Mean What You Say and Say What You Mean

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

March 25, 2007

I wonder how many of you remember the old Gershwin tune?

I guess quite a few of you do! Like many of George and Ira's tunes, it's a nice little ditty with memorable lyrics that stick in our brains much longer, it seems, than some of the things that we might think are more important to remember. Like the fact that it's our turn to pick up the kids after school, or that today's our partner's birthday. But also like many of the Gershwin brothers' tunes, this one confronted, in an accessible way, a serious social issue. In this case, the difference in the way our two characters pronounce "either" and "eyether" and "neither and "neyether" reflect a difference in ethnic background and social class. The cultured and refined, of course, say "tomahto" while the unwashed and uncouth say "tomato." And it's easy to separate the lofty from the lowly, simply based on how they speak.

The exchange between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in our song is, of course, an oversimplification and a gross generalization about how our use of language -- whether it's our accent, our pronunciation, or our vocabulary -- tells something about who we are and the way we think. But it illustrates a truth that is inescapable: the way we communicate is a complex web that is woven from multiple strands, from the words we use, our intonation, our posture, our expressions, and a host of other factors that are subject to interpretation and, of course, misinterpretation.

There is perhaps no better laboratory in which to study the complexity of the art of communication than with the emails that we send and receive every day. I would venture to guess that most, if not all, of us have sent emails that we thought were funny or ironic or playful, only to have the recipient take offense. And I know I've received my fair share of emails that I have interpreted to be aggressive or aloof when the sender had no intention of seeming so. It is virtually impossible to convey emotions via the computer, no matter how many smiley faces you paste at the end of your message. This is because communication of emotions is not content-driven. In fact, scientists have shown that only seven percent of effective communication comes through the words we use. Seven percent! We communicate far more, some 38 percent, through our tone of voice and even more, about 55 percent, through our body language. Think about that the next time you are about to hit the "send" button on your computer.

When you start to look at the complexity of communication, it's surprising that we ever get anything done, and not at all shocking that mistakes and misunderstandings between us are rampant. Communications theorists tell us that in a simple, two sentence exchange between two people, where one makes a statement and the other person responds, there are four places where communication errors can occur, and at each place there is a multitude of potential sources of those errors. Social scientists estimate that between 40 and 60 percent of meaning is lost in any exchange between two individuals. And this is in a face-to-face setting. Some of the factors that influence the effectiveness of our communications include cultural differences, personal biases, the emotional state of the parties and the vocabulary we use. Each phrase we utter, accompanied as it is by gestures, facial expressions and intonation, provides the listener with countless opportunities to interpret, translate, and decode our message according to his or her own emotional, physical, psychological and cultural state.

I'm reminded here of an exercise we were required to do in law school. We were broken up in to two groups of about 6 students each. One group was dismissed from the room while the other watched a videotape of a traumatic event; an automobile accident or an assault or a bank robbery. The first group of students was brought back into the room and asked to interview each of the "witnesses" to what they had just seen. We were supposed to discover the truth of what had just happened on the tape through the statements of the witnesses. It sounds simple enough. But I can tell you that the variety of the accounts among the different witnesses was astounding. No two witnesses described the same thing. Some noticed things that others did not, while others dismissed apparently significant events as trivial. The ability of each person to relate his or her perception of the events they had seen varied widely, and was clearly subject to their own particular perspective and interpretation. The last part of this exercise then required the interviewers to compare the notes they had taken while talking to the witnesses. And you can guess the variations that we found among that group. Some captured every last detail of a witnesses' statement, while others painted in broad brush strokes, leaving large gaps in specifics.

If we have this much trouble communicating with each other about concrete events and the mundane aspects of our everyday lives, think how hard it is to relate to one another on questions and experiences of deep meaning. How do we describe an experience we may have had of a transcendent moment, when, for the briefest time, we felt an intimate connection with all that is? What words do we use to tell someone how we felt standing on a mountaintop, where the only sound was the whistling of the wind through the trees, and we sensed our link to the ancient tribal peoples who lived there thousands of years ago? What tools do we have to convey to someone our feeling of being held in a warm and loving embrace of a greater Presence when we were in fear for our life? How do we talk to each other about what it is we believe about the nature of ourselves, about life and death and our place in the universe, about the ancient mysteries that will never be solved? I am speaking here, of course, about religious things, spiritual things, about those things of ultimate importance. Questions of faith and our eternal yearnings.

As Unitarian Universalists we are doubly handicapped in this arena. Those who belong to other, more conservative religious traditions are handed vocabulary and narratives through which they discover their place and their way in the world. The stories of Genesis and Exodus give Jews a creation story that orders God, Man, Woman and Beast, and a tale of victory over hardship and escape to freedom from slavery. The story of the Passion of Jesus provides Christians with faith in life everlasting. Buddhists have the Wheel, whose turning stands for the endless cycle of samsara, with the spokes representing the Buddha's eight-fold path. As Unitarian Universalists we have no such narratives, no persistent symbols (save, perhaps the flaming chalice). And when I say we are doubly challenged I mean that while we have no unifying narrative, many of us also stand over and against the symbols, traditions and stories of our personal religious pasts. And thus we share little in the way of a common religious heritage or background, but for the common experience of disillusionment and rejection. We proudly assert our heritage of heresy and the diversity of our beliefs, but are reluctant to share that which is deepest within us.

