Today’s find: Aphasia

It’s hard to put into words, what we saw…what we shared…in our scripture study on Saturday.

It’s hard to put into words. And that’s largely the point: how words work. What a gift words are, what a mystery they are. How, in the end (and in the beginning), words reveal God’s presence. God’s desire for relationship.

So anyway, here’s what happened: One of our long-time members returned after a long absence – many months away from our regular weekly gathering. Jim was quiet at the start, but I didn’t think much of it. Jim is pretty much always quiet.

We were eight, maybe ten minutes in to our small group discussion when Jim spoke. “I think I can do this,” he said. And then he began reading aloud the scripture passage from Nehemiah we hear proclaimed at Mass today. He just jumped right in, started speaking – and we didn’t realize until later that we were witnessing a breakthrough in that moment.

Jim was returning from exile. He had been wandering for many months in a wordless desert, exiled there by aphasia following a stroke. Only it’s not a “wordless” desert, not exactly: The damage to Jim’s brain hadn’t erased the words he’d spent a lifetime accumulating; rather, it had made them almost impossible to assemble, to articulate. Jim had spent many months wanting to speak, but found that he could not.

Not until yesterday. Spreading the hand-out sheet on the table in front of him, something seemed to click. “I think I can do this,” Jim said. And then he shared with us the story of Ezra, returning from exile, reading aloud from “the book from daybreak to midday, in the presence of the men, the women and those children old enough to understand.”

All the people wept, we’re told, when they heard Ezra proclaim the Word of God in that assembly long ago. And I think maybe a few of us followed suit yesterday as Jim stood in for Ezra, in our midst. 

“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus says, perhaps not-all-so-coincidentally, in Sunday’s Gospel reading. And we are moved to ponder how the Word is present, the Word is active. Indeed, how the Word is gift, profoundly so. And how it may take a triumph over aphasia for us to fully appreciate the miracle of the Word in our lives.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS