Pop 89: Disarming Words
By Madonna Hamel
In the name of free speech, Charlie Kirk went from campus to campus, raising questions, provoking debate, in a style that was, as he himself admitted, often aggressive, provocative, hyper-masculine. His events could go from a kind of mano a mano, all-out hollerfest of name-hurling to a more gentle consideration of a genuinely confused or concerned questioner.
He did his homework. He read a range of books. He observed human behaviour. He was driven, he had a cause. His questioners - chosen ahead of time by his handlers - were not aways as articulate. They weren’t doing this for a living, they were just taking an opportunity for a shot at him and at their 6 minutes of fame. After they hurled their invective or framed their somewhat-considered query they receded back into the crowd. In that way, his appearances were less a debate between two equal partners and more a showcase of his thoughts and causes.
If you were in line with Kirk’s politics you had a better chance of receiving a gracious response from him. If you proclaimed yourself a Christian, you were embraced. Today many Christians are claiming him as one of their finest evangelists. John Horvat, a writer for the website The Imaginative Conservative recently wrote: “Like it or not, Charlie Kirk was a man-symbol …he represented much more than the positions he held or the person he was. As a symbol, he proposed an ideal for America. His behavior was governed by a profound respect for a moral law and a strong faith in God. He symbolized what might be called the Ten Commandments American.”
This is not my understanding of God nor Christ’s message. Not once does Christ say it’s ok to defame, ridicule, exclude, denigrate others. Instead he says: love your neighbour, love your enemies even.
Mr. Hovat’s view is not mine, but this does not mean I will be unsubscribing from the site because, like the world I live in and the people I treasure as friends, the site delivers a variety of insights, views and opinions, and tomorrow there will be a brilliant piece I will find myself reading over and over to let its wisdom and poetics sink in.
My point being is we are all “fearfully and wonderfully made” (psalm 139) of a range of thoughts and experiences, opinions and beliefs. And we are all sinners. The Benedictines define sin as, “the refusal to grow.” I can’t help feeling that the journalists AND self-proclaimed Christians among us could use some growing up. Polarization and speaking in absolutes are a sign of emotional immaturity. It’s what we all did in our rebellious teens. But when adults keep hurling inflammatory rhetoric back and forth we are looking at an entire culture that panders to not just emotional immaturity but spiritual immaturity as well.
Another site I read daily is: Aleteia. Today Cardinal Pizzaballa, who lives in Gaza, reminded us that “ending violence begins with ending dehumanizing speech. …When suffering becomes overwhelming, people can lose the capacity to notice the other’s pain. Changing how we speak is one practical way to resist that numbness. It begins with the storytellers who can seed a different moral imagination.”
The cardinal quoted Pope Leo who urged journalists to “disarm” our words and communicate in a way that "never separates the search for truth from the love with which we must humbly seek it."
“Peace begins with each one of us,” he said. “In the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others. In this sense, the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: We must say no to the war of words.”
Pope Francis warned about legalism getting in the way of love. Christ’s ultimate teaching is the same. His sermon on the mount insisted we love and help the poor. He doesn’t say to deport them.
We view each other through the polarized lenses of left/right, wrong/right, good/evil so we can identify “the enemy”. So we can gauge the degree of grief we need to access to mourn the death of a young man. As if all murders aren’t worthy of grieving. Aren’t we all precious in God’s eyes?
So what about evil? I believe there are evil forces in the world. But it is one thing to label a person evil and another to condemn their acts as evil. We are all sinners. We have all lost ourselves in moments of hellish hate. But Augustine reminds us to hate the sin not the sinner. To write people off as evil is an easy way for some self-proclaimed Christians to stop listening, to stop loving, to go numb.
There is a dark, armed energy that we keep circulating in the world when we engage in aggressive, rage-provoking language. And whether we call it evil, or mental illness, it will ultimately destroy us.Rhetorically, we’ve unleashed something malevolent and we give it momentum and traction daily, aggravating a public battle of words that is anything but civil.
The question is: do we actually want to stop the battle? Do we want to see each other? Do we believe in a shared, common humanity? Then we must move past this adrenaline hit of cruelty and crassness, beyond slurs posing as wit. We have to mature into people who care. Who don’t dismiss our neighbour because they don’t vote the same as us.
Sure, maybe you drew a line, because your neighbour said something egregious. But the next day they brought soup. Then they made a remark that offended you. Then they loaned you their car. What do you do? Jump back and forth over the line? Filter their words to fit your world view, mimicking your computer, with its algorithmic choices made on your behalf?
Or, you accept your neighbour as is, warts and all. Knowing that we are all are bundles of ideas, loves and hurts, you choose spiritual growth over political alignment.