Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing-and How We Can Revive Them

by Jonathan Merritt

Despite widespread religiosity, a paltry 7 percent of Americans say they talk about spiritual matters on about a once-per-week basis (more than fifty times in the past year). That means that for most of us, our conversations almost never address the spirituality we claim as important.

Only 13 percent of practicing Christians had a spiritual conversation more than fifty times last year, which again, would be about once per week.

Speaking God matters because speaking always matters.

As one Episcopal writer says, “God could have made us stone creatures, tree creatures, sea creatures, winged creatures, but God made us speech creatures instead. Human beings made in God’s own likeness, which is to say, capable of joining God in the work of creation by speaking things into being ourselves.”

dictionaries don’t explain what words mean. They only tell us how words are used.

The figurative language of the Bible beckons us into a larger conversation. It forces us to stop and pause—to engage our imaginations, not just our brains. While we accept these analogies, they illustrate an approach to language that’s often different from our own.

The day I first engaged lectio divina, however, I encountered a new way of understanding the word prayer and those who use the tool for spiritual formation. The practice was relational, rather than transactional, which is how it becomes transformational.

But as long as the pain is here, we might as well answer the questions it is raising. And in so doing, we come to know God, others, and ourselves more intimately.

Humans tend to assume that God is the deity they want.

Anne Lamott says, “Expectations are resentments under construction.”

C. S. Lewis’s conclusion to the question of suffering in The Problem of Pain was that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Perhaps the greatest threat to faith is not doubting God but being disappointed with God.

God does not intend to meet our expectations. Instead, God intends to meet our needs.

I refuse to let my disappointment sever divine ties.

“The ‘traditional family’ is not a family lifted out of the Bible’s patriarchal period, its united kingdom period, its exilic and postexilic period, its early or late New Testament period, or any other period,” writes Rodney Clapp. “It is instead a family lifted out of nineteenth-century industrialized Europe and North America.”

That last part seems to be a little Jewish hyperbole. After all, I couldn’t locate ninety-nine people who have zero need of repentance if I spent the next ninety-nine years searching for them. Jesus teaches that some people are lost and need to be found; other people are lost but assume they have already been found. The second group, as Jesus tells it, is worse off.

A mystic friend of mine once told me that life’s greatest journeys are cyclical rather than linear. When you end up back where you started, prepare to begin again—only this time, you’ll progress with greater wisdom, insight, and courage.

We must learn to live our lexicons. But we can’t embody a vocabulary we do not know, understand, or use.