Introductory Words

My opening words come from Tom Hennessy, a lifestyle columnist for the Long Beach, California, Press Telegram. Sensing the need to update the Mother Goose nursery rhymes into a more politically correct form, he rewrote some of them. Here are two that I hope you will still recognize:

Humpty, Dumpty, a non-human animal product stolen from the Poultry World, sat on a unit of infrastructure. Humpty Dumpty had a terrible, unscheduled descent. All the equine non-humans and masculine humans in the employ of the ruler of the land could not restore Dumpty to his former state. Medical practioners prounounced him terminally inconvenienced.

Muffet, a female individual afflicted with arachnophobia, thoughtlessly sat upon a clump of living, breathing grass, consuming her processed dairy products. Along came a non-human of the arachnid species, just as thoughtlessly sat down beside her and frightened the Muffet Person away. Three television networks did a movie on the arachnid.

Sermon

I believe it was a Friday night a few weeks ago when Philomena, my wife, my two-year-old son Andy, and I were sitting in our living room together. Andy was playing with some toys on the floor, Philomena was reading a novel and I was reviewing my to-do list in my mind. All of a sudden I remembered something I had forgotten to do which I had previously spent a significant amount of mental energy vowing I would not forget. In an uncensored moment I said, "Oh SH...." and used a four letter word for excrement. Andy's face brightened up as he looked at me and began to repeat what I had said with great delight. Philomena looked at me with a "now look what you've done" stare. My mind raced as I heard Andy repeating these words during coffee hour at the Fellowship in Port Charlotte. It was too late! The words had escaped. I had poisoned the innocent mind of my child with these socially unacceptable words.

Then an idea came to me. I looked at Andy and said, "Oh Shoot!", with the same level of emotional intensity. Andy began to giggle and started repeating "Oh Shoot!" along with me. I repeated the phrase again and again so it would anchor in his brain and replace the original expression. It worked - this time. Both Philomena and I were sobered by our son's awareness of our language and our need to control it.

Having a child certainly does increase one's awareness of one's use of language. Small children are like little tape recorders collecting language and replaying it back again and again. Conscientious parents realize that their conversation with their children is constructing their inner verbal reality which they will carry for the rest of their lives. Much of our internal dialogue has roots in the words of our parents and caregivers heard in our early years. It's a bigger responsibility than many parents realize. Most of the time parents run on automatic in this regard. Internalized parental voices are the ones that fly out of the mouth first, unexamined, as vows not to do what my parents did to me are forgotten in the heat of the moment. It takes great discipline to correct the mistakes of bad parenting one has endured.

Our language has tremendous power to help or to harm. A kind word can lift our spirits. Words of comfort can become rocks to cling to in the storm of grief, loss, bereavement and depression. And a thoughtless remark in a time of vulnerability can stab us like a knife through the heart.

I've been thinking about the power of language as I read the surveys I asked the members of the congregation I serve to fill out, evaluating the life of the community and my participation in it. Overall, the comments are very helpful to guide me in my ministry there and the results validate much of what I am doing. I've read some positive comments that were very encouraging to me. There is good guidance for the Sunday Services Committee, adult classes for next year, and the Social Concerns Committee. A few of the comments, though, are quite callous and hurtful. We have several people who play recorders for us on a regular basis, who are getting better all the time but are not professionals by any stretch of the imagination. They really enjoy participating, but they are not well-received by some listeners. One person wrote, "kill the whistles!" The anonymity of a survey seems like a suspension of civility to some, I guess. I had originally planned to publish the results but now I'm not sure if I should do this, given the nature of a few thoughtless responses. Should I just edit them out? Is it honest, in the hopes of protecting feelings, to remove them and skew the survey?

How we use language is extremely important. How many of us have made hostile comments about a third party who was not present? "Oh, she is such a bore - she starts talking before she has anything in her head to say." "Oh, he is so self centered - all he cares about is being fed at 5:00." "She dresses like a tramp." "He has the emotional sensitivity of a mule." How many would repeat these remarks when the person being discussed was present in the conversation? Is there any value in our remarks about their character at all?

