Speaking Love to Truth

Kindness begins with truth. Too often we suppose that truth largely exists in the realms of fact. That love is an emotion, and so fickle, and may cloud our judgment. And that faith fluctuates on band-waves of differing consistencies.  Facts are solid, consistent reliable, sure. Emotions and affairs of the heart are liable to oscillation and vacillation, and they waver across the undulating contours of human feeling.

I am not so sure, however. Some things known in the heart, so to speak, are not certain in the head by any means. Yet they are as certain as certain can be. Few facts prove love. Proof of love sends many signals, and they nearly all lack objectivity, rationality and even common sense. Human beings are complex creatures, and how we are known through our desires, and those that might desire us, will shape our self-understanding.  Humans are more than the sum of their parts.  We cannot be defined, even, except by the love we have received and given.

Kindness, the mystics says, begins with truth.  I have a proverb that I sometimes use to complement this, although is more of a ‘perverb’: ‘ignorance is never bliss’. So, how can kindness gestate without truth? I do not think it can.  But the question then arises, how does such truth – raw emotion, sometimes – come to express its integrity?  How does the abused person ‘speak’ truth to power structures, exactly? 

Ursula Le Guin makes a helpful distinction between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘father tongue’.  The ‘father tongue’ is the language of power: ‘spoken from above…it goes one way…no answer is expected or heard…’. U. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World:  Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Books, 1989), p. 149.The ‘father-tongue’ in the clinical language of the lecture theatre or the professions – it distances the emotions, passions and desires.  In contrast, ‘mother tongue’ is the language of the home.  It is, according to Le Guin, ‘inaccurate, coarse, limited, trivial, banal…earthbound, housebound, common speech, plebian, ordinary…’. Le Guin, Ibid., p. 149 .But for Le Guin, the ‘mother-tongue’ is also the language of connection and relationships; its power lies in uniting and binding, not dividing.  It is Le Guin’s contention that much public discourse, especially professional discourse within institutions, is a learned ‘father-tongue’ that deliberately marginalizes the realm of feelings and the scope of relationality.  She argues that a recovery of ‘mother-tongue’ within public discourse is an essential step for the reconstitution of public life, where ‘plain’ speaking can reclaim its proper value (or currency) as bona fide expression. 

It is often the case that in relationships where the expression of anger is denied its place, resentment festers and breeds, and true love is ultimately distorted.  Strong feelings need to be acknowledged for relationships to flourish.  If strong feelings on one or both sides have to be suppressed for the sake of a relationship, then it is rarely proper to speak of the relationship being mature or healthy.  In cases where sexual abuse has taken place, or some other abuse of power within the church (say on matters of gender, sexuality, or other ‘protected characteristic’ in law), the church often seeks the compliance of the abused, and rarely censures the abuser. Gentleness and love that is detached and self-sacrificing have often been held up as the virtues that Christians should be striving for.  Sometimes civility and peaceable-ness are paraded as ideals or archetypes for ongoing communion.

Now, civility is certainly an important virtue in the church, but often with little acknowledgement that the form and patterning of polity has normally been established by those in power, so that consciously and unconsciously their privileges are maintained.  At the same time, we may need to appreciate that anger and aggression are often correlated with violence and chaos, and their intimate connection with love is therefore not acknowledged.  The expression of passionate feelings, or perhaps of any feelings, is seen as a threat to the polity that maintains the power of an emotionally-detached rational faith.  The danger, as two feminist theologians, Harrison and Robb point out, is that

I am not so sure, however. Some things known in the heart, so to speak, are not certain in the head by any means. Yet they are as certain as certain can be. Few facts prove love. Proof of love sends many signals, and they nearly all lack objectivity, rationality and even common sense. Human beings are complex creatures, and how we are known through our desires, and those that might desire us, will shape our self-understanding.  Humans are more than the sum of their parts.  We cannot be defined, even, except by the love we have received and given.

Kindness, the mystics says, begins with truth.  I have a proverb that I sometimes use to complement this, although is more of a ‘perverb’: ‘ignorance is never bliss’. So, how can kindness gestate without truth? I do not think it can.  But the question then arises, how does such truth – raw emotion, sometimes – come to express its integrity?  How does the abused person ‘speak’ truth to power structures, exactly? 

Ursula Le Guin makes a helpful distinction between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘father tongue’.  The ‘father tongue’ is the language of power: ‘spoken from above…it goes one way…no answer is expected or heard…’. U. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World:  Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Books, 1989), p. 149.The ‘father-tongue’ in the clinical language of the lecture theatre or the professions – it distances the emotions, passions and desires.  In contrast, ‘mother tongue’ is the language of the home.  It is, according to Le Guin, ‘inaccurate, coarse, limited, trivial, banal…earthbound, housebound, common speech, plebian, ordinary…’. Le Guin, Ibid., p. 149 .But for Le Guin, the ‘mother-tongue’ is also the language of connection and relationships; its power lies in uniting and binding, not dividing.  It is Le Guin’s contention that much public discourse, especially professional discourse within institutions, is a learned ‘father-tongue’ that deliberately marginalizes the realm of feelings and the scope of relationality.  She argues that a recovery of ‘mother-tongue’ within public discourse is an essential step for the reconstitution of public life, where ‘plain’ speaking can reclaim its proper value (or currency) as bona fide expression. 

It is often the case that in relationships where the expression of anger is denied its place, resentment festers and breeds, and true love is ultimately distorted.  Strong feelings need to be acknowledged for relationships to flourish.  If strong feelings on one or both sides have to be suppressed for the sake of a relationship, then it is rarely proper to speak of the relationship being mature or healthy.  In cases where sexual abuse has taken place, or some other abuse of power within the church (say on matters of gender, sexuality, or other ‘protected characteristic’ in law), the church often seeks the compliance of the abused, and rarely censures the abuser. Gentleness and love that is detached and self-sacrificing have often been held up as the virtues that Christians should be striving for.  Sometimes civility and peaceable-ness are paraded as ideals or archetypes for ongoing communion.

Now, civility is certainly an important virtue in the church, but often with little acknowledgement that the form and patterning of polity has normally been established by those in power, so that consciously and unconsciously their privileges are maintained.  At the same time, we may need to appreciate that anger and aggression are often correlated with violence and chaos, and their intimate connection with love is therefore not acknowledged.  The expression of passionate feelings, or perhaps of any feelings, is seen as a threat to the polity that maintains the power of an emotionally-detached rational faith.  The danger, as two feminist theologians, Harrison and Robb point out, is that

‘We need to recognize that where the evasion of feeling is widespread, anger does not go away or disappear.  Rather, in interpersonal life it masks itself as boredom, ennui, low energy, or it expresses itself in passive-aggressive activity or in low moralistic self-righteousness and blaming.  Anger denied subverts community.  Anger expressed directly is a mode of taking the other seriously, of caring.  The important point is that where feeling is evaded, where anger is hidden or goes unattended, masking itself, there the power of love, the power to act, to deepen relation, atrophies and dies’ B. Harrison & C. Robb, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), p. 15.