Now for something completely different. There's a meme going around Facebook telling you to pull up Google and search for what you need (e.g. I entered "Sylvia needs"), and then post the top ten results. I am going one better; I am going to write about each of the results, completely divorced from their original context in the search engine. Here goes . . .

Sylvia needs something more than platitudes.

Sylvia needs something more than platitudes. It gradually happened. She stepped beyond the point in her life where the Baltimore Catechism was a choice form of theological reflection. Though she swore it would never happen, she began to understand what her father meant when he told her years ago that you can't look at everything in black and white--there are shades of grey. She starts to wonder how to resolve the reality of the black and white, a reality stretching above and beyond what is seen, with the experienced reality of the murky greyness. Sylvia was growing up.

Unfortunately, platitudes come in two varieties. The first kind of platitude is the combination of words you've heard before, the phrase so descriptively termed "hackneyed," for it has been hacked to pieces and its entrails of meaning spilt onto the roadway and left far behind. The second kind of platitude becomes one as soon as you say or write it. It's a fresh stale odor. Sylvia considers that her friend Nicole frowns when she, Sylvia, utters a new platitude. Nicole tries to find the meaning in the remark and fails, for there is none. Which is worse? It is not what is outside that defiles a man. Sylvia needs something more than platitudes to come out of her. She can easily avoid the trite; she has to struggle to avoid the empty.

Life has meaning. Sylvia knows it. You know it. That is why the deadly struggle against the banal must continue. Sylvia must avoid living her life by perusing a thesaurus. She has to know, deep down, what the specific word means. What the Word means. It's not enough to substitute someone else's knowledge. Sylvia needs something more than platitudes.