As early as childhood and adolescence I was attracted by words. Not so much then by specific words and phrases as by the plots and stories the words created, such as the Union vs. Confederate novels I devoured. I believe it was during my student years at Jesuit-run Xavier High School in downtown New York City that I first focused to any extent on words; but then and there, I must confess, I was influenced by the power of words to defeat or confuse adversaries in debate.

Several years later, a remarkable change. In a Jesuit’s formation two years of “juniorate” (corresponding roughly to the first two years of college) are given over largely to literature — the first year to poetry, the second to rhetoric (our prose). We “juniors” focused on “the best” in our past. We read, remembered, recited. Wordsmiths who claimed our attention, at times our imitation, taught us by example that one word is not as good as another.

I am confessedly and unashamedly a weaver of words.… In the Hebrew Testament I found the word wondrously alive. As John L. McKenzie was to phrase it years later, the spoken word for the Israelites was:

A distinct reality charged with power. It is
charged with power because it emerges from
a source of power which, in releasing it, must
in a way release itself. The basic concept of
the word is the word-thing. The power of
the word … posits the reality which it signifies.
But in so doing it also posits the reality
which speaks the word. No one can speak
without revealing himself; and the reality
which he posits is identified with himself.
Thus the word is dianoetic as well as dynamic.
It confers intelligibility upon the thing,
and it discloses the character of the person
who utters the word.

That is why God’s word is particularly powerful.

In the New Testament, I discovered, the word as a distinct reality charged with power is fulfilled to perfection. God expresses Godself not only in human syllables but also in a Word that is itself a person. The same personal Word God utters from eternity, God uttered on a midnight clear — to us. “In Jesus Christ is fulfilled the word as a distinct being; as a dynamic creative entity; as that which gives form and intelligibility to the reality which it signifies; as the self-revelation of God; as a point of personal encounter between God and man.” (McKenzie)

The word, I learned from the Letter of James, is a perilous thing. “We use it to bless the Lord and Father, but we also use it to curse men and women who are made in God’s image.” (Jas 3:9) And still, in St. Paul’s eyes, the word is an indispensable thing. “How are men and women to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” (Rom 10:14)

Words, I learned from experience, can be weapons, and words can be healing. Words can unite in friendship or sever in enmity. Words can unlock who I am or mask me from others. Two words, “Sieg Heil,” bloodied the face of Europe; three words, “Here I stand,” divided the body of Christendom. Words have made slaves and freed slaves, have declared war and imposed peace. Words sentence to death (“You shall be hanged by the neck”) and words restore to life (“Your sins are forgiven you”). Words covenant a life together in love, and words declare a marriage dead. Words charm and repel, amuse and anger, reveal and conceal, chill and warm. Words clarify and words obscure. A word from Washington rained down atomic hell on Hiroshima; words from an altar change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

With all this, I feel no shadow of guilt in being a weaver of words. A word is real; a word is sacred; a word is powerful; a word is … I.

My high regard for words received an unexpected confirmation. It came from that remarkable symbol of Czechoslovakian courage Václav Havel, from his acceptance speech when awarded the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 15, 1989, shortly before becoming his country’s president. Entitling his speech “A Word about Words,” he claimed one thing as obvious: “We have always believed in the power of words to change history.” One paragraph, illustrated from history, from Gorbachev and Li Peng and Ceausescu, from the French Revolution and perestroika, stated:

No word … comprises only the meaning
assigned to it by an etymological dictionary.
Every word also reflects the person who
utters it, the situation in which it is uttered,
and the reason for its utterance. The same
word can, at one moment, radiate great
hope; at another, it can emit lethal rays. The
same word can be true at one moment and
false the next, at one moment illuminating,
at another, deceptive. On one occasion it
can open up glorious horizons, on another, it
can lay down the tracks to an entire archipelago
of concentration camps. The same word
can at one time be the cornerstone of peace,
while at another, machine-gun fire resounds
in every syllable.

Havel warned his hearers, from harrowing experience, of “the fiendish way that words are capable of betraying us — unless we are constantly circumspect about their use. And frequently — alas — even a fairly minor and momentary lapse in this respect can have tragic and irreparable consequences, consequences far transcending the nonmaterial world of mere words and penetrating deep into a world that is all too material.”

How do words take flesh? Through imagination. The scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell did not think much of us clergy; he said we have no imagination.

What do I understand by imagination? The capacity of the human person, the capacity we all have, to make the material an image of the immaterial or spiritual. Over the years I discovered the creative power of imagination especially in three areas highly significant for effective preaching: (1) in story — a constellation of images, a narrative where we recognize our own pilgrimage; (2) in symbol — “an externally perceived sign that works mysteriously on the human consciousness so as to suggest more than it can clearly describe or define” (Avery Dulles in “The Symbolic Structure of Revelation,” Theological Studies, vol. 41, 1980); (3) in the fine arts — including motion pictures.

Imagination is not at odds with knowledge; imagination is a form of cognition. In Whitehead’s words, “Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts; it is a way of illuminating the facts” (The Aims of Education and Other Essays). True, it is not a process of reasoning. Notre Dame of Paris is not a thesis in theology; C. S. Lewis’ famous trilogy does not demonstrate the origin of evil; Gerard Manley Hopkins was not analyzing God’s image in us when he sang, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / [plays] To the Father through the features of men’s faces” (from his poem “As kingfishers catch fire”). And still, imaging and imagining is a work of our intellectual nature; through it our spirit reaches the true, and the beautiful, and the good.

That is why, I have insisted for years, the effective homily is a fascinating wedding of all those ways in which the religious imagination comes to expression: vision and ritual, symbol and story, the fine arts. This is the homily at its best, the homily that makes God’s wonderful works come alive, immerses in the mystery, evokes a religious response.

A response — there’s the magic word. For the homily is truly a homily not when the believer assents to a proposition and declares, “I do believe there are three persons in one God,” but when the believer asks, “What do you want from me, Lord?” And the most effective approach to such a response is not ratiocination, not demonstration; it is imagination.

Novelist-preacher Frederick Buechner in his Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, pleads:

Let the preacher stretch our imagination and
strain our credulity and make our jaws drop
because the sad joke of it is that if he does
not, then of all people he is almost the only
one left who does not.… The joke of it is
that often it is the preacher who as steward
of the wildest mystery of them all is the one
who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly
mature and wise to the last when no less
than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for
Christ’s sake, no less than Christ tells him to
be a child for his own and the kingdom’s sake.

For Andrew Greeley, “perhaps the most important” requirement or characteristic of effective preaching is imagination. In his article “Priests Should Make Preaching Their Number One Job” (U.S. Catholic, vol. 12, December 1993), Greeley argues that “no one should be ordained who has not displayed some development of creative imagination: short stories, poems, painting exhibitions, photo shows, or storytelling interludes. I would settle for anything that demonstrates that the future priest has some spark of the creativity, with which we are all born, still on fire within him. It is virtually impossible for the priest who does not read, write, think, or imagine to do well in the most important part of his work — the homily.”

Very simply, our homily is all around us: the Word of God touched to the experiences of our people, intimately involved in our history. How then can we preachers respond from the pulpit and in the neighborhood around our parish in any way other than with a Just Word, a word of justice?

Much of this article reproduces material from my Long Have I Loved You (Orbis, 2000); permission to reproduce graciously granted by the publisher.