The Word of God

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Wow, that has got to be the coolest bible verse I've come across in a long while!

It's very interesting that the Word of God does away with our usual perceptions of interior self and exterior world. Normally, we imagine that we are effected by things outside of ourselves: the sun shines on me, the wall is near me, the water feels cold on my skin. Our ordinary experiences take place on the exterior, through our senses. But Hebrews suggests that the Word of God works in a totally different way. It's still possible to interact with it as we might expect, by reading or hearing, but the Word also engages itself within us in a very deep and particular way.

It doesn't sound very comfortable, this business about the Word working itself under our skin like a sword slicing the joint and marrow of the bone apart... it's a deep and fundamental carving out of a person. But perhaps it's related to Father Gary's homily on the Conversion of St. Paul a few weeks ago. He talked about the way "conversion often feels a like a breakdown," and so perhaps when the Word works on us, it feels as though it's breaking us apart.

The Word burrows itself in, and suddenly we've got a bunch of exposed nerves: our souls are not synonymous with our spirits, the thoughts of our hearts are not the intentions of our hearts, and thus we become fully human and fully awake.

~Stephanie