you can't live without them.

Clichés are interesting things: you can't have your cake and eat it too; hindsight is twenty-twenty; the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. These are all phrases that at one time were profound; I guess when they were first uttered. But then, probably because of the novelty of the new phrase, they were endlessly repeated until people forgot that they were profound at all. They are statements that were once spoken with passion because they described the world as it was experienced. Then, with the excitement that usually follows true articulations of the world, they were eagerly spoken again and again and again. But, somehow, with each time the statement was conjured, it lost a little of its power, its novelty, its profundity. Perhaps this happened because truth just grows dull in reptition, but more likely it is because people began to speak the words insincerely and without any reverence for its truth. Thus, for some, it became a default expression for the given situation and the authentic passion that should accompany these accurate articulations was diminished. The words are now spoken with a sense of sarcasm and the world laughs at them as though they are out-grown. But it is my submission that it is the cliché phrases that often have to be grown into. Let me give you an example:

It was a typical late-night discussion with one of my roommates in The Blue House. We talked about our usual stuff: politics, theology, and especially women. It was about the time in the conversation that we would get up from our worn-out bachelor-pad sofas and go to Dara’s for slushies and Laffy Taffy when a particular cliché ran through my head: "Women. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them." This particular package of words had been heard plenty of times prior to this evening, yet this time it was different. I felt the pull between the sheer pain of maintaining a relationship and the aching hole left in a life lived alone. The words had finally taken root in their original context and they hit my chest as if I had just discovered the New World. I turned to my friend and looked at him with squinted eyes, letting him know I had something profound to say. I tried to let him in on this new discovery. "Dude!" I half yelled, half whispered, "Women, you know? It's like you can't live with them, but you can't live without them." The words fell on him as they had me so often in the past. He was uninterested in the cliché—the washed out expression that time and repetition had belittled. I do not blame my friend, for as I said, these clichés must be grown into. They must find their context in our experience before they can ever speak to us. I say this because I want to restore a respect for these clichés whose meanings have been lost in the years of repetition. They should be viewed as words that have endured the test of time; they have proved themselves as important pieces of our language and essential articulations of our shared experience as humans. In short, their over-exposure should not negate their profundity, it should attest to it.

In this way, I think clichés are a lot like Christianity in America. You see, people feel the same way about Christianity as they do about these clichés, and for good reason. It is played-out, unoriginal, and often lacking in depth. They have heard it before, in fact, they have heard it too many times. And even though its history of martyrdom shows that it was a powerful articulation of the way things are, the dispassionate repetition of it today makes it seem empty, shrill, and grating on the ears. In America, it is not the religion that people sing about as they are being burned alive; instead, it is the religion that is on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and Wal-Mart check-out lines. Christianity in America has become the most obnoxious cliché. But it is here that I want to remind you that the over-exposure does not negate its profundity. Christianity continues to endure simply because there are people who one day just get it. The washed-out phrases like, “Jesus loves me,” all of a sudden take root in the human experience and they smack the chest with the weight of their significance. Christianity continues because people who had been searching for the right words all their life one day find that it is the obnoxious cliché that says it best.