September 23, 2022

Letters to the Editor

Submit a letter to the editor electronically | For our letter writing policy, click here

Reader: Words are the essential and powerful force available to humanity

Words matter. They reflect reality and  also have the power to alter reality—the power to edify and to abase.

Words do matter, and the right words matter most of all. In the end, what we say and what we do is all that remain of us. Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, or hope, and they produce after their kind. Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a lived experience.

If language is as intricately tied up with consciousness as it appears to be, then the perpetual diminishment of our propensity to use it to express the times in which we live, could very well mean that an element of human consciousness itself is on the brink of vanishing.

Words are singularly the most essential and powerful force available to humanity.  We can choose to use this force constructively with words of love and encouragement, or destructively using words of despair and denigration. Words have spirit, meaning and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.

Words can reconfigure our brain. Words give expression to the abstract in a way that images cannot. Words open the faculty of the soul to thought and feeling beyond our own, in a way that an image cannot.

Words connect us to others, and, unspoken said words is a language of connection unto itself. Words stimulate our imagination.

Language is the mother of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

As St. Teresa of Calcutta said: “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”

- Kirth N. Roach | Order of Carmelite Discalced Secular, Indianapolis

Local site Links: