by Major Philip Davisson
As anyone who has learned a second language can likely tell you, words are larger than their definitions. Words and their meanings also reflect the culture and experiences that gave birth to those words. You don’t get anywhere near fluency in a second language until you can begin to think in that language.
And when you begin to think in another language, you make another discovery: that the people born into this language-cultural milieu actually think differently than you do.* These differences are a big part of what is being reflected in the difference in vocabulary and grammar.
I reflect on this reality when I come to another observation: that even people using the same language and using the same words can sometimes mean very different things when they speak. These differences, too, reflect differences in experiences, and they can reveal a reality beyond surface similarities within a common culture. It is this hiddenness of meaning that I want to apply the subject about Christians opening doors to conversations with people who identify as part of the LGBTQ spectrum.
In particular, I am finding that our use of the phrase, “love the sinner but hate the sin,” is fraught with all sorts of misunderstanding due to experientially-derived differences in vocabulary.
“Love” seems to be a universally including word, while “hate” seems to be a universally excluding kind of word. We welcome those whom we love, and we try to love those whom we welcome. What we hate, we seek to eliminate or exclude, reject or otherwise usher out the door.
There is much more to say about that, but for now let me continue with what may be the real problem area: sinner and sin. Not the definitions of those words, which actually have rather universal agreement. When many of us in the Church use the word "sinner," we refer to a person. And with "sin," we refer to a behavior, action, and attitudes. We identify certain behaviors as sinful, and those who embrace such sins as sinners. Fair enough.
But I sense that the way we are using these words isn’t shared by the people we're trying to start conversations and build bridges with. When we say to the gay or lesbian person, for example, that we love you but hate what you’re doing, we are missing an incredibly important element.
That element is the interrelatedness between identity and sexuality. We are speaking words that draw a distinction between identity and activity, but the experiences of the other side in our dialogue draw the lines differently. The lines are drawn differently because of how each side in this stillborn dialogue has heard from the Church what is good and right about one significant aspect of identity, human sexuality.
While there is growing acknowledgement that human sexuality is an integral part of our existence as human beings, there remains an obstacle to a common vocabulary, a barrier that is related to whose existential experiences may be classified as good and right.
If we are to overcome this obstacle, the simple but difficult next step is to listen and really try to hear, to listen to the other person and to hear how their experiences have shaped the meanings of the words that we use. It’s a bit like trying to learn another language, where we need to begin to think in another language, which requires a level of attempting to experience reality from another perspective that is perhaps altogether alien from our own.
I suspect that if we were to make a regular practice of this task, then we who would seek to truly love LGBTQ persons would discover that our attempts at sending out love are not being received as love, words of welcome, and invitations to be included—but instead as messages of hate, words that exclude and prevent entrance into the place where we say God may be found.
We might find that what we describe as an optional or conditioned behavior that we label as sinful (and therefore to be eliminated) is really an integral part of our potential dialogue partner’s existential reality: there simply is no separation between who the person is and how their sexuality is realized; both are part of human existence, of fundamental identity.
When we say we will accept the homosexual person but not the same-sex sex, the experience of the other person in this instance is that the two elements are—as in every human being—so intertwined that they hear us saying we will simply not accept them. To reject their sexuality is to reject their personhood, their status as acceptable human beings.
If we succeed in opening this conversation beyond this kind of language, the benefit to our dialogue partners might be for them to come to appreciate some fears and anxieties some of us have about redrawing the lines sin and acceptability. Where or how does this redrawing project end? Are there any standards of morality we can agree upon? Is there no danger in letting go of what the Church has understood and taught for centuries?
We can't and shouldn’t minimize these real concerns; they need to be heard and understood. But we can and should come to the point where we are prepared to learn a new language and a new way of listening: with respect and the determination to find a shared reality and a way forward together.
Entire groups of people in Jesus’ time were excluded because of existential identity reasons. Most all of these revolved around issues of the body, and the prevailing religious authorities pronounced these people unclean. It was not that their activity or behavior was wrong—although inevitably by virtue of the outgrowth of their body “issues” their activities also were denounced—but that they, as people, were declared unclean and out-of-bounds and so excluded from the realm of good and right.
When we see how Jesus interacted with these excluded people, we observe something rather remarkable. He touched them. He ate with them. He included them. And without reservation; it wasn’t as if he healed them all and then declared them acceptable. It was as if he was redrawing the lines of acceptability, and drawing all people in with him.
+ + +
Major Philip Davisson is James Davisson's dad. He's an officer (clergy) in the Salvation Army, and he is in charge of distance learning at Booth University in Winnipeg, Canada.
*Note from James: what my dad is talking about is part of a linguistic idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically states that what language you speak can have an effect on how you think. The strongest version of the hypothesis states that your language can actually limit your ability to think about certain things. An example of this hypothesis in action: Spanish and German speakers are asked in a survey to come up with adjectives to describe the word "bridge." The word "bridge" in Spanish (el puente) is grammatically masculine (it uses the same grammatical categories as male animals and people), and in German (die Brücke), it's grammatically feminine. In the survey results, Spanish speakers tended to use stereotypically masculine language to describe the bridge, while German speakers used stereotypically feminine language. Thus, it seems that the grammar of the language has a subtle impact on speakers' perceptions.
Photo source:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/kasia_jot/50839702/
No comments:
Post a Comment