“Courageous speech has always held us in awe. From the first time we spoke back to our parents as angry, stuttering teens, or had to stand tongue-tied before a roomful of people, feeling naked as the day we were born. There is, after all, something bare and revealing about speech. Perhaps because we intuit the physical intimacy behind the sound of words and the way they are spoken, and that much against our wishes our words tell the listener a good deal more than we would have them know about us.
The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world. It carries our experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the future, and the emotional resonance of the moment. If it carries none of these, it must be a masked voice, and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows intuitively we are not all there. Whether or not we try to tell the truth, the very act of speech is courageous because no matter what we say, we are revealed…”
And that’s the memo.
By David Whyte from The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
P.S. That says a lot about how we live out our Christian faith, although it was in a secular context.
