WHAT MIGHT GOD SAY IF THEY HAD A TONGUE?

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

What might God say if they had a tongue?

I know they would not say any of the following:

Because to give words to the wordless is to make the VAST, small.

So, we will ask for forgiveness as we dare begin this wrangle amongst the overly verbose boundaries of a continuously lettered word that will come to suffocate the Truth, syllable, by consonant, by syllable. God forced to squeeze themselves amongst our vowels: Oh, Ah, Ooo…

Just one wrong word aborts an un-languaged tenderness yearning to be born, like a misfit shoe on an overgrown foot desperate to feel ground.

Or, a shooting star trapped inside a ketchup packet.

Or, the soul of a young girl only penned by purity and the shallow tide of a world that is coming to drown her most sacred water.

She won’t remember what to write.

She won’t even remember what to speak.

She will not even know she has a voice.

And the broken one she uses, it isn’t even hers. She borrowed it from the the tone deaf ones, whose frequency carries her further…

and further

and further away from herself…

like the ellipses that refuses to tell you where it’s going.

Before she’s old enough to learn what a dangling modifier is, she will be banished to a well inside of herself and no one will know that she lives there.

She won’t even know she lives there.

No one will even know there’s a well.

And she definitely won’t remember that when she was born the shape of her announcing cry was pitched to perfection by God himself, that baby girl’s cry God’s only word.

But God can’t call her back.

God can’t remind her of who she is.

Because God doesn’t have a tongue and she’s still just listening to words.

So she prays instead with tears, with clumsy words,  with the mumbled memory of all the loves she’s ever lost:

May I feel the undeniable shape of you within the cavern of my own mouth, that taste of something holy just beyond my lips, so that I may finally know the sound of god.