Pop 89: Plenty of mystery for everyone
By Madonna Hamel
I’m reading the works of the Franciscan Richard Rohr. I like how he talks about Mystery. He says we know we are at the heart of Mystery when dualities disappear. And “while the human mind naturally splits reality into opposing categories (right/wrong, us/them, good/bad), true spirituality requires holding the paradox to see the underlying unity.”
Our world and some of its so-called leaders seem hooked on keeping us at odds with each other with their language. Highly polarized rhetoric makes aggression look inevitable. It’s particularly adept at convincing some of us that “resources” are scarce, that there’s not enough to go around, so get while the gettin’s good.
The people who use such language are cowards because they are inaccessible. While they turn what should be compassion into contempt, buffered by flaks, security, and sycophants, they sling spite-filled language at people they have never met—and will never meet—in the lobbies of hotels and casinos, at cocktail parties, in limos, on private jets.
The trough between caring and blaming deepens with every hateful word they speak. This type of violent language online is termed "blamespeak" or “flaming.” It aims at dehumanizing target groups and inflaming an "us vs. them” violent language that is increasingly leading to physical violence.
It’s time to “call out the gaps between rhetoric and reality” in a sane and dignified manner, our prime minister said recently in a long-overdue speech, echoing words Pope Leo has been repeating since his call for “a disarming language” on his first day on the Vatican balcony.
The oft-brilliant and always acerbic social commentator-comic Bill Maher, like our prime minister and the pope, harangues us to be more careful with our words, though he claims language can’t be violent, only encourage violence. My etymological dictionary would beg to differ: under the word “violence” I find the synonyms “vehement” and “forceful.”
One thing Maher and I do agree on: every hotel room should have a dictionary. While on the road recently, I reached for the Gideon Bible in the hotel bedside table, and there wasn’t one. I’m not sure who is threatened by the presence of a free Bible in a drawer, but many hotels no longer have them. Fine, I thought: if a Bible is too threatening, how about a dictionary?
Whether addressing diplomats, members of the media, or his fellow cardinals, Pope Leo insists we take care with our words. In his “state of the world” address, he said: “Rediscovering the meaning of words is perhaps the greatest challenge.”
He urged us to resist and be alert to “the contortions of linguistic ambiguity.” He exhorted members of the media “to be sowers of good words, amplifiers of voices that courageously seek reconciliation by disarming hearts of hatred and fanaticism. In a fragmented and polarized world, be the antennas that capture and relay the experiences of the vulnerable, the marginalized, those who are alone and who long to know the joy of feeling loved.”
He reminded us that, in order “to confront this era marked—including in the field of communication—by the rise of artificial intelligence, it is urgent to return to matters of the heart, to the centrality of good relationships, and to the ability to connect with others, without excluding anyone. This urgent need finds its answer in the service of truth.
To know one another, we must meet without being intimidated by differences, ready to be challenged for who we are and what we believe.” He encouraged us “to be seekers of truth,” “artisans of a word that embraces,” “a balm for the wounds of humanity.”
But how do we re-unite through communication? We could start by not suffering under the assumption and delusion that only inflammatory language gets heard. We can remind ourselves, like Pope Francis reminded Leo, to keep our sense of humour.
Just last night my brother and I were talking about humour. He figures, as long as he keeps his sense of humour, he’ll get through this tough post-stroke time of “beehive brain” and “pinball eyeballs.” It occurred to me, as we were talking, that true hearty laughter is another way to dissolve dualities. The great mystery of genuine humour is when we can all laugh together with each other, not at each other.
We also spoke about our souls. How we mustn’t drop the words that speak on behalf of the wounded soul. And how we keep seeking the places where spirit and soul still matter, still thrive—in nature, poetry, song and theology, as well as humour.
Pope Leo has warned us that a "new Orwellian-style language" is developing in the West, referring to the ways language is being used to confuse people and to justify, as well as obfuscate, ugly behaviour.
I remember studying Orwell’s “1984” alongside Huxley’s “Brave New World” in my British Lit class in the late 1970s. (Just around the time “citizens” were being referred to, more often, as “consumers.”) Not long afterward, the cultural critic Neil Postman compared the two novels in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
Postman wrote: “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, with an infinite appetite for distraction,” and that people ultimately would “come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
Postman believed that Huxley, not Orwell was right. But I believe, sadly, they both were. Fortunately, we don’t need to choose between either. We can disarm, walk away from the “us vs them” fray. We can tune our antennae to humour and soul, united in the bountiful, infinite language of a shared Mystery.