“The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which
I am baptized, you will be baptized.”
St. Mark 10:39
Jesus often spoke in phrases heavy with meaning. He used images freighted with symbolic power,
ambiguous turns of phrase that force the listener to slow down and
consider. Meditation--a word that comes
from the Latin for what a cow does with her cud-- is not merely a pious
practice. We must often chew long on
these phrases to draw out their full meaning.
That can be difficult for us in a world where people try to conduct
national policy debates in 280 characters or less. By and large, we long for the single-page
memo, the objective facts distilled out from the spin, the bullet points
drained of their adjectives. Many of us seem to be drowning in a sea of words
as it is. We don’t think we have time for beautiful rhetoric or the probing
syllables of poetry.
But we can miss a great deal if we rushly too quickly to the point,
especially when the words spoken to us are about those things at the core of
our existence.
