Say the Word

Say the word and you'll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I'm thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?
It's so fine, it's sunshine
It's the word, love.
- The Beatles

Love is a great word. It rolls off the tongue rather nicely. Try elongating the L. Try saying it really short and crisp. Try singing it. Try saying it while plugging your nose and standing on your head. You can't make it sound bad. But it doesn't mean anything if we don't know what it means, if we haven't experienced it. The word love communicates the experience of love. So without the experience the word would be meaningless. We place a lot of value on words. They get us through college, they get us jobs, they help us build relationships, and if you are in a Cyber relationship, then they form the foundation of your relationship. I remember a movie whose name currently escapes me in which the protagonist sold his soul to the devil after the latter told the man that all he had to do was give the devil his word. The devil made "wordS" sound trivial, but the theme of the movie was clearly that they are our most powerful tool. As a potential journalist, I ironically disagree.
Words are not necessary, they are only useful. They are luxuries. The only tools that are necessary are those that allow us to arrive at the truth of life, at the essence of life. I want to say that these are the mind, body, and soul, but they might not even include all of these. The soul allows us to conceive of the truth, the mind allwos us to ponder it, and the body allows us to experience it. In Conversations With God, the author categorized words as "mere utterances." He enlisted the argument that we all too often emphasize the "Word of God over the Experience of God." We think we know what he is all about, what he said and did because we have it documented on paper or have heard it via word of mouth, so when our experience introduces us to some phenomenon that isn't literally what we know as being the Word of God, we don't accept it. We think it is blasphemy.
Don't get me wrong, I love words. They are beautiful, profound, profane, and useful, but they are only one form of communicatiion because they are severely limited in that they can only attempt to convey a feeling or an experience.

"Say the word, Love," go ahead, but don't expect the conceptual idea of it that words offer us to act as a substitute for the experiential reality of it.