The power of words

I’ve waited some time to post this.

A few weeks ago, several of us wrote on the position of women in the Christian church. There was heated debate in some blogs; I heard bitterness and fear as well as love and understanding. People were hurt.

I find it so very, very sad that those of us coming from different spaces in the Christian church can be so divided by words, even the interpretation of words in our own sacred literature.

Marge Piercy’s poem Learning to Read looks at the power of words as marks on paper. It is quite a long poem and in these excerpts I have tried to capture Piercy’s childhood experience of unlocking the power of the “black scribbles” only to find with a shock that words written in another language (when she grabs the haggadah to read at the seder meal) became incomprehensible:

…Secrets were locked in those

black scribbles on white, magic
to open the sky and the earth.

…At school I grabbed words like toys
I had been denied. Finally I
could read, me. I read every sign

from the car. On journeys I read
maps. I read every cereal box
and can, spelling out the hard words.
All printing was sacred.

At the seder I sat down at the table,
selfimportant, adult on my cushion.
I was no longer the youngest child
but the smartest. When the haggadah

was to be passed across me,
I grabbed it, roaring confidence.
But the squiggles, the scratches
were back. Not a letter

waved to me. I was blinded again.

Sometimes it feels to me that those of us who have different views of our Christian lives and how they should be lived are actually speaking different languages. Our own language is naturally precious to us. But how do we learn to understand and appreciate the language of others? Even if we do not speak, say, French, we acknowledge its validity as a language that has arisen with a people and a culture. How do we translate that to our religious beliefs? How do we learn the language of loving debate and shared experience?

In peace.