I do not know what that cloistered editorial board, Maria’s sisters, had in mind. We do not have their explicit thoughts. But I want to suggest that they might have re-cognized in Maria’s meditations the utter meaning that they so adamantly searched for elsewhere. That is, they hoped to create a text, a page, that in its re-citation – making the words audible again – would reveal God’s presence.

Maria is speaking in such a context, in such a particular way, that no document, not even a word-for-word transcription, could capture the transaction, for she intends no communication; for she intends the words to immediately and fully evaporate; for her utterances are divinely inspired and divinely expired. She needs the words to leave her mouth and then to have them leave entirely and completely. In silence, the Holy Ghost lingers.

•

I have tried to take the title of our conference – Living Literacies – seriously. I even acknowledge living as both adjective and verb. Maria Maddalena has been dead for nearly four hundred years. What can she possibly tell us? After such spectacular hospitality on the part of our hosts, I do not feel comfortable offering an example of dead or dying literacies. I resuscitate that long-dead Italian because I believe she speaks the word in the way, the only way, it could be spoken at certain moments – with the transcendent presence of The Other. Even her sisters, I believe, envied her. Maria reminds us of a time when people had the ability, the power, to speak words charged with ultimate meaning – when words reverberated with The Other.

I am not foolish enough to think that such a time can be recovered. But I do know that the door to The Other remains decidedly open for children, most of whom come into the world in love with sheer nonsense – with the thrill of making sounds – and move slowly, gradually, into more nuanced, mannered, and more understandable utterances. The propensity for the undiluted, penetrating remark, remains the privilege of the child. Children speak in disregard of any social filter. As adults, we are continually astonished at their comments. Where did she or he get that, we ask. Who taught this child that? No one, of course. The child speaks with a totally unauthorized mouth; and listens with fully authorized ears, for the weirdest of things – rhyme, sound, pitch, silliness, for funny stuff and friendly noises.