sight of precisely why you are writing, other than because you are, well, a writer.

I suppose preaching carries a similar danger. It’s probably more accurate to say that weak and sinful man, whether writing or preaching, is prone to think his crowing is somehow responsible for the sunrise. Or we are given to believing that our words are themselves the blessing, rather than frail and inaccurate vessels that at best, sometimes, by the grace of God, point to the blessings we had no hand in crafting. In that state of mind, we spill them out everywhere, a clever word in every setting. I wonder sometimes if we — if I — don’t wear them dull.

And then there are those who can read the Bible aloud — no contrived speeches or pithy aphorisms — and send a chill down your spine. Has that ever happened to you? I once attended a prayer service where a visiting pastor got up to speak. Seeing him take the pulpit, I expected some good sermonizing; a stranger in our midst, he surely had to make his mark, it seemed. Instead, he simply opened his Bible, and read a Psalm. But the thing was, you could tell he not only believed every word, he believed that they had been breathed out by the awful, Almighty God, and that this same God was in our midst. It makes a difference, I think, how you read those words we’ve heard so many times before, when you truly believe that they were first fashioned by the Word himself, and that in reading them you are inviting into yourself the mind of the Creator. Even though the words most of us read are only shadowy translations, they still convey this power, I think.

But when we traipse over them, either in our own study, or our essays, or from the pulpit, that magnificence gets lost. We dull them with our constant use. I have a devout Jewish friend who refuses to utter the word “God.” There is a reverence there, I believe, that we might all learn from. I’m trying now, when I read the Bible, to linger over the words, to remember that they are God-breathed. And I am praying more, when I write, that I am at my best when I am at my least.