So much of my life has revolved around the use of language. As a child, I was a voracious reader. I used to check out the maximum number of books our community library allowed on each visit. I read books in my bedroom, in my treehouse, and wherever else I went. As a student, I learned to write. I can’t say I enjoyed all of the exercises in diagramming sentences, but I did learn how to do it with enough accuracy to please my teachers. As a college and graduate student, I earned grades by writing essays and research papers. I managed to be published in a professional journal during my graduate school education. I also succeeded ion publishing a poem in a church magazine that was translated into several different languages including braille. I wrote and defended a position paper and a professional paper to earn my degrees.

As a pastor I wrote and wrote. I wrote prayers, I wrote liturgies. I wrote sermons. Early in my career I made a study of the difference between oral language and written language. I experimented with pitch and rhythm in my speaking. I made recordings of myself speaking and listened to those recordings in attempt to improve my language communication skills. I listened to other preachers and storytellers and imitated their styles as I developed my own style.

While on sabbatical in 2006, I began to write personal essays. in 2007 I started to publish my essays as a blog that evolved into this journal. I’ve written every day without exception since I started to publish my journal on my website. I told myself that I might become a writer if I developed a discipline of writing. I’m not sure that the volumes of words that I have written have improved my skill as a writer, but they have opened the door to more writing.

I have become a critic of some forms of contemporary communication. Last week I visited my sister, who lives in a planned community. There are gates at the entrance to her community. There are signs near the gates that say, “Automatic Gate Ahead, Drive Slow.” On the streets of the community are painted the words, “Drive Slow.” I know that language is constantly evolving. I know that the rules of grammar are changing. But I am not ready to accept a world without adverbs. I was tempted to paint graffiti in her neighborhood to add “ly” to the signs and street painting.

Signs, of course are a unique form of communication. I learned early in my life that the signs near our elementary school that read “Slow School Ahead” were erected to get traffic to slow to protect children, not an announcement of the pace of education. That knowledge didn’t prevent me from making fun of the signs.

I am not good with the language of instant messaging. I send text messages that are complete sentences with punctuation. I eschew repeating exclamation points ad infinitum. I don’t find the need to use more than one per sentence. I’ve been known to write text messages on my computer where I can use a keyboard to write as opposed to the futile exercise of thumbs on a phone keyboard. My thumbs are a bit too wide for the keyboard and I’ve had procedures to treat trigger thumb on both hands. I’m stuck using a single forefinger to “type” on my phone. Still, I take the time to add punctuation and write in complete sentences.

I have little interest in learning the language of emojis. Thousands of years ago, alphabetic languages developed in the midst of dominant cultures that employed pictographic writing. The people of Israel spent many years in close contact with Egypt. The written Hebrew Language developed around an alphabet that allowed writers to express more complex philosophical and theological ideas than could be easily depicted using pictographs. I see emoji as a form of pictographic language. There are ideas that can be communicated with all of the little drawings, but when it comes to exploring complex ideas, using a language that employs an alphabet works far better than creating additional emojis. The pictures will always be imprecise.

Having said all of that, I am not completely lost in trying to enforce rules of grammar. I love to read authors who push the limits of language. Lately, I’ve been reading several different books by Brian Doyle. He is a master storyteller. He is also a master of the run-on sentence. I find myself reading some of his one sentence paragraphs out loud just for the musicality of the words. He pushes the limits of what I have discovered about the distinction between written and oral expression. Some of his writings almost beg to be read out loud - to be spoken and not just viewed. Although primarily known for his novels, I find great delight in his collection of prayers titled “A Book of Uncommon Prayer.” It reads almost like poetry to me. I find myself reading the prayers out loud. I suppose a career in public prayer has given me a propensity to speak prayers, but like Doyle, I continue to write prayers. When I teach, I try to craft a unique prayer for each class session as a discipline of bringing my spirituality to teaching and remind myself that I am as much of a learner as the students in my class.

I belong to a poetry group. We meet over Zoom twice a month and share poems written to prompts. Each meeting begins with our responses to a prompt given at the previous meeting. Then we receive new prompts and write the beginnings of poems in a short amount of time during the meeting. I’m not good at those short five-minute sessions. It seems to take a week of mulling ideas for me to produce a poem. Even then I don’t know enough about poetry to be sure that what I am writing is a poem. Often I think I lack the discipline to become a poet. Lately my poems have resembled Brian Doyle run-on sentences.

Perhaps the future includes new forms of writing that I cannot yet imagine. In the meantime, I intend to continue to use the alphabet, adverbs and punctuation - sometimes all three deftly in the same sentence.