In my write mind

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Once upon a time in what seems like another lifetime, I was working on a doctorate in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. In those heady times, when we doctoral students discussed our dissertation topics, we often joked about what we called the mandatory dissertation hyphen. You see it in that book report title of Calvin's in the last panel.

The title for my own dissertation was "El aspirar del aire: The Transformation of the Human Person as Participation in the Life of the Trinity in the Cántico espiritual of Saint John of the Cross."

Oddly enough, in my humble opinion, that title expressed quite succinctly what I intended to prove in the dissertation. The little nicety of beginning with a brief phrase taken from the poem upon which John's treatise was based was just that -- a literary flair that enabled me to get in that mandatory hyphen. (The phrase means "the breathing of the air" and refers to the double spiration of the Holy Spirit within the inner life of the Triune God ... but I sense that you have lost interest already. Not surprisingly, so did my dissertation directors.)

At any rate, I discovered that when one lives in those exalted academic atmospheres, one not only begins to talk and write this way, one begins to understand other people who talk and wrote this way and -- here's the rub -- one begins to think that everyone can understand that language. At the end of my time in the monastery and for the year after, I worked for a Catholic nonprofit on the campus of the University of Chicago. We specialized in programs that reeked of mandatory hyphens. (We also made sure that we served hot food at all these programs so that students would show up. We weren't totally stupid.)

It reminds me of a story I heard in a course on how to preach.

A young man from a small church in the rural south had gone off to seminary, his expenses supplemented by generous donations from the poor people in his home congregation. After his elevation to the clerical state, he returned home to great acclaim and rose on the following Sunday, stepped into  the pulpit and began to declaim.

I don't recall if the story included what he said, but whatever it was, it fell into the mandatory hyphen category. As he waxed more and more eloquent and his images and terminology soared aloft, an old woman in the back of the assembly called out, "Lord, Lord, bless this brother of ours. And help him bring them cookies down to a lower shelf."