Aging & Wisdom Quote by Clifford Longley

Longley’s point lands with a journalist’s instinct for power: language isn’t just a vehicle for meaning, it’s a constraint on what power can plausibly claim. “They cannot make it say what they want it to say” is less nostalgia than a warning about capture. The “old language” (read: inherited liturgy, Scripture in established forms, the thick texture of traditional phrasing) functions like a hard drive of public memory. It resists today’s favorite trick: swapping in new words until the past conveniently endorses the present.

The subtext is a critique of institutional timidity. Churches, in this framing, aren’t merely worship spaces; they’re one of the last mass institutions that regularly rehearses a vocabulary older than the news cycle. Abandon that, and you don’t just lose aesthetic beauty, you lose a shared reference point sturdy enough to argue with. Longley’s “beginning and the end” compresses the whole case into a single civic function: preserving phrases that can’t be endlessly rebranded.

Contextually, this sits in the long argument over modernization - contemporary translations, inclusive or simplified language, “relevance” as a marketing imperative. Longley isn’t pretending old words are magically pure; he’s saying their very unfamiliarity can be protective. When a community keeps speaking in sentences it didn’t invent, it admits it is not sovereign over meaning. That is exactly what modern institutions, religious and secular, increasingly struggle to tolerate.

The sting is in the last line: if churches stop being custodians of difficult, inherited speech, who’s left to keep any of it alive - and who then gets to decide what our oldest claims “really meant”?