Here is the time for the Sayable, Here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
The Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
ranier maria rilke

I read those lines in a World Lit 312, a laugh of a class that changed my life. Not drastically, and not until these days of late. Sure, I named this page after a line from the same poem: Perhaps we are here in order to say: house/bridge, fountain, gate... a different translation from the original German, but you get the idea.

I have been trying to decide for the past few weeks whether 2009 will be the year of Jubilee or the year of the Sayable. I haven't decided and it may be both when I am looking over my shoulder from 2010, but here is the time for the Sayable. Now is the time for speaking things that are not as though they are. Not to wield some heavy incantation over impossibilities, but to convince myself that God has set things right.

Romans 10.9 says "With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: "God has set everything right between him and me!"

I am not one for the sayables. The right out loud idea frightens me. Somehow saying means hoping and hoping means being disappointed and disappointment means my faith is weakened, not stregthened and I need all the strength I can muster up. I sit tonight and stare across the kitchen island and say to her, why do we bother saying what we want at all? Wouldn't it be easier to just go on pretending that things are fine just as they are, that living here is exactly where I want to be, that working there is exactly where I want to work, that waking here is exactly where I want to wake?

The truth is that it would be easier, but it wouldn't be embracing God setting things right and saying it out loud. It wouldn't be believing with our hearts and confessing with our mouths that He is Lord.

I'm stumbling around on that a lot recently, to be honest. I'm a private sort of believer. I keep the bigger believing to myself. The God Has Set Everything Right sort of belief is bigger than the God Is or God Will because the latter assume that He messed it up and is scrambling to set it right before we notice.

Thank you, God, we've noticed. Now what are you going to do?

And that's what I catch on tonight, driving home from home. He Has set it. He HAS. This great plan of Hope and a Future and real, abundant life is poised for action and only needs the Sayable to usher it into motion. The Our Father, the Open the Eyes of my Heart, the Lead Me By Still Waters. And that's on us. That's on me.

So 2009 will be a year of the Sayable. Perhaps the unsayable sometimes, or the unsaid, or the missaid or the misunderstood, but said. God help me to speak, to say.