Emma shares thoughts on how words shape us. (This piece was originally published at Contemporary Christianity; republished here with permission.)
Regardless of the adage, words can and do hurt. They are powerful. Used as weapons to stoke combat or a tonic to soothe the soul, a single utterance can have a profound effect. Language, therefore, must be taken seriously.
When I was a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein’s famous quotation hung on my classroom wall: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”. While not an absolute truth, it gestures toward something undeniable — that words give shape to our understanding of life. Indeed, without them our very capacity to think is diminished.
Words matter — and it is precisely because they matter that we must approach them with care and gentle handling when it comes to matters of faith. Without realising it, our understanding of God is profoundly shaped through the words we choose. Take, as an example, descriptions of faith as a “journey”. There are many metaphors in the Bible that encourage this idea — references to walking, paths, races, to mention but a few. Together, these references have been taken to mean a sense of linearity, interpreting the “journey” of faith as a constantly forward motion.
As the years progress and I experience more of life, I find this reading increasingly unhelpful. For me, discipleship has a different dynamic — one I suspect you might recognise.
It goes like this: something happens, you make a mistake and things don’t go the way you want. There is internal struggle, but eventually, through prayer and petition, you come to a resolution. You feel you have succeeded. You have moved forward in your faith “journey”. Good. But then, sometime later, a different set of circumstances causes you to be right back at the start. Feelings of failure and doubt are the result because it seems you are not moving forward but backward. And suddenly you feel that the authenticity of your faith is being brought into question because your “progress” cannot be tracked, charted or logged as you have been led to believe.
And perhaps it is here that the real problem lies. Perhaps it is that notions of progression — success even — subliminally encourage us to believe that faith is measurable. And, as we bear witness to life’s struggles and experience, heart ache and pain, we can find ourselves “walking away” — a response which itself is shackled by such language. The language of linear progression fails us because it doesn’t capture the return. It skims over the recurrence and, most importantly, it can’t convey the supremacy of grace.
But what if we were to free ourselves of this analogy and lean-in to the cyclical nature of life and learning? Could the return, the redo, the repeat, strengthen faith rather than induce atrophy? Perhaps the call in Ephesians to be “still standing” when buffeted by life’s storms is a more helpful way to think. Rather than seeing ourselves as individuals questing forward, might it be more honest to say we are stumbling around? And maybe trying to help one another stay upright and minimise our movement is a deeper and more holy aspiration than it seems on the surface.
Yes, words are powerful. They condition as much as they contain us. Perhaps, after all, it isn’t sticks and stones that shape us most deeply, but the words that teach us how to stand.