Let praises now awake the dawnWe’ll greet Your mercy with a songYour people stand and sing for all Your lovingkindnessYou’ve carried us in faithfulnessUpon the paths of righteousnessOur gracious KingYou’ve crowned us with Your lovingkindness
In fact, if you own a copy of The Elements of Style, just destroy the damned thing. It is a pestilential presence in your library. Most of the rules of style it contains are vacuous, arbitrary, or impossible to obey, and you are better off without them in your life. And the materials on grammar and usage are frequently something worse. Some of them are simply inherited fake rubrics—“however” must always be a postpositive, “which” must not be used for a restrictive relative clause, and other nonsense of that kind—all of which are belied by the whole canon of English literature. Others, however, are evidence of surprising ignorance. It is bad enough that the manual insists that one must on principle prefer the passive to the active voice; but it is far worse that it then adduces several supposed examples of sentences in the passive voice that are in fact nothing of the sort. One of them—“There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground”—seems to have been chosen simply because “lying” about sounds like a passive sort of thing to do. That neither Strunk nor White knew the difference between a passive construction and an active intransitive verb in the imperfect past tense—or, as the book also demonstrates, the difference between the passive and an active past perfect, or the difference between the passive and an adjectival past participle without an auxiliary verb—is genuinely shocking. It does, however, impart a useful lesson: never mistake a tone of authority for evidence of actual expertise.You can either agree or disagree with Hart, but his essay is a delight to read. Consider his defense of semicolons.
A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language’s miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality.I remember a piece of advice given during a writing workshop: write for a 12-year old. This, we were told, was the secret of success behind Times Magazine and Reader's Digest. The articles should be accessible to anyone. The advice made me uncomfortable. David Bentley Hart writes a searing and, once again, hilarious, rebuke:
Do not write down to what you presume to be the level of your readers (unless you are writing specifically for very small children). To do so is an injustice both to them and to you. Even if your suppositions regarding them are correct, you should do them the honor of assuming they know what you know, or can learn it, or are at least willing to try. True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs. Invariably they will blame the author rather than themselves. You owe them absolutely nothing. If you attempt always to descend to the lowest common denominator, you will never hit bottom, but you will certainly end up losing the interest of better readers. Ours is, sadly, an age of declining literacy and attention spans, and the situation grows worse by the year. You simply must not make any concessions to that reality, unless you are prepared in the end to give up on writing altogether.The essay ends with a celebration of language. This part is my favorite.
Language is magic. It is invocation and conjuration. With words, we summon the seas and the forests, the stars and distant galaxies, the past and the future and the fabulous, the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible. With words, we create worlds—in imagination, in the realm of ideas, in the arena of history. With words, we disclose things otherwise hidden, including even our inward selves. And so on. When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write.
You are invited to a Virtual Workshop!The Philippine College of Physicians in cooperation with the PCP Medical Humanities presents:Reflective Writing for Internist: A 55-Word Story Writing Flash Workshop (Session 5)When: 14 January 2023, Saturday @ 10:00 AMVia Zoom meetingsRegister for free:
I celebrate the start of the weekend by reading Dr. Elvie Razon-Gonzalez's poem, Toxic Positivity, which appears on her collection, Vignette of voyages by Kasingkasing Press. Her words take me to a quiet, meditative place.
Here's an excerpt.
I dream of letting the wind
accede to my whims, to take me
out of this disquietude
nestle in the warmth of the Alps
into her maternal expanse
that lead to praying hands.
When we ask Chandrika Desai how she stays connected to people, she has a hearty laugh. “It’s my personality,” she says. Desai is a jovial 74-year-old who epitomises how important social engagement could be. But like she tells us, passively becoming part of a group is not the only way to do it. You need to be active at your end, too. Every morning, Desai sits with a list. She has a large network of family and friends, and each morning she calls different people. “I make an effort to reach out,” says Desai who lives on her own, leads her own life but is deeply connected to her two children who live overseas.
While pursuing a PhD in Health and Social Psychology. Holt-Lunstad tried to find the answer to the question, do social relationships reduce our risk of dying early? Her study published in July 2010 showed that people with strong social relationships are 50 per cent less likely to die prematurely than people with weak social relationships. The impact of poor social connection on reducing lifespan is equal to the risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and a risk that’s greater than the risk of obesity, excess alcohol, and lack of exercise.
My mother, 66, is a great example. Despite being an introverted person, she has found a way to redeem her retirement days. She has a small social circle outside of family. She tends to these deep and lasting friendships. At 3 am each morning, she connects with her friends for Bible study and prayer through Facebook Messenger. She finds time to visit friends, funerals, and parties; attends Bible study in church on Friday afternoons; and do short walks, usually to Auntie Badid's property. Auntie Badid had a stroke last year.
These days, I've been thinking about how I'll be spending my days when I get older.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. — Ephesians 2: 4–10
Where do you find yourself today? Are you in a season of desperation or sadness? Or are you in an equally, if not more, vulnerable season of joy? What does worship look like for you? Is it loud and excitable like the song for today, or is it full of longing and wishing like the poetry reading for today? Is the season you are in inviting you to a posture like the images we are looking at? Or, is it moving you to your knees, or even a fetal position?
I ask (and will ask) myself the same question this year. I'm grateful to the Lord for so many things, and may the year 2023 be a year of worship and prayer.