2014.06.01 Words Matter, Spoken and Unspoken

Ludwig Wittgenstein (below) was born Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge, UK, in 1951. He was was a philosopher interested in language. He wrote: "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."  I wonder.

What if you have no words?

I’m no philosopher, though I think a lot—too darn much in fact. But I do love languages, even Latin. (I had a great Latin accent.)  Curiosity, wonder, and yearning make us humans reach for heaven—sometimes even touch, like Adam and Creator-God in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. Both reach. Both touch. No words.

When I was a hospital chaplain at Hartford Hospital I worked on the spinal cord team. It was a terrifying ministry—quadriplegics and paraplegics all. I saw young teens who had dived off piers and cliffs and broken their necks; I saw young people who had flown through car windshields to land on open road; I saw middle-aged people who’d fallen off ladders. I saw everything—lives snapped off at the neck, literally. I cried myself to sleep often.

Some could still talk, but others were without speech, without words, although, cruelly it seemed, their minds could still function. Most could still hear. We invented ways to communicate, a bit.  What got me through was the poetry I read to people, smiles, prayer, and staying in the tension of my desire to know what it was like and my desire to flee.

Also nurses.

Nurses are the most bold and creative people I know. They are not afraid of bodies—sick, disabled, paralyzed bodies. They flip them and turn them and shove them around the bedclothes, and rarely speak down to them.

I visited a quadriplegic nurse in the hospital and in a rehab center. She finally made a decision to die—or not to live in a paralyzed body. She could talk very little and think, but not move. She set all her affairs in order, had her priest anoint her, and somehow willed herself to die. I prayed helplessly by and never tried to “talk” her out of it. I will never forget her courage and felt sure, for no reason, that Godde was present throughout. Suicide is not a sin!

What I learned in my time on the spinal cord team was that there was a language of the soul, a language without words. I wrote about it. I had no skill in this silent language, being such a cognitive wordy freak, but I could sometimes feel eyes speaking, read twitching mouths, and hear sound in the silence. And touch was visible even when it could not be felt. 

Wittgenstein, the word man, offers a metaphor that helps me define soul-speech: "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

It’s possible that the imagination has a life that travels far beyond the body and the mind. And that it has its own keyboard and its own music. The Church calls this the Holy Spirit and uses the image of a dove flying about and landing inside human hearts with a wordless word.

Perhaps, all those years ago, the feeble words I uttered mattered anyway. Maybe they struck the imagination of some of my patients and we made a chord. I have no idea. I just made my rounds, used all kinds of words, was glad to be rotated off the spinal cord team.

Godde, you are sometimes imaged as the Word, a word of grace and wisdom. Be the Word in our words, and help us to be more conscious about how very much words matter, how very much they can enhance or impede the flow of your divine love.  Amen.

Amen, in soul-speak, is three blinks.

2014.05.25 Inalienable Speech—and Thought?

It’s graduation season, an exciting-hopeful-crazy time, full of terror. What are we commencing to do? Will I meet a boy in college? Fall in love? Did I tell my kid enough about what to avoid, on and on. Will I be homesick?  Go!—with all my love and Godde’s grace! Here’s a little cash.

Bless you, Gillian, the family high school grad, 2014.  (GG with Uncle John)

 

I’ve been reading in the news about some disturbances at colleges about choices of graduation speakers, choices that offended some students’ political views.  Inalienable rights of speech and thought came into question. Whose rights?   (Inalienable, btw, means you can’t give this away, nor can it be taken from you.) I presume that includes the right to think and speak and have ideas.

Ruth Simmons, retired former president of Brown University, was the first black president of Smith College, my alma mater, from 1995-2001. I remember feeling proud of Smith when she was selected, and also irrationally miffed at Brown for “stealing” her away and Simmons for abandoning my alma mater.  But after all, at Brown she got to have two firsts: first woman and first black. Still, Simmons did not take the job for those reasons. She's not like that. She is humble—and religious. She stepped in at the last minute to deliver the commencement address at Smith on May 18, 2014.

She filled after Christine Lagarde, FIRST woman to head the IMF (International Monetary Fund),  pulled out. There had been some protesting about the choice of Lagarde whose perspectives come from a conservative point of view—the "1-percent" view, you might say.

Lagarde said that this was an occasion of celebration and joy, and that no tensions, if avoidable, should interfere with that spirit, nor with the focus on honoring the grads who had worked so hard.  Her decision seemed gracious.

The current president of Smith, Kathleen McCartney, accepted Lagarde’s decision with regret and commented, "I was interested in hearing what she had to say.”

 

It would not, I believe, have hurt Smith grads, their families, and the whole gathered academic community to hear from a woman leader with a challenging viewpoint. This is what their liberal education prepared them for. That’s what I learned at Smith, a gift of thinking for myself, not in isolation, but with courage. That's also what I learned as a Christian priest who welcomes everyone to the table.



Simmons was quite brilliant, also tearful and witty, with a little quip about herself being a religious person but having faith in the inalienable right to practice one’s religion without persecution. Not bad for the daughter of a Baptist minister, she grinned. She carefully articulated the liberal, same root as liberation, values of the college and the importance of fighting for everyone’s right to have a voice, even and especially if it represented a challenge. Oh Godde, ya hafta think!

The college, Simmons said, should not “lapse into a place of quiet repose” but rather fight for “the jangling discord of learning at its best.” — “to protect the right of each one to each one’s views.” Simmons closed with a passionate call to graduates, in whatever they chose to do, “to do it in the full spirit of who you are and who (I do know it’s whom) you care about.”  "Above all, she concluded to cheers and ovation, “take care of your voice!”  

That feels like gospel!

I could not help but think that the church should not become a place of “quiet repose” as so many expect, want, and even need.

The church is an organic community of living breathing souls, all of them with voice, and all of them covenanted to love Godde, self and neighbor.  Jesus was slaughtered for his voice. It takes courage to speak your mind and heart. 

Take care of your voice through careful thought, conversation, and with prayer: Godde, help us not to lapse into quiet repose, except when we sleep each night, and, for Christ’s sake, guard us against waking repose. Amen.