IT Girl
Phillip Martin Illustration. Used by Permission under Creative Commons License.
All my life I've been enchanted by words. For me words represent humanity's greatest creations, tools to convey our ineffable thoughts and emotions to one another. Yet now, in my mature years when I want to share the wisdom learned through life experience as a disciple of Jesus Christ, I find that words are failing me, failing us as a society, and I tremble at the failure.
This revelation came as I took my weekly meander around the Internet, searching for the themes and messages that might help us United Methodists discern what God wants for us individually as disciples and collectively as the body of Christ. Perhaps coincidence or excessive Lenten contemplation deepened my melancholy at the apparent dearth of hope on the webs. It seems as though words have become so weaponized among United Methodists that they express not the good to which we aspire, but the basest responses of which we are capable. Indeed, I've decided not to publish two such posts that I had captured earlier in the week, because in the end I found they did more harm than good.
I confess this as my particular sensitivity, for words have been my calling for as long as I can remember. My mother taught me to read at age 3, and by age 10 I was writing silly little poems and adapting stories I'd seen on TV or in the movies. One of my classmates in freshman honors English called me "obsessed with writing" simply because I was the only student to complete the semester's assignment of writing a journal entry every day.
So perhaps I am too sensitive to the misuse and abuse of words today. After all, humans have been using words to deceive and harm one another since civilization began (start with the story of Adam and Eve, see the tale of Babel's tower, and then follow the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants in Genesis).
Nonetheless I am wounded when I hear something such as the hateful racist lyrics gleefully chanted by members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma. I am wounded by words that twist the facts of an issue or an event. Such manipulation shows not merely a difference in perspective, but an outright denial of what can be demonstrably proven. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but no one is entitled to privatized facts.
Most of all, I am becoming traumatized by the incessant war of words when I read successive blogs in which the writers tear one another to pieces over something another person has said or done. These are not the reasoned debates of thoughtful disciples earnestly seeking to discern God's truth; they are attacks intended to tear down a person's credibility, even to discredit the sacred worth of another human being. Like Diogenes with his lantern seeking one honest man, I look for messages that will traverse the chasms we've carved with our chisels of words, and I find them so rarely.
There's great danger here, for hopeless words may also infect those whom we send to the 2016 General Conference in Portland, Ore. If our weaponized words engender despair in our delegates, there may indeed be no hope that the only body authorized to act for the entire global United Methodist denomination can adopt legislation that will move us toward the future God wants for our church. We saw this happen at the 2012 conclave, and it can happen again.
This reality once again convinces me that we in the Church are indeed living through an apocalyptic period. As I've said before, I use "apocalypse" not in the common understanding of "world ending," but in its classic theological meaning of "revealing, disclosing, laying bare." Our words are stripping away the thin veneer of discipleship with which we've cloaked ourselves these past few decades. Our behavior indicates that we are not true followers of Jesus, for even in his moments of greatest anger such as casting the moneychangers out of the Temple, Jesus' goal was to restore the community, not destroy it. In contrast, the words used today by many of us in the debate over United Methodism's future are aimed at tearing apart the faith community, and we're doing a good job of it.
Make no mistake; I do not advocate that United Methodists accept a false unity papered over by hollow protestations of peace, as when Israel's prophets proclaimed security in the face of Jeremiah's call to repentance (Jeremiah 8:10-12, NRSV*). Yet there must be some alternative to the words used like street thugs' knives intended solely to injure and kill, not like surgeons' scalpels excising cancer so that a body may heal. We do not use our words to bring one another to new life after repentance, but to execute spiritual slaughter.
As we near the end of the 40-day preparation for Easter, I find myself pondering John the Baptizer's injunction to "bear fruits worthy of repentance" (Luke 3:8, NRSV*). We can only escape this thicket of thorny words if we turn toward our ultimate goal: union with God's Logos, the Word made flesh, who made a home with us and taught us through his words about the God Who is Love.
Help us, Divine Word, to rise above all our misbegotten words.
A veteran religion journalist and certified spiritual director, Cynthia B. Astle serves as coordinator for United Methodist Insight.
* New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, copyright 1989 by the Committee on Education of the National Council of Churches USA. Used by permission.