[There has been a lot of talk this week about the coarseness of public conversation. Here is a selection from my book in progress (*Quakering Theology*) about the importance of learning the language of blessing to counter the language of curse.]
The language we use in our conversation concerning peace and social justice (tone and intention) may be as critical as the actual content of our conversation. Combative, vitriolic language characterizes the left as well as the right. Public conversation is becoming more coarse, increasingly aggressive, even violent. If language is viewed primarily as a vehicle whereby experience is articulated in a descriptive fashion, then the language used to speak of our world, ourselves, will be violent. In fact, we could conclude that our speech must be aggressive in order to “speak truthfully” with integrity.
[However] … language does not simply describe reality, it evokes reality. Our speech may actually create new and inhabitable worlds, not simply describe presently existing ones.
Rooted as Friends are in the narrative of Christianity, the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus—our discourse ought to be the language of and practice of blessing. The aggressiveness of societal discourse speaks a curse—so much easier to utter in many ways; one that condemns, that dismisses, that diminishes, that sends away. “Send the children away, the Lord is tired.” How ought Friends to respond to groups whose demeanor is aggressive, belligerent, bellicose, dismissive, or even violent (even when—especially when—those groups are activists whose social agenda many Friends share)? Shaped by this narrative and inspired by language birthed from the experience of a violent world, we may well follow suit.
In blessing the children Jesus speaks a language of a “less traveled vocabulary.” Perhaps the language of evocative, world-creating vision is more properly the language of poets and artists, musicians and lovers. If so, Friends may have some difficulty entering such a practice, schooled as we have been by the sentiment of William Penn, for example, who dismissed the arts as distractions from the pursuit of things spiritual: “These were never invented, but by that mind which had first lost the joy and ravishing delights of God’s holy presence.”[1] A distressing lack of imaginative incarnational vision.
We may enter with wobbly knees, hobbling on crutches, but it is into this place we should enter. Speaking blessing rather than curses, the blessings of a new covenant, the blessing of a vision of a new heavens and a new earth. In so speaking, we may even give birth to a new world.
[1]Penn, No Cross No Crown, 236-237 (XV.7).
Thank you, David. I am now pondering your words about how we use language to bless. I particularly like your thoughts about using language to create possibilities where only impossibilities seemed to exist, to convey a vision of a hopeful reality, one evoked by Jesus’ receiving of the children. How can we speak hope where despair and resignation prevail? Certainly a starting place is to reject the language of confrontation, and substitute a more joyful mode that embraces and blesses and learns from our antagonist.
Tom
Love this post!
“language does not simply describe reality, it evokes reality”—Maybe underlying the national discourse this week is disagreement about this statement. What is language? Does language just describe the “already” or create the “not yet”?
Your image of “wobbly knees, hobbling on crutches” reminds me of Jacob’s all night struggle with the angel/God. In the struggle, God blesses and actually names Jacob. And he walks into the promised land, the new world, by limping!