I was recently introduced to the work of the poet Ocean Vuong through his newest book, “Time is a Mother.” His poetry is vivid and powerful, but one poem in particular made an impact on me. Titled “Old Glory”, it is a collection of popular phrases and idioms that reveal how much violence lies under the surface of the English language. It begins with these words: “Knock ‘em dead, big guy. Go in there / guns blazing, buddy. You crushed / at the show. No, it was a blowout. No, / a massacre. Total overkill.” Seeing it on the page in front of me, I laughed. When all these phrases are strung together, they appear truly ridiculous. But I was also horrified. Reading the whole poem adds weight to the words many of us throw around flippantly without thinking. It leads us to ask the question, “why is our everyday language filled with so much violence?”
There seems to be something distinctly American about many of these phrases, accurately reflecting the pervasive violence we live with everyday, as well as the violence we outsource to other nations. I spent yesterday processing with a friend the recent shooting that happened at Ingraham high school. Her teenage daughter is best friends with a student at Ingraham, and they were texting back and forth while her friend was under her desk. The day it happened, a member of Sanctuary also texted me a picture of his cousin waiting in the parking lot of Ingraham for his kid. Violence is already a part of our lives. Every week we hear about school shootings, racialized violence, or the death of yet another trans person.
This is a reality I try not to think about, but events like the shooting this week reminds me that I can’t shut it out. It is not only a part of our everyday lived experience, but is also embedded in our language. Our language is shaped by the reality we live in, but language also shapes reality itself. It creates meaning as it is spoken, influencing the way we think and the possibilities that are available to us. So if we don’t possess language for a more hopeful reality, then how could we possibly conceive it to bring this reality into fruition?
As a church, we share a particular vocabulary with particular meaning. So we have this unique challenge of investigating our own language and asking whether it can contribute to creating a more hopeful reality. And this week, I came across these words, attributed to Jesus, from the Gospel of John: “take courage, I have conquered the world.” Immediately I felt sick. I thought about the legacy of Christianity joined with imperialism and colonialism. I thought about how much of the world has been conquered in the name of Christ, and how that legacy has contributed to the violent culture of America we live in today. I wonder if there isn’t a direct connection between “conquering in the name of Christ” and the high rates of gun violence in the US.
But of course as we view Jesus’ words in the context of his life, teaching, and coming death, this makes no sense. Either something has been lost in translation, or Jesus meant something completely different. I can’t make sense of such violent language being used by someone who was so clearly anti-violence to articulate one of the most hopeful messages I’ve ever heard. But Jesus often played with language, stretching the boundaries of words and, in many cases, completely re-defining them outside of the systems they lived in.
How do you make sense of this? As you examine the everyday language you use and our shared cultural language as a church, what do you wish to keep and what do you wish to discard? If language shapes reality, what kind of reality is the language of Jesus creating?
Text for tomorrow: