What’s standing between you and heaven: a comma, colon or semi-colon

I am a punctuation/grammar geek. Not in a judgemental way but in a slightly scary way of someone who probably collects coconut heads. I wasn’t always like this. I couldn’t comprehend grammar until 1) the second year of French and 2) my senior English teacher, Mrs. Hill, gave us an assignment to write 10 sentences with 10 different comma elements:

participial phrases
gerund phrases
prepositional phrases
dependent clauses
verbal phrases
transitional words
transitional phrases
interjections
between main clauses
in a list

Do my boys love grammar? No! They torment me – with either blonde jokes, a woman’s place jokes, or mauling grammar with ain’ts, double negatives and so-wrong verb tenses. This language-loving mama is surrounded by language mal-contents rebelling with every and, but, or, for, so, nor, and yet.

No longer having a classroom of college students captured for an hour to listen to my spirited presentation of comma, semi-colon and coordinating/subordinating conjunction usage has left me in a grammar/punctuation discussion famine.

Until I happened to Way Station One, Brian’s blog.  He’s a poet, a blogger and raising sons – and he had this awesome line that just begged. . . . for a rousing dinner table discussion of grammar. Let me be clear here – Brian did not misuse in any way punctuation, even in a purist’s sense of grammar.

However, for a girl who spent one assignment in graduate school analyzing character via passive and active verb usage – the meaning of comma, the meaning of colon, the meaning of semi-colon in reference to life’s great meaning – well, it was just too irresistible to this grammar/punctuation geek who needs a good editor.

“death is just a comma, not a period
in consecutive life sentences,”
Brian at Way Station One: “Poetics: resurrection/man”

To understand where I am coming from, here are my definitions of the punctuation involved in this rousing discussion (if I say rousing discussion often enough, you might start to believe it whether you want to or not).

Comma: a pausing between sentence parts, to clarify meaning, or to separate items in a list in order to prevent confusion

Semi-colon: A semi-colon equals a period. The difference, though, is while sentences with periods build on each other, one idea leading to the next sentence, a semi-colon infers a “WAIT A MINUTE. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE IDEA COMING UP NEXT.”  Complete sentence ideas separated by a semi-colon denote a very close cause/effect relationship. Ignoring the nuance differences between a period and semi-colon leads to over-use of the semi-colon creating a reading experience comparable to driving down the interstate and every 5 minutes needing to stop at a traffic light. The purpose of the traffic light (semi-colon) becomes diminished and irritating.

Colon: The colon is the most often mis-used in a list. The sentence using a colon in a list should look like this: complete sentence + colon + list. Just like what I wrote. However, when using a colon as a period, well, that’s a pretty dicey thing to do. It’s denotes a rare closeness, like a single egg splitting into two lives, or maybe conjoined twins where one cannot exist without the other.

Just in case you forgot the lines of Brian’s poem:

“death is just a comma, not a period
in consecutive life sentences,”
Brian at Way Station One: “Poetics: resurrection/man”

The comma here in reference to death reminds me of Peter Marshall’s explanation of what it is like to die in a story:

“Kenneth,” she said as she returned to the next room, “you remember when you were a tiny boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you would be too tired even to undress, and you would tumble into mother’s bed and fall asleep? That was not your bed…it was not where you belonged. And you stayed there only a little while. In the morning, much to your surprise, you would wake up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because someone had loved you and taken care of you. Your father had come—with big strong arms—and carried you away. Kenneth, death is just like that. We just wake up some morning to find ourselves in the other room—our own room where we belong—because the Lord Jesus loved us.”(A Man Called Peter, Catherine Marshall).

Marshall’s definition of death matches Brian’s comma analogy.

Maybe, though, death is like a semi-colon, too. A semi-colon death shows a cause/effect to life and death.  What happens after life is a result of what came before, like 2 complete sentences connected by a semi-colon.

Using a colon, though, oh, that is a faith thing, indeed. A colon bespeaks more than cause/effect – it bespeaks relationship, a relationship closer than marriage, more like a blood relationship – like Jesus blood covering our sin to allow us entrance to the next sentence.

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”(1 John 5:7).

At first, after reading Brian’s poem I thought going  from life here to life after death needs a bit of explosion, unlike the pop-gun of a comma!

Then, I thought – I want to die them all – the comma, the semi-colon and the colon.

When I die, I want to fall asleep and wake up in heaven (comma), having lived a life seeking and loving the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit(semi-colon),  covered by the blood of Christ (colon).