I am in love with words. All throughout college, this was my overused yet honest tagline in the student bios sections of newspapers, magazines and playbills. “Julia Chin is in love with words.” As a prose enthusiast, I’ve always been in awe of the sheer beauty and efficacy of language. Indeed, my English Ph.D. is largely a justification of just how much time I spend thinking about words and what they do. Yet after reflecting on today’s scriptures, I can’t help but think that the words I revere and research—those of Shakespeare, the Brontës and Woolf—could never hold a candle to God’s words.

One well known argument for language’s potency is the notion of the “speech act,” coined by J.L. Austin in his 1962 book, How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes that simply saying something does something. The famous example you can use to impress the resident philosopher or literary critic in your life is what happens in a marriage. When the priest says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” this speech has concrete and legal consequences. His words perform the action of marrying the couple. The same goes for juries who pronounce a defendant “not guilty.” Yet if such power is inherent in the words of humanity, how much more is possible in the words of God?

Thankfully, your linguistic research needs look no further than today’s Mass readings, which collectively offer several striking characterizations of speech both from and for God. In the first reading, for instance, the Lord says that in the same way that rains fall from heaven to water the Earth and give life to the harvest to be reaped, “So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). God’s word is greater than the speech act which leads to the action of marrying a couple or freeing a prisoner; God’s word is the action. It is the rain itself that gives life, the key that unlocks all doors, the Son whose love offers salvation.

Moreover, if the Word is a guaranteed enactor of change, how can we even begin to comprehend the power of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew’s Gospel, a prayer given by God the Son to be offered by the faithful to God the Father, who “knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8). In the way of prayerful instruction, the “Our Father” contains the only words Christ gives us verbatim; however, we sometimes find ourselves tempted to mumble through this ritualistic prayer at each Mass with a mindlessness that does an injustice to the words entrusted to us by God himself.

Perhaps this Lent then, we can approach the “Our Father” with renewed appreciation and attention to the words we “dare to say.” What does God’s will done on Earth as perfectly as it is in Heaven look like? Have we forgiven one another as wholeheartedly as we hope God will forgive us? Indeed, the Father knows what we need before we ask, but do we ourselves know what we need, what areas of our lives need grace, what hurts are in need of healing? If we don’t, perhaps it is time then that we quiet our idle tongues, and in the sacred silence, listen to God speak.