By Gary Topping–
My wife Marianna and I met in the fall of 1991 when we were both hired to teach at Salt Lake Community College, she in the writing program and I in history. For the first few months there were weekly workshops for new faculty, so we saw quite a bit of each other and became friends. We also began seeing each other at the Cathedral of the Madeleine where we were both parishioners, so our shared Catholicism was another bond. We didn’t start dating for several years, but when we did, we quickly discovered that one of our deepest bonds was our mutual love for the English language. Marianna is an expert grammarian of encyclopedic knowledge who often, to my great benefit, corrects my gaffes and makes me look like a much better writer than I am. More to the point, we take delight in finding a vivid new word, a deft metaphor or a clever turn of phrase.
There’s a downside to this, because I get very impatient with clichés, mangled metaphors, and other things that deaden, rather than enliven, the language. (Marianna is much more mellow about stuff like this than I am.) Ever hear anyone use “impact,” when they mean only “effect” or “affect,” depending on whether they are using it as a noun or a verb? And the next time I hear someone talking about “kicking the can down the road,” I’m going to reach for a shotgun (in a spirit of Christian love, of course). I could extend a long ways the list of things that bug me, but a rant like that would jeopardize my license to blog at The Boy Monk. So I return to my point.
I read a lot more than Marianna does, so most of the discoveries come from me, and I love to see that most beautiful of all smiles burst out when I share them with her. But the most recent discovery comes from her. She has a phone app called “dictionary.com” where she gets a new word every day. The current one is “salvific,” which the app defines as “of or relating to redemptive power.” She—and I—found particularly striking the two usage examples provided with the definition. The first is from Walker Percy, who says that “the naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art.” (If you’re like me, you might have to think about that one a bit, but do it; it’s worthwhile.) The other is from a reporter named Colin Moynihan, who wrote in the New York Times that “when you idealize financial markets as salvific you embrace the idea that profit is all that matters.”
As a very amateur student of religion and theology, I have been unaccustomed to think of anything as salvific but religion. But now that Marianna brings it up, I realize that there are sound theological and scriptural reasons for seeing salvific elements in all kinds of things. I immediately thought of St. Paul’s much-quoted admonition (Philippians 4:8 RSV) that “whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Why? Because they are salvific!
