Speaking Truth, Speaking Peace
A Sermon Preached by Marilyn McEntyre
April 2, 2006
University
Congregational United
“Speak the truth to one another.” “Render judgments that are true and make for peace.” These two solid pieces of advice seem like ethical commonplaces. “Tell the truth” is one of the first moral principles we learn as children. Be fair. Resolve conflicts in honest conversation. Every adult who participated in our upbringing gave us some version of these teachings.
But I’d like to reflect with you today on why telling the truth and rendering true judgments that make for peace is particularly difficult and complicated for us, here, now—for this generation of Americans, Christians, speakers of English, consumers of mass media. And why it is urgent that we learn new strategies of truth telling in the interests of waging peace—indeed, in the interests of survival.
Those of us who are American citizens are involved not only in a new kind of warmaking, and a world economy with new kinds of inequities, but also in a language environment that has enormously complicated the business of truth telling. Language, like other natural resources, is being depleted, and vitiated by widespread abuses. The word, given into our keeping along with the earth, needs our attention. Part of our calling as children of God and heirs of the kingdom is to be stewards of language—to care for the words we use so that they may be capable vessels of truth.
It’s hard to tell the truth these days, because the varieties of untruth are so many, so pervasive, and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda.
These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture, that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd” has prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth—from PR to advertising claims to political propaganda masquerading as news.
In the face of those deceptions, the business of telling the truth, and caring for the words we need for that purpose, is more challenging than ever before. Simply the scale on which lies can be propagated can be overwhelming.
Recently I helped a committee review some publicity material for a local organization. I objected to the clichés and vapid abstractions that seemed to bury the main points (such as they were) in wet cotton. "This is what works," was the reply. This is what PR writing looks like. It reassures people." Imprecision had become acceptable in the interests of generalized good feeling.
There is no question that precision is difficult to achieve. Imprecision is easier. Imprecision is available in a wide variety of attractive and user-friendly forms: cliché, abstractions and generalizations, jargon terms, passive constructions, hyperbole, sentimentality, and reassuring absolutes. Imprecision minimizes discomfort and creates a big, soft, hospitable place for all opinions; even the completely vacuous can find a welcome there. So the practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort, it may require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment. The practice of precision is a spiritual discipline. Precision, I believe, is an aspect of the renewal of the mind that Paul calls for in today’s passage from Ephesians.
Precision begins with definition of terms. I asked a group of students recently to write down their working definitions of five terms whose imprecise usage poses a serious threat these days to peace and safety: “liberal,” “conservative,” “patriotic,” “terrorist,” and “Christian.” The results were sobering in their range and banality. We hear these terms abused daily. They are co-opted to serve partisan agendas and to prevent serious discussion of particulars. If patriots could be required to specify which particular U.S. policies they support and why, we might have some talking points. If the “Christian Right” would acknowledge the existence of the Christian left, the community of believers might be able to deliver a lively witness to the capaciousness of our faith in spirited debate.
Precision also requires
attention to process. One of the most
urgent goals I pursue in writing courses is the use of precise verbs.-- finding
the verb that gets at the subtleties or intricacies of process. It is hard to
think clearly about process when most of us are surrounded with products we did
not participate in planting, harvesting, designing, manufacturing,
transporting, or marketing. Indeed, the
processes by which things come to us are often deliberately hidden so as not to
draw attention to the less savory dimensions of process like pollution, abusive
labor practices, fuel consumption, dangers of pesticides, treatment of animals,
inside trading. So a precise use of the
term “cost” would include all of the above—would perhaps enlarge to Thoreau’s
definition: “I count the cost of a thing
in terms of how much of life I have to give to obtain it.” We might more
appropriately modify his reckoning and count the “cost” of a thing in terms of
how much of others’ lives was given so that we might obtain it.
Certainly one of the most consequential areas in which imprecision is commonplace is in justification of violence and injustice. Any one of us could come up with a lengthy list of euphemisms designed to obscure the processes and costs of war, for instance. Think of how the term “collateral damage” spares us the discomfort of imagining the bodies of women and children ripped open by the explosions of “smart bombs” that destroy everything within a 120-foot radius of their target. Or how the idea of economic “health” begs the question of how we measure a healthy economy and how common use of that term fails to take into account the health of the humans within the economic system.
