Meaningful Words

“I first met Lorem Ipsum when I went to work for a publishing company,” said an employee. “In fact, I saw Lorem almost every day. But despite spending so much time together, I never got to know Lorem well because she never had anything to say.”

Hearing that, some of you may be picturing this person working beside a tight-lipped colleague, and you might be wondering how someone could go to work day after day without ever saying anything at all and still retain the job. But, in fact, it was Ipsum’s very absence of speech that made Ipsum so useful in that publishing company, especially in the page-design department.

Okay, maybe you’re starting to figure out that Lorem Ipsum isn’t a person at all. It’s the name for dummy text used in the printing and publishing industry as a placeholder on a page where it is later replaced with actual written content. Lorem Ipsum is called that because those are the first two words in the industry’s standard placeholder text, which has been used since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type-specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting.

Lorem Ipsum is used by page designers when creating a proposed layout for a page to show to whoever commissioned it. At that point, the artist wants the viewer to focus on the visual mockup, not the words. There needs to be some text to show where the actual content will be, but a viewer will be distracted by readable content, so the designer inserts dummy text instead.

Of course, “Content here, content here,” repeated over and over, could be used, but Lorem Ipsum has a more normal looking distribution of letters and word lengths. The Lorem Ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.

So, “words” that communicate nothing have a place. They are meaningless, but they give us something to look at.

Perhaps Lorem Ipsum best illustrates the old saying our mothers taught us: “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” You may recall that maxim when you see certain comments posted on social media or at the end of online articles where readers spout their opinions, or even while hearing a person taking glee in verbally skewering someone.

But some of us prefer the advice of Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

But is saying nothing the only solution we can come up with when fighting the urge to dish the dirt on someone?

Consider today’s Epistle to the Ephesians, where Paul states some principles for how Christians should talk. Verse 29 could be referring to the Lorem Ipsum approach – “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths” – but it doesn’t stop there, for Paul adds that we should speak “what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.”

Paul made that statement directly about speech, but he wrote it in the context of one’s attitude and spirit: “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Our words and our conduct are the most audible and visible expressions of the faith we profess, and they are also matters that other people view as evidence that we really do try to follow Christ – or that we don’t.

While here in Ephesians Paul speaks of what Christians should “put away,” in his letter to the Colossians he writes about what Christians should “put on”: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Colossians 3:12).

“Put away” and “put on” make it sound like exchanging our vices for virtues is as simple as changing our clothes, but of course, that’s not the case. It’s certainly possible that those of us who do not find peaceable virtues coming naturally can make an effort to “put them on.” While there is room for “fake it until you make it,” Paul was not referring to merely pretending to be kind and patient.

No, these kinds of changes begin through prayer. The impatient person who prays, sincerely, “Lord, help me to be more patient,” may never become the patience-model of the county, but he or she will move in the direction of more patience – simply because it is a topic of prayer. Likewise, the stingy person who sincerely prays, “Lord, make me more generous,” is going to find their heart opening more. And the foulmouthed person who prays, “Lord, help me guard my tongue,” is going to move in that direction.

The notion that we can put on Christian demeanor and speech like clothing also gives us some direction for those times when our Christian attire becomes embarrassingly threadbare. Prayer is the mall where we shop for new spiritual clothes. Prayer is where we can say, “Lord, my kindness shirt is tattered and torn. Please give me a new one.”

There’s a legend about the famous Polish composer-pianist, Ignacy Paderewski (1860-1941).

It refers to one of Paderewski’s concert tours in America. Present in the audience one evening was a mother with her 9-year-old son. The mother hoped that seeing and hearing Paderewski at the keyboard would encourage him to practice the piano himself. So, against the boy’s wishes, he had come. But growing weary of waiting for the performance to begin, he squirmed in his seat.

As the mother turned to talk with friends, her son slipped away from her side, drawn to the ebony concert grand Steinway piano and its leather tufted stool on the stage. Without much notice from the audience, the boy sat down at the stool, placed his fingers on the keyboard and began to play “Chopsticks.” The crowd suddenly went silent as hundreds of frowning faces turned in his direction. Someone yelled, “Get that boy away from there!” and others shouted their disapproval.

Backstage, Paderewski overheard the sounds and quickly moved onto the stage. Saying nothing, he stooped over behind the boy, reached around both sides, and began to improvise a countermelody to harmonize with “Chopsticks.” As the two of them played together before the now fascinated crowd, Paderewski whispered in the boy’s ear, “Keep going. Don’t quit, son. Keep on playing.”

And so it is with us. We hammer away on our project to speak virtuously and live a holy life, and sometimes it seems we do no better than a 9-year-old pounding away at “Chopsticks.” And about the time we conclude we’ll never get it right, along comes Jesus, who leans over and whispers: “Keep going; don’t quit. Keep on going.” And his touch, added to our effort, turns the whole performance into something that can bless those around us.