Every morning, for the past seven days, I’ve had the same word pop into my head unbidden.

 Wallpaper.

That’s right. I’ve never been a particular fan of wallpaper, but after this week I don’t think I’ll be able to meet it without smiling. All the same I feel a little strange about our relationship.

It’s complicated.

It started with G. K. Chesterton. I listen to him at work sometimes, when I feel like something edfying and snarky. You can’t really beat Chesterton for snark, to the extent that I sometimes feel his points are being sacrificed to cleverness. But it makes his work the perfect stimulation needed for data entry, and his witty one-liners make pausing the recording to answer the phone painless, whereas long-winded, comma-heavy works tend to leave me feeling lost after the third or forth consecutive call. At any rate, in one of his random short essays he goes on a tangent, much like this one, and throws out to the world the admission he has a abiding abhorrence to gaudy wallpaper. “The Bible must be referring to wallpaper,” he says, “when it says ‘use not vain repetitions.'”

Now, the verse about vain repetition actually isn’t aimed at wallpaper but at wordy prayers. A point which I have had drilled into me all this past week, as my Bible study has been looking at Matthew 6.

 “And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words”

        Matthew 6:7

So every morning, for the past week, I have come downstairs and read this verse and thought “wallpaper.”

It has been a little distracting.

It works well as a picture though, in that if your words are indistinguishable from background noise you might want to rethink them. Still, I was trying to find another analogy for “vain repetition,” since wallpaper seemed a little too hard to explain in a group setting, especially one where outside sources are banned. I still haven’t found one easier to explain than wallpaper, but in the process of trying I remembered that quite a few anime include prayers. Not just short “I wish X ” ones either, but formal, semi-spell like petitions. Naturally, being anime, most of these prayers are heavily stylized chants, drawn originally from shinto or buddhist traditions. Since I am using language study as my main reason for watching anime, coming across one of these prayers is always a little vexing because the subbers refuse to translate them. Sometimes they will go so far as to put the romanji – the English representation of the Japanese sounds – on the bottom of the screen, but they won’t bother conveying the meaning. There are two possible reasons for this that I have come up with. One is that the translators have no idea what is being said because it’s some ancient form of Japanese that pre-dates King James. The other is that the prayers really are just mumble jumbo words, like “hocus-pocus,” and everybody is supposed to recognize them as a powerful spell or chant and leave it at that.

In either case, whether it is the fault of the subber or the intent of the writers, what the people are saying in their prayers becomes unimportant. Their words become merely tools. Hammers and nails which produce a quantifuable result. The meaning behind them fading each time the incantation is repeated. Obviously, for words spoken by made-up people in a made-up world, this is doubly so. But I can think of too many times recently when the words that I myself have said have merely been symbols. Tools meant to get from point A to point B.

“How are you today?”

“How can I help?”

“Sorry.”

 If I can remember them you know it must mean I’ve said it in the past week, because my memory doesn’t really extend much farther back then that.

Now, I don’t think every wall in a house has to have a great piece of art on it, nor does everything I say need to be of such importance that people wouldn’t be able to follow the plot of my life unless it were translated, but I do appreciate the reminder that  – whether it be a wall in your house, or your day-to-day interactions with God and people – you should be mindful of how you are using filler.

And if we must use wallpaper, please, let’s not pick something like this.