It is, I think, a failing of our faith, that we too often allow our members to stand in this place of rejection, in this place of claiming with clarity all that they do not believe while failing to give them the tools they need to discover and articulate those things which they hold most dear. We are enablers in a co-dependent dance that condemns us to forever skirt the difficult questions of where we come from, why we are here, what happens after this? In rejecting creeds and statements of faith and providing a wide path for personal belief and expression, we risk becoming nothing more than a group of well-meaning people who claim they are "spiritual but not religious" and who gather for mutual support and intellectual stimulation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote: "A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming." If I might be so bold, I'd like to amend the last line of Saint Ralph's words, and say that it behooves us to discover and discuss what we worship, so that what we are becoming we shall become with clarity and intention.

Unitarian Universalism is unique among the world's religious traditions. Here we have the freedom to drink from the wells of all of human experience and to discover our own deep pool of meaning. We are not confined by rigid dogma to a single doctrine that stands as a test for membership. Here we are at liberty to grow and mature in our lives and in our faith. Here we are not required to check our rational minds at the door, but rather we're encouraged to search for truth, using reason and experience as our guide.

With this freedom, however, comes a great responsibility. Because we have been handed a faith that empowers us to find our own religious path, so are we charged with the obligation to walk that path, together. Our quest for truth and meaning is not a solitary search. We cannot hoard our stock of provisions for ourselves, nor may we sit idly on the sidelines watching others pass us by. By joining this faith tradition we are committing ourselves to providing mutual support, encouragement and sustenance in our pursuit of salvation.

What? Wait a minute? Did he say what I think he said? I know I saw some of you sit up and take notice when I used the "S" word. And yes, I did just say that we are in pursuit of salvation. I used that word with intention, not to see if you were listening or to get a rise out of you (well, maybe to get a little rise out of you). But I used that word to bring us back to the question of language. Although, as I said earlier, effective communication depends on a whole host of factors that influence both the speaker and the listener, ultimately language -- the words we use and how we use them -- is our stock in trade. Certainly there are other ways we can communicate with each other -- through art, through music, through performance -- but for most of us, the spoken word is our primary vehicle for relating. And it is in the realm of the word, both spoken and written, where we discover perhaps the most significant challenge facing us as Unitarian Universalists. How do we, as a religiously diverse community, reclaim religious language to describe, enrich and inform our religious experiences?

The first step on the road to recovering religious language is to agree among ourselves that, like other words, words of deep meaning like "sin," "salvation," "prayer," and even "God" mean different things to different people. There is, I submit, no one correct definition of sin. Prayer can mean different things to different people. The word "God" is, like all other words, a symbol imbued with the meaning that we give it. These words have no power over us unless we allow them to. And we have allowed the conservative and fundamentalist religionists to claim exclusive use of them for far too long. I would venture to guess that some of you have listened to the lyrics of the Mendelssohn pieces performed today, with their references to "Lord" and "God" with some degree of discomfort. That's because we assign to these word-symbols the meaning that others have assigned to them. Consider how differently you might hear those words had you defined them for yourselves.

The second step, then, is to imbue these terms with the meanings that we are prepared to give them. As religious liberals, we will not institutionally prescribe meaning to these terms. There is not, nor should there ever be, a Unitarian Universalist dictionary that defines for everyone the meaning of religious terms. Instead, we must each engage in the task of deciding for ourselves what it means to sin and what salvation looks like. Who or what is God to you? This is the task of "meaning what we say."

And finally, because our faith encourages the individual search for truth within the context of community, we have an obligation to each other to explain what we mean when we use any so-called language of reverence. This responsibility, I'll point out, cuts both ways. When I use a term like "God" or "prayer," I should be prepared to explain it, and when you hear me say "God" or "prayer," you have an obligation to seek clarification and learn what that word-symbol means to me, rather than to interpret it according to your formulation or in the context of your religious past. This is the task of "saying what we mean." Forrest Church, senior minister of All Souls Church in New York City, models this process beautifully when he tells of an encounter with a hospital patient with whom he was visiting. "I don't believe in God," the patient told him. Church responded, "Tell me about this God you don't believe in. I probably don't believe in that God either."

A few years ago, in an address that he titled ""Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence," the Rev. David Bumbaugh said, "We have manned the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of the mind. But in the process...we have lost...the ability to speak of that which is sacred, holy, of ultimate importance to us." I believe that we can and should recover this ability, that we can and should reclaim the language we need to describe the deep, transcendent experiences of our lives. I believe that it is possible. I believe we can start today.

"If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?

Go there now."

Blessed Be and Amen.

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