Words

Some bloggers throw words on a screen with abandon, writing from the gut (and too often from the nether regions therein).

Other bloggers take a great deal of care, researching a subject and choosing words with precision.

(Alas, I fear that I tend more toward the former than the latter.)

Yet whether we write well or poorly, a little or a lot, about great things or about stupid things, there is a very profound message for us in the first part of today’s first reading, in Job’s last words to the Lord.

Job has been profoundly eloquent in the expression of his anguish and of his faith. Indeed, the Lord himself (in a verse omitted from today’s selection) sternly tells Job’s friends that Job has spoken rightly. Even so, Job gives these last words:

“But now my eye has seen you.
Therefore I disown what I have said,
and repent in dust and ashes.”

Many centuries later, the man who was arguably the greatest Christian theologian since the Apostles, St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote books that summarized all of theology and Christian wisdom, after decades of study and prayer was blessed with a direct vision of God himself and he realized that all of his unsurpassable work was “straw” in comparison to what he had seen.

We should always do the best we can to learn more about God and to share our faith and doctrine with others, but we should also always have a proper humility about what we know and what we say.

While we can certainly rely on God's revelation of himself that comes to us through Scripture and through definitive Church teaching, our minds and our words can but point to God in himself, and yet God will always be more wonderful than we can imagine.