Wendell Berry’s little story “Making it Home” offers a memorable experiment in truth telling about war. In it he undertakes to describe in plain language the experience of a soldier returning from battle:
The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. . . . [W]hatever interfered you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farms, houses, whole towns—things that people had made well and cared for a long time—you made nothing of. . . . You got to where you could not look at a man without knowing how little it would take to kill him. For a man was nothing but just a little morsel of soft flesh and brittle bone inside of some clothes. And you could not look at a house or a schoolhouse or a church without knowing how, rightly hit, it would just shake down inside itself into a pile of stones and ashes.[i] (86, 88)
This representation of the altered state of awareness, the “zone” in which a soldier might insulate himself from the pain he or she inflicts and the guilt it might bring relies for its impact on simple language: verbs like “kill,” “destroy,” “hit,” “want,” and nouns: “morsel,” “bone,” “dust,” “stones and ashes.” The precision of language has to do not with sophistication, but rather with the felt accuracy of elemental feelings and appetites. This kind of precision is both accusation and confession. It is strenuous and morally relevant—hardly a matter reducible to aesthetics. Such precision produces what Edmund Wilson called a “shock of recognition,” or what we still call a “ring of truth.” It is tested against our own memories of fear and numbness and moments of crude will to power.
Notice how part of its power
lies in understatement. There is no
report of explosions, no wide-angle vision of a devastated landscape, no cries
of the dying.
This problem is too familiar to need much elaboration, but let me just note that we should be concerned that the currency of hyperbole has made its way into ecclesial discourse in ways that confuse evangelism with marketing. This tendency is most conspicuously true in church and parachurch youth settings where every pizza party, campout, mission trip, fall program, and brainstorming session, it appears, is “awesome.” Or “incredible,” or “fantastic” or (my particular pet peeve) “exciting.” I’d love to hear one event described as restful and restorative to nerves and spirit rather than, inevitably, exciting.
Here’s I think we stand to lose by importing the culture of hyperbole into the church. We lose our countercultural edge. As people of God, we are specifically called to be countercultural—to be in the world, but not of it. I recently heard a colleague observe, with reference to a particularly splashy “Christian” event, “Christians have finally found a way to be of the world but not in it.” To be in the world is to be socially and politically engaged, to work for the kingdom here and now, recognizing that it is within us and among us. To be of it is to capitulate to its terms and its agendas. The intention may be to appropriate the power of mediaspeak and redirect it to good ends, but the medium does become the message, and at great cost. The discourse of the church, the subtleties of biblical language and the nuances of translation, the ear for poetry and care for theological distinctions may be eroded by allowing the language of popular media to become the dialect of our worship and fellowship as believers.
I say this not only to warn against what I think diminishes and damages the treasures that are ours to care for, but also as an invitation to help one another maintain the strenuous pleasures of precision, clarity, and lively confrontation, that are mutually empowering.
Finally, if we give way to hyperbole—and to the comparable temptations of sentimentality, slogans, and other kinds of language designed to “sell,” we lose credibility. The corporate media with multimillion dollar marketing budgets are better at devising and using those instruments of persuasion. I suggest we let them have them and remember the persuasiveness of the “still small voice” that speaks beneath the whirlwind.
Stewardship of words is a high calling, and telling the truth something like an extreme sport for the very committed. We can cultivate good stewardship by reading and listening to good words: the Bible; the literature that still deserves to be called, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the best that has been thought and said.” We can listen carefully, notice how words are used and consider how they may be heard; we can pick them up from the dusty corners where most of the good ones have been consigned to disuse and reintroduce them, hoping to ambush the careless listener contented with cliché. Like Adrienne Rich, who called herself “a woman sworn to lucidity,” we can pledge our energies to the work of smithing words for purposes they have never before had to serve. We can temper our urgencies (if we are given to wild-eyed prophesying) with play because no responsible word work can happen without it. Precise language comes from high play and trust in the Spirit. And when it comes, it surprises like a dancer's extra second of stillness in mid-air; the word and the experience come together in an irreproducible moment of revelation and delight.
Our goal is to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The first requires healthy suspicion, understanding of process, historical perspective, and, more to our point, attentiveness to appropriate uses and conspicuous abuses of language. The second requires mutual support in the arduous business of seeking peace as well as truth, focusing lovingly on the health of the community rather than obsessively on the corruptions of public life.
We who love the God who gave us the precious gift of language, have an obligation help each other tell complex truths and resist the lure of lies. This means to demand definitions, specific language, clarifications, to learn methods of nonviolent communication, use them, and teach them, where we have identified lies, to turn off the TV, stop the subscription, discredit them, and to take these obligations quite personally. Sometimes, as Emily Dickinson put it, we need to find ways to tell the truth, slant—to be subversive in the service of reclaiming what is endangered.
We have been called by name. Not every one of us is called to public speaking, political activism in streets and on telephones, or investigative journalism, but all of us to seek truth and follow after it, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Caring for the words we speak and testing the words we hear serves each of those ends directly.