A new language for all

The Christian Science Monitor

Last year, ex-convict, ex-drug-addict, and ex-alcoholic Jimmy Santiago Baca won the prestigious American Book Award for his fifth book of poems. A man who never attended school in his life, he taught himself how to read and write while in an isolation cell at one of Arizona's maximum-security prisons. Of those former days he says, "I wanted to learn how to read and to write and to understand.... I wanted to know how to function in this world. Why was I so ignorant and deprived?

"The only way of transcending was through language and understanding."^{Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1989 .}

Those who have found a spiritual meaning to life would also feel that they have transcended ignorance through language and understanding. But the language they would be referring to is the language of spiritual truth, which transcends materiality and enables one to begin to understand divine Spirit, God, and man in God's spiritual image.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

A new language for all

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access