must come through something else. Welcome to the world of faith. Here is my lady, my picture, my philosophical account of an olive. I look around at the stuff of the world and I ask myself what it is made of. Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us. In the Christian story, the material world came into existence at the point of speech, and that speech was
