Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

My three ABC books -- Wishful Thinking (1973), Peculiar Treasures (1979), and Whistling in the Dark (1988) -- have been in print for so long now that I'm encouraged to think there continue to be people who find them useful and might find them more useful still if combined into a single handy volume. So that is what I have done here -- tweaking some of the original entries a little and adding enough new ones to bring the grand total up to 366 in the hope that maybe a word a day will help keep the demons at bay.

In Wishful Thinking, the words I dealt with were mostly religious words like God, sin, salvation, repentance, and in that book I was as much concerned to show what they don't mean as what I think they do. I made no attempt to define them in any comprehensive, scholarly way, but to show how much less boring, banal, and irrelevant they are than the way they all too often sound in church or Sunday school or on the lips of some televangelistic vaudevillian. I tried to suggest something of the true richness and vitality of the realities they point to. I tried to have some fun with them.

In Whistling in the Dark, I turned to just plain, everyday words like good-bye, marriage, animals, and remember in the effort to show that they too have a religious dimension and that, just like the plain, everyday events of our lives, speak to us of holy things if we have our eyes and ears open. It is less a theological ABC like its predecessor than an ABC theologized.

Peculiar Treasures deals not with words, but with biblical characters all the way from Aaron to Zaccheus. Far from the moral exemplars and stained-glass superstars they are usually taken to be, they are just such a conglomeration of saints and scoundrels, oddballs and screwballs, apostles and apostates, as we are ourselves, so that to look at them as they move through the pages of Scripture is not unlike looking into a mirror.

I have called the collection Beyond Words because in one way or another all the words it contains point to the realm of mystery and depth that lies beyond our ordinary experience and thus could be called beyond-words. To say something is beyond words is also to say that it is beyond the power of even beyond-words to convey adequately. Beethoven's last string quartets, falling in love, the of a friend -- how can we possibly describe such things other than to say that they are ultimately indescribable? You can know them only by experiencing them for yourself, and maybe that is the final message of a gallimaufry like this: Be alive to your life! Observe! Pay attention!