Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle Read Free Book Online

spirit.”
    Now it goes, “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.”
    To which the only suitable response is, “Likewise, I’m sure.”
    We’re told that the new
Prayer Book
is meant to be in “the language of the people.” But which people? And in language which is left after a century of war, all dwindled and shrivelled? Are we supposed to bring our language down to the lowest common denominator in order to be “meaningful”? And, if we want to make the language contemporary, why not just cut out the
thy
and say, “And with your spirit?” Why are we afraid of the word
spirit
? Does it remind us of baffling and incomprehensible and fearful things like the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and the Passover, those mighty acts of God which we forget how to understand because our childlike creativity has been corrupted and diminished?
    Perhaps the old
Prayer Book
dwelt too much on penitence, but there was also excellent psychology in confessing, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,”
before
“We have done those things which we ought not to have done.” In the new confession we confess our sins of commission before our sins of omission. But I have noticed that when someone dies, those who are left are apt to cry out, “Oh, if I had only taken her on that picnic!” or, “If only I’d gone to see him last Wednesday.” It is the things I have left undone which haunt me far more than the things which I have done.
    In restricting the language in the new translations we have lost that depth and breadth which can give us the kind of
knowing
which is our heritage. This loss has permeated our literature and our prayers, not necessarily in that order. College students of the future will miss many allusions in their surveys of English literature because the language of the great seventeenth-century translators is no longer in their blood stream. I like to read the new translations of the Bible and
Prayer Book
for new insights, for shocks of discovery and humour, but I don’t want to discard the old, as though it were as transitory as last year’s fashions.
    Nor do I want to be stuck in the vague androidism which has resulted from the attempts to avoid the masculine pronoun. We are in a state of intense sexual confusion, both in life and language, but the social manipulation is not working. Language is a living thing; it does not stay the same; it is hard for me to read the language of
Piers Plowman,
for instance, so radical have the changes been. But language is its own creature. It evolves on its own. It follows the language of its great artists, such as Chaucer. It does not do well when suffering from arbitrary control. Our attempts to change the words which have long been part of a society dominated by males have not been successful; instead of making language less sexist they have made it more so.
    Indeed we are in a bind. For thousands of years we have lived in a paternalistic society, where women have allowed men to make God over in their own masculine image. But that’s anthropomorphism. To think of God in terms of sex at all is a dead end.
    To substitute
person
for
man
has ruined what used to be a good theological word, calling up the glory of God’s image within us. Now, at best, it’s a joke. There’s something humiliating and embarrassing about being a chairperson. Or a chair. A group of earnest women have put together a volume of desexed hymns, and one of my old favourites now begins:
“Dear Mother-Father of personkind…”
    No. It won’t do. This is not equality. Perhaps we should drop the word
woman
altogether and use man, recognizing that we need both male and female to be whole. And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce