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American Babel

Ellen RM Toner

My mother is an English teacher. Every fall, she begins her class with a discussion of the opening lines of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” I grew up reading that once a week at the end of Mass, and had never, before taking my mother’s class, stopped to think about the strangeness of it. Although I am not bold enough to claim an ability to decipher all the mysteries of scripture, I can posit, based on those introductory class discussions, some theories on what it means to talk about Jesus as “The Word.”

We are made body and soul. We exist in the spiritual and corporeal realms. We have eternal souls, souls existing in a world beyond our comprehension, while at the same time we have toes that get stubbed and hair that gets pulled. Analogously, words exist in this physical realm, inasmuch as they necessarily have limits and boundaries to their meanings, but they’re rooted in a world of transcendent thought that dwells above mere definitions. Every time something is defined, it is limited, but also given life. As I’m writing this blog post, it is becoming one thing, and all the possible directions it might have gone in in its pre-nascent state are being blocked off, one by one, although they’re still reference points in my mind that I’ll think of as I’m writing it and whenever I look back on it.

When The Word was made flesh, an eternal entity came into human dimensions. When we as humans perceive the world, make judgments to understand it, and then attempt to discuss it with each other, we are trying to summarize a world beyond our comprehension in human terms, i.e., in words. Words then are sacred things because they are a direct analogy, a parable, used day in and day out, to what is the very real link between the spiritual and the physical worlds that is found in every human person.

My mother gives good advice. When, as a love-lorn teenager in the throes of unrequited affections, I told her all my troubles, she advised me that the gentleman in question was not a person with whom I’d ever be able to communicate on equal terms. Not surprisingly, she was right. In my mid-twenties, when I was dating my now-husband, she advised me again in more specific terms: “Every family has its own language, a way that siblings and parents talk to each other, shortcuts and house rules, guaranteed to be different from every other family. If you don’t learn his and he doesn’t learn yours, you’ll never be able to understand each other.” Right again!

We live in a very conflicted world, though, for what it’s worth, I find that reading history helps me feel more sanguine about the societal war zone we find ourselves in today; a lot of rotten you-know-what has happened in the past, but here we still are. Although not every one is called to duke it out in the streets, some of us, surely, have to be willing to have the difficult conversations, to stand in the front lines and protect the transcendent right. It would be much easier to withdraw from society and create our own little islands of safety, to pray that we go untouched; indeed, especially during that period of life where you’ve got little ones, you probably should be building that wall around them, up to a point.

But if you’re on the streets, literally or figuratively, and find yourself in conversation with someone on the opposite end of an inflammatory topic, how do you go about effecting positive change? Words. Pure and simple. Realize that any word that they are using, while it might sound on the surface to be the same word that you’re using, is drawn by them from that incorporeal world of thought with many points of reference and structures, resulting in an ultimate definition and limitation of understanding that might be wholly foreign to your own comprehension of that same word. And this is not one-word-deep; it becomes issue after issue, one built on another, all leading back to one or many varying understandings and, at some point, a limitation that led to a misinterpretation, one side or the other. And once you can pinpoint that root of whatever conflict you’re in, you can begin to have a hope, however tiny, that you and the person you are with can actually communicate with one another.

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Case in point: in a discussion a few years ago, literally on a street, with a young man in the opposite camp of the marriage debate, I found myself saying at the end of our talk that as long as we disagreed about what sex was for, we couldn’t really have the rest of our debate. If sex is primarily about a mutual or autonomous gift of pleasure, but not necessarily about the possibility of conception, then there isn’t a convincing reason why homosexual marriage doesn’t make sense. And from that stems the natural result of sexual identity politics, so heated a topic today. At the root of all this, beginning with the widespread use of contraception that changed what sex was to so many people, is a disagreement about a definition, about a word, that reaches back much farther than most people realize. The American people are speaking in different languages, and they don’t even know it. Is it any wonder, then, that we don’t know how to talk to each other?

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Filed Under: Deep Down Things, Essays

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About Ellen RM Toner

After teaching for three years at a classical liberal arts school, Ellen began full-time work as a writer and editor in 2012. She has degrees in Literature and Publishing from the University of Dallas and the University of Denver, respectively. She lives with her husband, writer J.B. Toner, in rural New Hampshire.

Comments

  1. AvatarRyan Hess says

    June 6, 2016 at 7:00 am

    I like this article quite a lot. The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges addresses the issue of words and how they take on very different forms every time they are conjured, so to speak, from your “world of transcendent thought.” Of the Argentinian’s works, I especially like Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote or the Library of Babel from his book Ficciones. If you do not know these works, check them out, they pertain to your topic very much! Thank you for this fine article.

    • AvatarEllen RM Toner says

      June 8, 2016 at 6:42 am

      Ryan, thank you for your compliments, and even more so for your reading suggestions! I will definitely look them up.

    • Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

      June 16, 2016 at 1:35 pm

      Borges for the win!

  2. AvatarWalker says

    June 6, 2016 at 11:03 am

    Are there any good theology books people know of about what Christ being “the Word” really means?

    • AvatarEllen RM Toner says

      June 8, 2016 at 6:46 am

      I will ask around and let you know if I get some recommendations!

    • AvatarAnn Turner says

      June 8, 2016 at 1:56 pm

      I am the English teacher Mom of whom Ellen speaks. My thoughts on the matter had their genesis in the reading of Jean LeClerq’s Love of Learning and the Desire for God. It is largely a history of monasticism, but I found it changed my world. For starters, t made me read St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on love, so wonderful. It was with this book that I made the habit of making lists of books referred to by the author that I wanted to delve more deeply into. LeClerq speaks of the need for the Incarnation in order that the Word could be communicated. He says, if you want to be understood you must in some way become like the being with whom you are communicating. Thus, God took on a body to be more like us so that we would understand Him, His Word. What generosity! Were it not God, it would seem flattery that Someone would take it upon Himself to become like me, just because He has something so important to say to me, and something that He wants so very much for me to understand. Mind-boggling, delightful!

      • AvatarWalker says

        June 9, 2016 at 8:24 am

        Beautiful–I’ll check that book out.

  3. Josh NadeauJosh Nadeau says

    June 16, 2016 at 1:36 pm

    Great stuff! Very well-framed.

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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