“This is a risky age, a troubled time”.

The Lectionary Readings for New Years day include Psalm 8, with its poignantly surprised question, 'what are human beings that you care for them?' In a world that has so many suffering places, and where some of them, like Gaza and Israel, Zimbabwe and Congo, are places where it is other human beings who give occasion for the suffering of others – the question 'what are human beings', takes on theological urgency.

Violence is caused by the breakdown of dialogue – it thrives on the willingness to treat the other person as less than a human being. To do violence is to deny the God instilled glory of each human life. It is to stop speaking until only the voice of the strongest can be heard, because the other has been forcibly silenced. The correlation between manufactured human suffering and mutual wordless enmity is both obvious and tragic. Language enables a meeting of minds, hearts, wills and ultimately of people – but language also accuses, provokes, encases the hated other in rhetoric, and defines the speaker as the righteously and legitimately enraged.

Elizabethg Jennings poem For the Times, goes back to that line in Psalm 8, at least in its recognition of the breathtaking wonder that is a human being – and thus points us to language, that most human of gifts, as one of the life or death issues in our personal, local, national and international politics. If there is a Christian ethic of language, then Jennings' poem gives strong hints at the framework within which such an ethic operates – risk and trust, peaceableness and anger, fear and love, and the insistence of Psalm 8 on the glory and tragedy of human being, and the precious premium God puts on each uniquely created human being.

For the Times
I must go back to the start and to the source,
Risk and relish, trust my language too,
For there are messages which need strong powers.
I tell their tale but rhythm rings them true.

This is a risky age, a troubled time.
Angry language will not help. I seek
Intensity of music in each rhyme,
Each rhythm. Don't you hear the world's heart break?

You must, then, listen, meditate before
You act. Injustices increase each day
And always they are leading to a war

And it is ours however far away.
Language must leap to love and carry fear
And when most grave yet show us how to play.