Lumen de Lumine

The thought is the obligation to account for every idle word. Vaughan uses a bodily image of regulated appetite to describe restraint in controversy, while acknowledging the bitterness provoked by attack.

Reflective possibility: A reflective use can ask what disciplines a response when anger has a cause. Patience here does not require pretending that injury never occurred; it changes the proposed manner of answering it.

Read with patience and disclosure, noise and the still voice.

The Flying Scroll

“Do not trust it to the tongue, for that is a flying scroll.” — the address to the reader.

Source forms: Tongue, Flying Scroul.

The reader has been invited into a sealed house but is told to keep what is seen in the heart. The biblical image of a flying scroll gives speech movement and consequence. Disclosure transfers a responsibility as well as information.

Reflective possibility: A reflective application can ask how a received confidence should be handled. The text’s demand for secrecy can also be examined critically: a metaphor does not settle every present-day obligation to speak or remain silent.

Read with reserve, reflective reading.