Beyond Language

Can you force someone to learn another language? The answer to this question is more complex than one might expect. Setting aside a person’s age and natural predisposition for learning languages, if they have one, which they may not, the question pertains to that crucial element of empathy which enables commonality between persons. Commonality between persons has to do with empathy, and empathy is felt most strongly through a spoken language, and through the languages of art and music. Commonality between persons makes for a cohesive society. But you cannot force empathy and you cannot bring about commonality by forcing people to learn your language, especially if you are reluctant to learn theirs. Language is always two way traffic. Furthermore, if you speak another person’s language fluently you understand what makes them tick, so you are disposed to trust them, at least initially. I can vouche for this personally, as I grew up speaking both French and English, and later Spanish, fluently.

The danger which really faces us, when it comes to obliging refugees or asylum seekers to learn English lies in the area of the kind of trust which comes with understanding. Our problem is that we cannot trust those whose first language is not English. We are instinctively wary of those who sound 'foreign', and even more wary of those who look foreign as well. I think this has to do with our subconscious defensiveness as an island nation. We have, until fairly recently, looked out on the world from behind the ramparts of our own unassailed cultural context.

Those who live in a closed cultural context not only stifle their own cultural growth, they kill it off. Closed cultural contexts, or sectarian movements, down the centuries have revealed, at some cost to human life, that no society, whether secular or religious, can survive if it is sustained by a spirit of fear. This, incidentally, is true of the Church today, especially the Anglican Communion whose life is riven by sectarianism.

Perhaps what David Cameron is trying to do, in a rather clumsy way, is to oblige those whose first language is not English to help us feel less afraid of them. He may be on to something, but he is proposing a one sided equation. As far as possible, anyone with the slightest disposition for language needs to learn Arabic and Urdu, not to mention French, Spanish and German if we are to begin to understand what makes others tick. It is not just a question of ‘foreigners’ being obliged to learn English.

It is only when we get a glimmer of the kind of understanding which comes with bi-lingual fluency that we can begin to communicate effectively. Effective communication is a matter of both speaking and listening. When a person’s attention is taken up by the desire to understand what another person actually means, that person will have less time, and be less disposed, for acts of violence. Where there is speaking and listening at the deeper level of fluency, we are in the same room, so to speak.

This does not imply that we will agree about everything, but we may find areas of agreement and commonality that we never had thought of. Even if they seem irrelevant to the contentious issue itself, they will afford an opportunity for us to hate each other a little less, and so be in less of a hurry to destroy each other because, for a moment at least, we are all a little less afraid of each other.

The institutional Church should of course be leading the way here, but it is killing itself off in its own unwillingness to arrive at some kind of bi-lingual spiritual fluency. Issues of plain injustice, not to mention cruelty, have made this almost impossible. The institutional Church is way past the stage where the kind of shared language I am speaking of could solve its problems. Added to this, is the obvious fact that it has so far departed from the language of its founder, in so many areas of its life, that its continued existence as an institution is in question.

But it is not too late for our nation to learn trust and to inspire it in others, especially when we remember that the vast majority of people who seek asylum here, as well as a better life, wish us nothing but good. Our fearfulness, even when it is understandable, given the violence we have seen in both France and Germany, diminishes us.

 

Loving as we should: The future of the Anglican Communion

Leaders of the Anglican Communion will meet next week for five more days of intense discussion about its future. I say more, because this is not the first of such meetings, and previous ones have seldom produced much in the way of genuine reconciliation. This being said, the next meeting will, as in the past, achieve good things in other areas to be covered in its agenda. Items are likely to include the problem of religious violence and the ever growing problem of violence against women and children (the two often belong together), the environment, and yet another attempt to arrive at a shared ethos concerning human sexuality, along with a corresponding re-configuration of the Communion's structural life.

It would be easy to think of this meeting as being about the things which matter, as well as those that matter less. But what you think matters, and what you think matters less, will depend to some extent on who you are and where you stand in relation to other Anglicans. If you are a traditionalist, what really matters is that the Bible’s teaching on sexuality be respected and fully adhered to. If you are a liberal, you will be aware of how conditioned we are by our specific cultures (what is called contextuality), that the bible is a library and not a book and that its various books had a particular editorial bias. You will want compassion and the hospitality of mercy to prevail.

Both of these broadly delineated parties will know that while whatever is resolved in relation to the other issues on the meeting’s agenda (the things which seem to matter less) may lead to good things happening in the medium term future.  But they will also know, if they are honest about it, that the example the Communion is setting in terms of its own relations and, specifically, how it treats its gay and transgendered people, diminishes its credibility in many of these other vitally important areas.

The problem of how to heal the Communion’s divisions is not, as many think, one of unity for the sake of unity. It is much more subtle than that, and much harder to resolve. Papering over differences has been proved to be a waste of time. It doesn’t work, because arriving at functional unity, whatever form that takes is not going to make us love each other as we should.

Furthermore, most people, if they have heard of the Anglican Communion at all, do not in the least care about how it orders its life structurally.  They care, if they care at all, about the kind of leadership which the world needs to see coming from the Church, a leadership which is always subject to the commandments to love mercy and justice and to walk humbly with God. This kind of leadership brings about a very different kind of unity. We might, incidentally, benefit from seeing more of it in the context of the debate over the UK’s membership of the European Union. The nation waits for its Church to set the example.

So what might be a possible way forward? Archbishop Justin Welby hopes and prays for wisdom and that the Communion will learn, in its separate camps, ‘to love each other as we should’. Loving each other is not simply a matter of settling differences, as the Archbishop rightly points out. It is a matter of transcending difference. We do this by confronting the fear which for more than two decades has dominated the Communion’s internal relationships, stunted its spiritual life and diminished its credibility in the world to the point of near non-existence.

There is only one way to overcome this deeply destructive fear and that is to look fear in the eye by ‘becoming’ the person, or group one fears most. So the liberal looks the traditionalist in the eye and experiences at the deepest level of their being what it feels like to be that person, shaped within a specific context and faced with me, a liberal. The same is true in reverse; the traditionalist makes himself vulnerable (most of those present will be men, hence the masculine pronoun) from the place where trust can inhabit the human heart. Both parties are prepared, for the sake of Christ who loves us all, to ‘hurt’ there, to lose face, or even to feel that he has betrayed his Church. These feelings will not last long because the activity of grace works at an astonishing speed.

Voltaire wrote that ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. The Church is called to be like God.