Tongues Carve Our Gods

We pray for fifteen minutes but lie in perfect grammar the rest of the day.


Fifteen minutes......that is all it takes for us to enact religion each day. We bow our heads before mute idols, murmur archaic hymns, fold our hands with perfunctory piety, convinced that these fleeting genuflections will purchase us redemption. 
But what of the remaining twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes? That vast dominion belongs to language.
It is language that procures our daily bread from weary vendors beneath dilapidated awnings, pleads our causes in sepulchral courtrooms, seduces and betrays within silent chambers, composes elegies for our departed and nocturnes for our restless progeny. 
Without language, prayer is naught but the stirring of vacuous breath within a shadowed room. scripture becomes mere pulp pressed into forgotten pages. Even silence remains an unformed abyss until language arrives to consecrate it with a name.
We flatter ourselves that faith defines us. Yet long before gods ascended from clay or thunder, language had already chiselled our identities. We kneel to gods for fifteen minutes, but for twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes, we kneel to words ....words we burnish to survive quotidian indignities, words we spill to confess clandestine ardours, words we bury when grief threatens to annihilate us. Words with which we herald our arrival, words with which we sanctify our departure.
Religion is but an interlude in this ceaseless opera of language. For gods themselves, unspoken, unnamed, uninvoked, would dissipate into oblivion. without words, there is no heaven, no hymn, no redemption  only the mute terror of a nameless void.
Pray, if it steadies your trembling dawn. But know this: it is language that will bear your prayer beyond your breast, your truths beyond this hour, your name beyond your vanishing breath. For man does not live by gods alone. He lives by words. Perhaps the final god is the silent grammar binding together the shattered fragments of his mortal self.




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