Recently, a friend asked me when I first fell in love with words. I remember exactly when. It was sixth grade in Mrs. Sinclair’s class. She had a tradition that changed my life. Each week she’d put a really big vocabulary word on the chalkboard. I remember one week the  word was “ostentatious”. The assignment was to write a short story featuring that week’s word – and here’s the brilliant catch – without looking it up. We were not allowed to find out what the word meant until after we had turned in our story.

We were not being asked to get the correct answer; just to enjoy the word. Just try it out. Imagine what you think it might mean. Enjoy its sounds and suggestions. What might it do if you let it run around in your imagination and get involved in some story? Does this word know something you don’t know?

For an entire school year, we went on weekly word-adventures. The assignment encouraged us to be fearless toward these alien creatures – at getting to know them. And there was no test! We weren’t being asked to attack and defeat the words or capture them to be used to further some progression up an academic ladder. Words weren’t weapons or utensils; they were stories, friends, windows onto purpose and possibility.  

I had no idea that I loved words until that year. I didn’t know that you could love them.

Now, I know that I have been that guy who interjects with annoying word origin stories while everyone’s eyes glaze over. In fact, my friend Jay posted a meme on my Facebook profile of two jars – one, a ‘swear jar’ (you have to pay a swearing fine each time you slip up) and the other an ‘unwanted etymology explanation jar’. The second jar was full of coins, of course.

Occasionally I get whisked away to that sixth-grade playroom when I run across an exciting word connection. Sometimes it’s a false trail – it turns out ostentatious and ostriches are sadly unrelated – and other times it’s really fruitful. When it is fruitful I find words have the power to change the way I see and feel about things in a big way. Meaning is transformative and the world is transfigured in light of it.

So, this morning when I heard Mars Hill Audio Journal’s host Ken Myers point out an astonishing word connection, I had to write about it. In the following quote, Myers is playing with the word ‘diabolical’, and he begins with diabolical’s surprising opposite: symbolical. He says,

[Diabolical and symbolical] both come from the greek verb ‘ballein’, ‘to throw’. We get our word ball from the same word. The preposition ‘syn’ or ‘sym’ means ‘together with’. The greek verb symbolo literally means ‘to throw together, to collect, to join or unite, or to come together’. The Christian Creeds were known as the symbols of faith, not merely in the sense that they represented the faith, but that they were a means by which Christians were united. 

The verb ‘diabolo’ by contrast means literally ‘to throw apart, to set at variance, to separate’. 

Myers points out that the sentences “the creeds unite Christians” and “the creeds symbolize Christians” are saying the same thing; the verbs unite and symbolize have the same meaning here.

Alexander Schmemann puts it this way,

The primary meaning of “symbol” is in no way equivalent to “illustration.” … today we understand the symbol as the representation or sign of an absent reality, (just as there is no real, actual water in the chemical symbol H2O), in the original understanding it is the manifestation and presence of the other reality — which, under given circumstances, cannot be manifested and made present in any other way than as a symbol.

Interesting, right? So symbolical means to unite; diabolical means to divide.  Can you hear it in El Diablo, diabolical, devil, even Satan? It’s all the same root word.

So let’s pretend we’re sixth graders and play with these words for a few minutes. Maybe some kind of tapestry of meaning will emerge.  

First, all of Reality emerges from the interlaced life of a Three-Personed God – there is an uncreated symbol at the very beginning: The Trinity. There is an Angel of Light who is created, and for a time, enjoys some kind of participation in the Life of the Trinity, but sets himself at variance to God in rebellion and is thrown out of heaven. He is renamed, El Diablo, the Devil.

God creates the Cosmos we know and live in. Cosmos is related to the word for cosmetics. Using cosmetics a woman may ‘order her appearance’, and when God cosmoses, he is ordering his creation into a meaningful, integrated wholeness. Just like we order letters into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, then paragraphs and on into stories that speak beautifully of the Author’s identity, God has lovingly knitted together created reality. It still bears his embedded intention, even though we’ve lost a lot of our skill at detecting it. So, all of Creation is a vast symbolic manifestation of God’s “invisible qualities”.  

Enter El Diablo, the Enemy of our souls, the diabolical agent and Lord of Chaos. From the moment the Lord said, “Let there be light”, the Devil’s way has ever been to contra-dict what God has dictated . Chaos is anti-cosmos, anti-symbolic. The Lord sends his creative word out, and El Diablo, works to deconstruct whatever structure the Lord builds – to destabilize whatever God establishes.

In contrast, Jesus is weaving a better story around us like a safety blanket. It’s a story that offers a symbolical reality; for people in a terrifying free-fall, Jesus has knotted together, along with his fisherman buddies, a net to catch you and set you down on solid ground. And when the storms come, and they will, his household will stand – because of what’s under-its-standing: his lovingkindness.

The story Jesus tells is symbolic, which by now you’ll realize doesn’t mean less-than-real, but rather that this story unites us with Reality. The story Jesus is telling makes wholeness available: makes the fear of chaos conquerable. Jesus offers to knit you together again like he did the first time in your mother’s womb. But this time, as he told Nicodemus, the new birth will be accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord, the Giver of Life – the same who brooded over the waters of chaos at the very genesis of the cosmos, like a momma bird waiting for the world to hatch.

God at Sinai rescues a rabble of slave tribes, and unites or symbolizes them into a nation-family. Our Father has sewn us into the soil of family, but the devil has snatched up the seed. Jesus has permanently joined himself to us in the symbolical act of Incarnation to re-member (as opposed to dis-member) humanity and all creation to the Life of the Trinity.   In Christ, he abolishes the diabolical division of the dividing wall of hostility between Jew, Gentile, Slave and Free, man and woman. The Lord tears the temple curtain that sin had diabolically raised to drive apart God and his Beloved.

In the end, humanity will be symbolized to God. Which is the same as saying, Jesus will be wedded to a Bride.  In contrast, the devil is always pulling at the threads, unraveling the fabric, isolating us, always and ever “putting asunder what God has joined together.”

But we have good reason to be courageous: a chosen Cornerstone has been laid, and upon it a new Symbol is being built – an Everlasting Family. God’s judgement will mend all things, stitching the stranded threads again into a seamless fabric.  

Meanwhile, Schmemann says, “In the symbol everything manifests the spiritual reality, but not everything pertaining to the spiritual reality appears embodied in the symbol. The symbol is always partial, always imperfect”. We look in a clouded mirror. For now, we live in the diabolical separation between God’s promised reality and our experience of brokenness. But heaven and earth too will be married one day. The gap between how things are and how they should be shall close, and we shall see him face to face.

Closing Poem: 

Dear Trinity, unbroken love

All our loves so broken long,

All things cry out in fractured song,

Together weep in splintered speech.

Water once that pooled in lakes

Collected calm across the world,

Fled vaporous beyond our reach;

Falls now discrete in droplets, cold.

We would stand near Fountain spray

And bathe in it our cracking tongues,

And where the fallen fruit once hung

Hear chaos healed in wholesome song.

Dear Uncreated Symbol, speak!

And send your Word to water us;

Oh, mend the diabolic breach,

And join us at your wedding feast!