Have you ever seen a ferry coming into dock?
It is an impressive and frightening sight – especially if the ferry, like many such boats, is huge – designed to transport a great number of commuters, tourists, not to mention all of their cars, and a often a truck or two delivering goods.
The ferry pilot’s intention is good – his job is to dock the boat safely. But to do so, he must thread a dangerous needle. He must contend with the ocean and the wind – two unpredictable and uncontrollable forces that could, at any moment, shift the boat off course. The dock may have some give to it, and the hull of the ship may be made out of steel, but the fact remains that if the ship comes in too fast or at the wrong angle very bad things can happen.
Millions of dollars of damage, or, worse yet, loss of life.
Now I want to jump into the head of the pilot of that ferry for a moment. Even though I have never piloted a massive ferry boat I am willing to bet I know what is going on in his head.
He knows all the things that I have just said about the dangers involved with this maneuver. He knows a lot more too. He has been well trained. And I bet that, at one time, when he was still a rookie, he was obsessively concerned about these frightening details. But now that he is a seasoned mariner he is pretty casual about the whole thing. He can set aside these anxieties and depend, instead, upon an instinctual awareness of the forces that he was working with. He can almost do it in his sleep – this, in spite of the undeniable fact that messing up would be an unmitigated disaster.
Though the scale is much smaller, and stakes are infinitely less frightening, parallel parking a car uses the same guiding principle. The car becomes a physical extension of my body in space, and over time I have developed an instinct that helps me tweak the wheel in just the right way to move it as needed. Sure, it’s possible to misjudge things, and hit another car, or, worse yet, a person… but thankfully, these things rarely happen.
Knock on wood.
Have you ever been driving down the highway at 75 miles an hour, and found yourself suddenly stricken with the fact that you are actually driving down the highway at 75 miles an hour? In that moment, you suddenly become aware of the fact that one wrong move – one jerk of the wheel, would send you over the median, into the path of the oncoming 18 wheeler.
Ugh!
I don’t like this kind of awareness.
As soon as I realize that my mind is going to this place, I take immediate evasive action. I put on some good music or an engaging audiobook or call Cary on the phone. If I go too far down this rabbit hole of being aware of danger, it makes me overly concerned with danger, which, itself, is very dangerous. It’s much safer to ignore it and let instinct take over.
Isn’t that weird? It’s weird and fascinating.
It is a strange thing to think that, in some circumstances, not all, mind you, but some – it is safer to ignore the true consequences of what one is doing, than it is to be fully aware of them.
In my world, this feels wrong.
It seems to me that if the intention of the ferry pilot is to keep everyone on board safe, he should be obsessively aware of the danger he is flirting with.
But in this case, I think it’s true that the pilot’s good intention is best served by being free of the anxiety that the danger brings with it, so that he can, instead, use his practiced skill to casually bring the boat to dock.
*
I got to thinking about all of this because the passage that Deb just read for us uses the metaphor of a ship being steered by a pilot. The passage concerns itself, of all things, with the tongue – that modestly sized, often hidden, but always significant part of our bodies.
The passage from the Book of James says that the tongue is like the rudder of a ship:
look at ships: the text says… though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.
In my fanciful wanderings on this subject so far today, I have obsessed about the external dangers – the things that James sums up in the phrase “driven by the strong winds..” Both James and I marvel at the remarkable way that humans can be the master of such dangerous situations, bending them to our intent.
The elegant and memorable thing about what James is getting at, is that, as a rudder is to a ship, the tongue is a relatively small part of the body – and both of these things, though small, have out-sized influences on the destiny of the much larger body to which they are attached.
The reason for this is that, in the case of both the rudder and the tongue, though they are small, they interact with the surrounding context. The rudder interacts with the water of the ocean on behalf of the ship, steering it clear of rocks and stormy seas, and the tongue communicates with other people on behalf of the individual.
Since we have tongues and not rudders, let’s focus our attention on the tongue.
The tongue is the muscle we use to express ourselves. It harnesses the movement of air and the vibration of the vocal chords and it transforms them into words that have meaning. This meaning, in turn, expresses our intention – or at least it does most of the time.
Our intention can be good, indifferent, or evil.
James, for his part, fixates on how nefarious the tongue can be. He is quite eloquent about it:
The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of life, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue–a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
It’s odd. James seems to give the tongue its own free will that is independent from the intent of the person who has it in his or her mouth. The tongue, according to James, is a wild thing that can be depended upon to wreak the most dreadful mischief.
Thus far, this morning, we have been concerned entirely with intention. The intention of the ferry boat pilot to safely dock his immense vessel; the intention of the driver to avoid hitting an oncoming truck; the intention of the individual to represent herself well to the rest of the world.
But now, James shifts our focus away from the realm of intent to the realm of impact.
If we are talking about a conversation – since that is what tongues do, engage in conversations…
Intent is what I mean
And impact is what you hear.
Needless to say, James has a pretty dim view of the impact that my tongue has on you.
He is not alone in this. Jesus told his disciples, on several occasions, that they should be less concerned about what they eat, then what they say.
After one particularly angry exchange with the Pharisees, in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew, for example,
“Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
The generalization that both James and Jesus make with these claims, is that the words that are spoken by our mouths and tongues have a negative impact on the world.
Well, this is certainly not the case… we are capable of opening our mouths and saying things that have a positive impact on the world. I don’t think that Jesus or James would disagree with that.
There is, nevertheless, a crucial spiritual lesson to understand in all this that is, I think, particularly valuable for our generation to carefully attend to.
This morning we have analyzed the act of communication itself.
We have said that, on the one hand there is what we intend to say
And on the other hand, there is the impact that our words have on others.
Sometimes intention and impact match up.
But often they do not.
This is nothing new – back in the day, we just called it a “misunderstanding.”
But in the fall of 2024, we find ourselves in an increasingly polarized and contentious social and political environment…
It almost goes without saying that when we interact with others – especially strangers – we are guarded. Before we know anything about what the other person believes, or who they might vote for, we make assumptions. We put our dukes up. We start from a defensive stance.
It’s like we are starting from a place of misunderstanding.
How can any real communication happen in such a setting? How do we connect with each other and nourish each other as we need to do in order to feel safe and be fulfilled?
Our judgment in these matters tends to be self centered. We judge others based on the bad impact that we think they will have on us, and we judge ourselves according to the good intention we think we have for them.
I think that both James and Jesus want to flip this thought process.
If we begin with humility – with the concern that our intention (the words that come out of our mouths) are likely to be misunderstood and possibly cause harm, we will choose our words with more care.
If we begin with humility – with the openness to hear what moves the soul of the other person – what their hopes and anxieties are – then we may be in less danger of misunderstanding them.
And if, in spite of being careful, we are still misunderstood, our job is not to get defensive. Humility allows us to set aside our egos so that we can listen and learn.
And if, in spite of being open, we are still offended, humility allows us to think carefully about what we have heard and try to understand where it comes from.
When it comes to communication, we are not in control of what others do.
But we are in control of what we do.
The spiritual lesson that I think both James and Jesus are advocating, is that if we start from a place of misunderstanding, we will harm and be harmed.
But if we start from a place of humility, we at least have some hope of being nourished by a deeper understanding of the other person, and how their hopes and concerns, though different from yours, are still very real.
Amen.