Back to speech. (Rereading things you write so often leads to new, or forgotten, thoughts. Here are a few regarding speech.) The missing ingredient, though not directly related to the ones already mentioned, to fully seeing the power of speech for what it is lies in a simple observation: speech is the one of the few things humans can do without physically touching another to directly affect others.

When looking at the basic senses, we can notice how speech, particularly the sense of hearing, is more powerful than any of the other senses. Touching, scents and tastes can have an effect on others, but you basically have to have immediate physical contact with them in order to use these senses to communicate. Sight and hearing are the only senses that don't require great proximity to be effective in communicating (or affecting) others. Yet, between the two, hearing has more power of the two.

There are currently some interesting developments in the fringe cultures of academia and the new edge trying to validate what Bible readers have been able to get for millenia: words are amazingly power things! In an article discussing Masura Emoto's work with water and speech, Ralph Suddoth explores the well-documented water experiments of Dr. Emoto's work. The photograph below shows an example of speech's effects on water with the image on the left being spoken to using the word "soul" while the one on the right used the word "demon".



Now, I'm not trying to expose New Age or metaphysical thought as something I encourage or endorse; I don't. Rather, I am using their pioneering work to demonstrate that the power of speech is greatly overlooked because we, as a whole, are trained to focus on using sight as the dominant sense. Speech and speech alone has the ability, because it intelligent sound, to effect physical matter, and, as a result, our bodies and the environment around us.

It is easy to try and bring color and light, leading to the sense of sight, into the mix and say that color therapy offers similar powers, but I have yet to see demonstrative results of how sight-or more precisely, how we can affect others with light through the sense of sight-can be as powerful as speech.

Essentially, it boils down to the fact that speech is truly a mixture of intelligence and sound. Intelligence is what organizes and vivifies sound, which would otherwise be chaotic sensory data, bunched together communicating like Shakespeare's monkies. It is intelligence that makes speech differ from all the other sensory manifestations of power, and it is speech that allows us to transform the world. God calls prophets to proclaim, to speak forth and share his Word. Indeed, his good news is called the Word. In a world where we are asking to see more, look here, listen up, God's trying to tell us something. So, listen!

(The whole discussion of intelligence is something to be saved for another night cause I want to touch on the Thomistic idea of intelligences and how we have lost this in today's understanding. We get wrapped up in the numbers game of SAT and IQ forgetting intelligence is much more than the perverted measure we have forced on it to create an economy of intellectual goods called human minds. But, I'll quit my rant before I start!)

To me it is amazing how people overlook the power of speech. Day after day most people float through life with little physical contact with others. Aside from family, intimate friends and children, most Americans have little physical contact with others. To get others to understand them, do what they want or simply be affected by their presence, most people use speech as the medium of choice. Yet, we overlook the most commonly used method of affecting others as simple noises! It's anything but. Christianity, it is time to realize the power of speech and use it as God intended.