Husks
March 2019
“When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear; so do one’s faults when one speaks.”
a reading from Sirach (aka Ecclesiasticus) from last Sunday has stayed in my thoughts all week. Not because I am a particularly religious person nor particularly good when I speak. Just sometimes a phrase sticks around for a while. It is a beautiful image, a compact simile using a very common biblical theme of threshing. A very interesting way to think about expressing ourselves. Winnowing away husks to gain a kernel but not one consumed alone. Speaking truth, hopefully, and sharing it as a meal.
But that is not what is going on here. The focus is not upon the fruit of the grain but the husk. Speaking is a winnowing. All our speech dries up and blows away even as we speak, but something is left over. Our faults are revealed. How could it be any other way though? We are partial beings stuck in time. Beyond that these faults have a lasting quality. In Matthew 15 Jesus expresses a similar inversion. “It’s not what goes into the mouth that contaminates a person in God’s sight. It’s what comes out of the mouth that contaminates the person.” We don’t swallow our poisons as much as we spew them out.
Going back to the idea of speech as husks - how could it be any other way? A physicist (maybe Feynman) described what he did as being akin to flashing a light for a second in an immense cavern and furiously scribbling down what he saw… If this is what the best among us sees, how could what we utter be anything else but partial truth at best? Beckett, a few different times, wrote of expression as a ‘stain upon the silence’. Pound describes the awful cost of WWI as being for “…two gross of broken statues, …a few thousand battered books.” All reminders that when we express ourselves we cannot help but be revealed as the ‘poor, bare forked animals’ we are.
But not a reason to shut up.
A childish belief that I have not given up, is the idea when someone is reading in mass God speaks though them. I was taught, not to read along, but to listen because of that. If you are reading you are not quite listening and vice versa. It doesn’t mean the person speaking is holy or even good but in that position they are a vessel or a conduit. If you listen correctly you will hear it.
Occasionally you do. It’s true.[1]
Errors and fragments mixed with occasional flashes of directness.
I got a translation of Sappho in college and was blown away by this fragment:
“Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal…”
So much packed into that. A dense image which once you try to explain makes no sense. But there is the Trinity in that sentence and something which bursts out at you like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso”… And also just breath.
- I remember being bored and hungover at an outdoor mass in Korea and hearing the story of “Mary and Martha” from Luke. I realized I was hearing something direct and elemental even if I did not particularly believe or understand. “Mary has chosen the better part and this will not be taken from her” (Mary the sister of Lazarus in this case)