In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Gospel
According to St. John {1:1}
So we have it through John that in the
beginning, the Word was paramount … and
through Genesis we know that God spoke
His Creation into existence: “Let there be this,” “Let there be that,” “Let
there be a few other things,” and Creation was wrought!
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The
Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul
Rubens, circa 1615
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But of course, the Word that was God and the Words
He spoke were not the English words spoken in Shakespeare’s day (when the King
James Bible was translated); nor is contemporary English as rich and powerful
as Shakespeare’s … centuries of devolution … continuing to just yesterday, when
written text (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc) all but displaced the human voice
in most social interaction … and now even families and close friends prefer “texting.”
What a shame! Voice “channels” so much
more than text: the nuance of volume, tone, timbre, inflection, cadence, hesitation,
impatience, confidence or uncertainty, warm hot or cold, joy, sadness, etc,
etc, etc … Not to mention how spoken conversations tend to lurch in unexpected
directions, enabling discovery,
because dynamic, instantaneous, interactive exchange lends to productive
interruptions that cannot occur in
the linear, sequential exchange of text messages.
And it just gets worse, as text messages
become shorter and more abbreviated: AAP (Always a pleasure); 143 (I love you);
1432 (I love you too).
I guess I’m just happy that it took so
long to come so far. Can you imagine, had God texted (instead of spoken) His Creation
into existence, how it would have looked?
(watch for the period between Rowe and OriGraphics)