Such judgemental comments originate, I think, out of our emotions. Something displeases us in the behavior of another. Yet we learned in kindergarten that to say something nasty could get one in trouble or a fight. It is safer to turn to a fellow playmate and make a secret cruel comment. Many of us did it, didn't we? I did. Didn't it give us pleasure to shadow box without fear of being hit back? It was true for me.

But were we really safe? Playmates often tell on each other, getting another kind of pleasure out of causing trouble then later denying their action. Whenever three or more are gathered and a secret is shared, someone is likely to tattle.

And there are the playmates who don't tattle and carry the burden of knowing the secret, knowing they shouldn't tell anyone. Think of the family secrets you may be carrying now which cannot be betrayed, that bottle up your feelings.

Once an emotion is felt, it seeks a path of expression, often against our will. "Confession is good for the soul" the priest will tell you. Much research of late has pointed to the toxicity of unexpressed emotions. During the 70's, pop psychologists encouraged people to let it all hang out. Let your parents, spouse and children know exactly what you really feel. Those who experimented with this perspective, quickly learned that letting it all hang out caused more pain than it relieved. Do you remember these times? Many families are still trying to repair the damage from the disrespectful use of language.

Words have tremendous power.

I think about this, while I write my sermons. One of the reasons I write my sermons in a manuscript form is because of the power the words I say have when they are spoken from the pulpit. What I say as I stand here is received much differently than if I were to utter them in conversation. I take the responsibility for my language very seriously in these moments.

We are passing through a time of great introspection in Unitarian Universalism with regard to language. The first step was the green hymnal that came out in the early 1980's with gender-inclusive language. Women and men were realizing that saying "he" as a generic for all people was sexist. The words we use shape our understanding of ultimate reality. Using She and feminine words for God has a distinctly different meaning than He and masculine. How many of us weight the connotations of God and Goddess equally or interchangably? This effort towards affirmative and inclusive images of human diversity has called into question the use of masculine for the divine, the authoritarianism of the word "Lord", and the use of "black" and "dark" for that which is evil. We are looking at the root metaphors in our hymns to see if they are life-affirming or life-denying. This is why the words to some of our hymns in the new hymnal have been changed, which I know ruffles a few feathers.

The efforts to reform language have reached into places one might not expect. Perhaps you may have seen in the paper an article about changes to the official Scrabble dictionary. About 100 offensive words have been deleted. A Hasbro official said they were just trying to be sensitive to the complaints they had been receiving and wanted to do the right thing. I love hearing about a corporation motivated by the desire to do the right thing.

Not only is our view of ultimate reality shaped by our language, so is our day-to-day reality. Many are concerned about the increase in violence in North America. How many of us look for it infecting our own speech? Expressions like, "kill two birds with one stone", "shoot down an idea", "lead the charge", "blow up" at something or "go ballistic or nuclear", "cut him off at the knees," or "got my head bit off" unconsciously pass on the concept of harming. And little literalists like my son Andy don't understand the metaphor until later in life. I can imagine Andy hearing the expression about killing two birds with one stone and wanting to rush outside and try it. When I first heard the expression as a child, that's what I thought about. Some violent metaphors we continue to pass on and don't even know their origin. Take, for example, the "rule of thumb". The rule of thumb originated in a law to measure the maximum width of a stick with which to beat your wife. I think I'm going to avoid following the rule of thumb in the future and abandon talking about it altogether.

Of course this can be taken to extreme as demonstrated by the fractured Mother Goose rhymes I read earlier. The champions of the fight against the politically correct straw man who is differently gifted and concerned, people like Rush Limbaugh, do not appreciate and resist the underlying principles that drive efforts to change our language. Principles like justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

What I'm advocating today is thoughtful reflection before we choose our words, especially when unpleasant emotions force them into our mouth. The Buddha thought that language was so important, he included it as one of the eight elements of the middle path of enlightenment. Our choice of words or even the decision to speak at all can bring great benefit or great suffering. What if we asked ourselves before speaking, "What benefit will my words bring?" Didn't your mother ever say, "If you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all"?

