Our word, our world

As the Maker spoke amid the chaos, creation sprang forth into being. He spoke light on the first day, and other creatures in the succeeding days.

When the time came, He announced that He would make man, and proceeded in silence to do so. He formed man out of dust, and blew into him the divine breath.

The Maker made man in His image and likeness. Whereas He spoke creation into existence, He gifted man with the power to name. The Maker presented to man, Adam, each bird of the air and beast of the field, and each came to be known by whatever he called it.

Maker and man share the potency to shape reality through the spoken word.

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I had the honor of attending in April, the middle of spring, the evening birthday celebration of an acquaintance in Amsterdam, Netherlands. On the occasion, I met fellow guests who pursued language-related university degrees.

Over chicken, cheese, sushi, chocolate, wine and beer, our conversation drifted from trivia to topics like the flow of elements across cultures or cultural appropriation (there were Americans, Germans, a Pole, a Dutchman, a Montenegrin and myself, a Filipino in the room), complimenting versus catcalling and the therapeutic use of language.

The local, an adept in counseling, said people’s circumstances depend on the words they keep. Most in the group, familiar with cognitive neuroscience agreed. Words facilitate understanding. Understanding can motivate behavior. Utterances can heal.

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Foul language seems to have become fashionable in the Philippines with the advent of a Chief Executive who has cursed everyone from criminals to the United Nations (UN). A vast crowd hails the official profanity. We prefer action-oriented, frank vulgarity, they aver, to courteous prattle.

Such reasoning belies facts. First, to speak involves a speaker and is therefore to act. Speech per se does not just promise action. Often it configures the architecture of communication towards implosion or communion. Branding an interlocutor a “son of a bitch” sows conflict. Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte so labeled the UN in response to the possibility, broached by the press, that he may be held liable for breaking international conventions given his disdain for human rights. Unfortunate word choice, Mayor. The nation you will soon serve as President is a founding member of the global institution that happens to be adjudicating our tug-of-war with China over parts of the Spratly Islands.

Second, crude verbiage sits neither with sincerity nor authenticity that go with truth and ultimately belong to the same class as goodness and beauty.

One can be sincere in praise, love, regret or thanksgiving. One does not, however, qualify dispositions like belligerence, irreverence and disrespect as sincere. Cursing everything from poor public service to undisciplined compatriots, as the incoming administration is wont to do, embolden Filipinos to follow suit, but it is not a virtue. The ability to say “putang ina mo” is no criterion for being honest or real. It is but self-indulgence, abuse of language that certainly will not improve our lot but only help cast a reality so grim, shouting “death to the sons of bitches” and resorting to martial law become seductive solutions.

Finally, noble speech characterizes genuine servant-leaders before it dribbles off the lips of crooks who plagiarize it. Broken political promises break lives.

Foulmouthed leadership wreaks politico-moral havoc. Our heroes settled for and our people deserve neither. To our President-elect who professes an aspiration for heroism: “True piety is the act of being charitable, loving one’s fellowmen, and being judicious in behavior, speech and deed,” heroes Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto wrote. “To a man with a sense of shame, his word is inviolate.” Let us refrain from making execrable pronouncements that only pander to the attention deficit of the wicked. Look where no one looks, in the silence, in the ordinary that has kept this land going. There you will find heroes, like the men we will celebrate tomorrow, Father’s Day. They are worth our words of gratitude. They are worth our song.

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Our words are symbols of the Word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and in him we live and move and have our being. So said the apostles, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Paul of Tarsus.

When the Word walked the Holy Land, Saint Matthew recorded, He said, “I tell you, on the day of judgement you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”