This week someone posted a YouTube recording of two United States diplomats having what they thought was a private chat about the situation in Ukraine. (You can read more here.) At one point, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland used a pungent Saxon verb to tell her colleague that the Obama administration should, um, "make love to" the European Union. The recording appeared anonymously, though I did note an unusual twinkle in the eyes of Russian President Valdimir Putin during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics last night.
The whole thing got me to thinking: What if someone was recording MY private conversations? More to the point, given recent revelations about what the National Security Agency gets up to, what if the someone's who ARE recording my private conversations decided to release them? This line of thought naturally takes a Scriptural turn: What if the Someone who knows not only my words but my thoughts decided to put 'em all out there on ThouTube?
So as I sat down this morning with my first cup of coffee and wondered to which poem I would treat myself, I thought of Malcolm Guite's quasi-rap, "What If. . ." from his new book, The Singing Bowl. You can read the entire piece here and purchase the book here, but consider just a few of Malcolm's speculative rhymes. He begins by quoting Matthew 12.36-37 where the Master warns that "every idle word" will be re-tweeted in the judgment. Then (and though I am abysmally white, I can't help sort of mentally beat-boxing as I read this one), he leads off with:
What if every word we say/Never ends or fades away,/Gathers volume, gathers way/Drums and dins us with dismay,/Surges on some dreadful day/When we cannot get away/Whelms us till we drown?The poem continues with a rush and a stamp, building momentum as you read until the words hurl you forward like feet on a steep slope when momentum takes on a life of its own. I've tried to read the poem slowly. As a child I once tried to fall off our roof slowly. Neither can be done. The very meter of the piece recreates the rush of words that take on a life of their own even as the voice inside our own heads shouts, "For pity's sake SHUT UP!" And then there's that relentless rhyme scheme: Six lines all ending in the same sound until the seventh slams us to a halt with drown/down/ground/down. It's as if an air-bag deploys as we slam into the dead-stop of each stanza.
I sometimes think Purgatory would consist of having to hear every one of my own sermons over again, followed by everything I was thinking as I preached them. And that's the stuff I planned to say in front of people. God help me if anyone ever publishes the garbage I've uttered when I went off the cuff and off the record. But what if God is the one doing the publishing? What God will help me when it is God who accuses me? But the cross teaches me that God will intercede with God on my behalf. I have high hopes that my sermons are all under the blood. Still, I think I'll be a little more careful before I go shooting off my mouth.