The challenge of watching our language usually intensifies in the moments when we have nothing nice to say. And silence is not always the answer when we see two people harming each other or if someone is trying to harm us. Is there a way to take negative emotions and transform them into helpful words? I think so.

A fictional example from the trials and tribulations of married life: If you are interested in learning to be more kind, gentle and helpful with your language, home is a good place to practice. A man came home one night from a hard day of work to find his wife's dirty socks in the middle of the living room floor. Because of the stress of the day, his emotions were raw and a surge of anger-producing chemicals shot through his veins. As he looked at his wife reclining on the couch watching television, very unpleasant thoughts passed through his head. But this man, unlike many of his gender, knew how to control his speech. He took a few deep breaths to clear his bloodstream of hormones and calm his mind. He paused to put the socks lying on the floor into perspective. It wasn't the end of the world. Nor did it appear that it was a hostile act even though his imagination had carried the event into divorce court. He remembered the pleasant dinner out and conversation of the last weekend and felt the commitment of his wife to their relationship. By now he had regained his stability and connection with his wife but was still irritated at the mess. He chose his words carefully. "Hello, honey, how are you this evening?" She looked at him with great weariness and told him about all the work she had done and her exhaustion. He now understood that the socks in the middle of the floor came in the context of a busy day - and it seemed much more forgivable - but it still bothered him. "Honey," he said, "I recognize this has been a hard day for you, but it bothers me to come home and find dirty socks in the middle of the floor. Is there some way we can work things out so that happens less often? It would make me happy if we could find a way to resolve this issue." He took full responsibility for his feelings without projecting them on his wife. What was at stake for him was not the rightness or wrongness of his wife's behavior but rather his feelings and finding a mutual solution to them that would improve their relationship.

The key to finding helpful words is holding the humanity, the inherent worth, the dignity, the divinity if you will, of the other in your heart. The most important step before opening the mouth is tuning the heart. The second most helpful thing to do is to speak out of your own inner reality, your emotions, your likes and dislikes, rather than judging the value of the other. Lastly is the invitation for reconciliation. This doesn't mean automatic forgiveness, rather, opening the door to a process by which reconciliation can be found.

I believe watching our language is a powerful way for us to live our U.U. principles. Unitarian Universalism is a place where language is taken very seriously. Look at how we struggle to craft the language for our resolutions at General Assembly. How many have fought over the wording of a motion at a congregational meeting? And we do it because we understand the power of words.

My challenge for you this morning is to take your words more seriously. There is much spiritual growth that can happen from investigating one's language. Choosing words with care, with connection, can certainly improve a marriage, friendships, and one's state of mind. Would it be conceivable to abandon gossip? Would it be beneficial to oneself not to hear about other people's dirty laundry? Are there more effective and harmonious ways to use language to negotiate what we want? Does your humor secretly wield a knife? Are there constructive and creative ways to vent negativity?

Watching our use of language will bring us a happier existence. But this doesn't mean obsessing over each word we use. The Buddha taught the use of speech as part of the middle path, not the path of extremes. Speech is a central component in creating happiness and in the alleviation of suffering in our homes and families, in our congregations and in the world at large.

So next time you are moved to speak at a board or committee meeting, think about your words before opening your mouth, asking these questions: Will they help or harm others at the meeting? Where in my heart do they come from? Am I serving myself only by using this time, or am I benefiting the meeting by what I am about to say? Will it enhance the conversation or attenuate it?

Let today be the day we begin to speak truth as an expression of personal commitment to justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

Closing Words

Truth spoken in love will transform the world with each sentence. And there are a thousand reasons to shade the truth and tell half of it or not say anything at all.

May we attend thoughtfully to the language we share within these walls and dedicate each word:
to open and not to close,
to help and not to harm,
to transform and not to bind.

Go in Peace.
Make Peace.
Be at Peace.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.