The story of how the Word of God came to redeem man begins not with speech but with silence.

Lancelot Andrewes seized upon this paradox of the Infinite becoming an infant—𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑏𝑢𝑚 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑎𝑛𝑠, the Latin 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑎𝑛𝑠 meaning ‘without speech’—when he exclaimed with astonishment, “The Word without a word!”

T.S. Eliot, as was his habit, borrowed and developed this phrase from his favorite of the Anglican divines in “Ash Wednesday.”

In “Ash Wednesday” it is though Eliot’s “Hollow Men” had crawled with rat’s feet in some other dry cellar, and stumbled upon a manger. Expecting to find it, like everything else, empty; found instead a wordless infant speaking stability and coherence, speaking salvation.

The wordless Word becomes the unmovable axis at the center of the turning world without whose presence there could be no cohesion at all.

“...the instilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent word.”