Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation … and Grace

Misused apostrophes added unnecessarily to plurals or added (or forgotten) with possessives … to use a serial comma or not … should this be a colon or semicolon … does a comma or period go inside the quotation marks or outside?

Verb tenses, definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, noun-verb agreement ….

Homophones (their, there, they’re … hear, here … right, write, rite) and so forth ….

This sort of thing drives me crazy as I write for “immediate publication,” which is essentially what blog writing is. Apparently I do not type what I think. Maybe I should retitle this blog “What am I TYPING this morning?” We would all be surprised, I’m sure! I know I am surprised when I re-read what I’ve published here. I find all of the issues above-mentioned and more when I do so. So there’s this constant process of correct, hit the update button, read again, correct, hit the update button, read again … and on and on it goes. (Especially transliterating the archaic Irish script of Dantá Dé into modern Latin lettering! I read and re-read, compare to the original, re-type, then do it again, and again, and still I find more things to correct.)

So, dear readers, I beg your indulgence. If you read a sentence that doesn’t make sense, read it again and figure out what’s missing. A helping verb, a preposition, a conjunction, something will make it good. I trust you to supply the correction … and to check back later and see if I’ve supplied something else!

A story …

When I was in seminary a good friend (a retired priest in my home parish) died, so I went to the seminary chapel and added his name to the prayer list for that day’s Evening Prayer service. The list asked us to include our name as requester and indicate our relationship to the person being remembered. Our officiant that evening was a commuter student who didn’t know all of the dormitory residents … and apparently in my grief or haste I did not write very legibly. So when the list of those for whose souls reposed was prayed came around, she prayed for “Father Hunt Parsons, friend of Ernie Funston.” Of course, there were sniggers and a few outright guffaws in the congregation.

Leaving the chapel at the conclusion of the service, Dr. Guy Lytle, who taught Anglicanism and church history, happened to go out the door beside me. He took me by the arm and said, “Don’t worry. God has spell-check on prayers.”

Since then I’ve come to regard that as a metaphor for God’s grace … God has spell-check on our lives! Like the automatic spell-checker in our word processers, God quietly and efficiently corrects (or simply chooses to overlook) the errors we commit.

And we are called to have spell-check (and grammar-check and gentle proofreading) for one anothers (another’s? anothers’?) lives.

So “grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ!”