Breaking In The Habit

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” We’ve all heard this rhyme many times in our lives, and there’s definitely truth to it. While people may call us names or use harsh words, it is up to us how we feel about them. Words, unlike physical objects, do not have to hurt us. At the end of the day, they’re just words, mere sounds coming from the mouth of another. What damage can minuscule sound waves cause?

And yet, there is something fascinating about harsh words, particularly swear words.

At their core, they are nothing other than words, right? They mean nothing until we give them meaning. Language, though organically developed, is completely arbitrary. If all of us agreed to it, we could start calling computers “griltarings” or “tribos” or any other combination of consonants and vowels that we wanted. There is no objective name for anything, only an agreed upon word with an agreed upon definition. Words have meaning—and power—because we give them such.

In this way, words are not simply sound waves coming from the mouth of another; behind them and giving them life is an entire world of meaning. While most common swear words have lost their umph with overuse, we can still see what I’m talking about in racial or ethnic slurs. The reason that they are so powerful—and contrary to nursery rhymes, do in fact hurt people—is because they come from a world of hatred, bigotry, and oppression. In using any one of these words, we are not simply saying consonants and vowels, we are conjuring up history and meaning and emotions that are wildly offensive. They may just be words, but there is a history of “sticks and stones” behind them.

Some words, despite being just words, do have power to hurt people. And we all know what words these are.

But what about those words that are not overtly offensive, that do not immediately hit us like “sticks and stones,” but have a slower, less detectible effect on us? What about those words that we use all of the time, those words that are seemingly normal, but actually undermine who we are as Christians?

This is the question I ask in this week’s video reflection. Looking at five words that we use often, I want to encourage us to think more about the words we use and how we use them. Words have power, and we should always be wary of what that power is doing to us.

While there is jealousy and rivalry among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving in an ordinary human way? Whenever someone says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human? What is Apollos, after all, and what is Paul? Ministers through whom you became believers, just as the Lord assigned each one. (1 Cor 3:3-5)

It appears that the people of Corinth caused St. Paul many problems. Besides their abuse of the Eucharist, incest, and issues over idols, one of the things that St. Paul had to address was the growing factions within the Church. Forgetting that the person that they were baptized into was far more important than the one performed the baptism, they fought and divided themselves into smaller churches, over and against each other.

At the heart of it all, that is what I want to address in today’s video. Too often in our Church (and in our world) we let secondary identities define us. More than just preferences in politics, style of worship, and social life, we begin to label ourselves (and others), identifying with a group over and against the whole.

“I’m a progressive Catholic.”

“I’m conservative.”

“I’m a trad.”

Two thousand years later, we find ourselves back in Corinth, unnecessarily dividing our Church into factions, grouping people together, and claiming our superiority over others.

This cannot be the way with us. If the world wants to group all “those” people together, wants to diminish the diversity of opinions within a given school and dismiss everyone at once, then that’s what the world will do. But we are called to something more. We are called to break through the overgeneralized labels that keep people apart, that make us focus on issues that do not matter while ignoring the ones that do, that make us believe we have more enemies that we actually do.

In reading the early comments on the video, I couldn’t help but be disheartened by some of the responses. One person wrote, “This is what the liberals do. They infiltrate our Church to bring it down.” Another said that anyone who voted for the president was a terrible person and couldn’t be a real Catholic. I was attacked by one commenter for this “liberal propaganda” I was sharing. One person even asked whether I was liberal or conservative myself (completely missing the point of the video) and got angry when I told him that I don’t use those words because they fail to encapsulate who I actually am.

It seems that our factions run deep. It seems that there might be some truth to the idea that we are trapped in our ideologies, that we want to be able to put people into nice and neat boxes, that our conservatism, liberalism, traditionalism, vegetarianism, or any other -ism has the ability to cloud our Christianity. Rather than remain open to seeing the other person as a person, open to the idea that they are a complex human being with a diversity of opinions and experiences, many resort immediately to labels, assumptions, and judgments.

It has to stop. There is no place for this in our Church. There is no place for this in Christ.