LANGUAGE

Fr Jim Cogley

I read the story recently of a boy who was eating an apple in the back seat of a car. He asked his dad who was driving as to why the apple was already beginning to go brown as he was eating it. The father replied. ‘When you remove the top layer or membrane that affords the fruit protection, the air gets to the inner substance and oxidizes it. This changes its molecular structure and so it takes on a different appearance.’ His son answered, ‘Dad, are you talking to me? It’s an unfortunate fact that our religious language is not always talking to those to whom it is intended and badly needs to be revised and modernized. The language that was appropriate for one generation and helped lead them to truth is most likely to be a complete turn off for the next.

Words are meant to be conveyers of truth, but they can also become obstacles to truth. The language used to convey the Christian message needs to adopt in order to be appropriate for each generation so that they can hear it. This poses a huge challenge for preachers and teachers and indeed for anyone who wants to be effective in spreading the Gospel message. It happens on occasions at seminar presentations that a few teenagers might  be present and it’s useful to ask them if what is being said makes sense and if they can really hear the message. When they say ‘yes, it really speaks to our hearts’ it brings great relief to know that we are on the right track. There is no one more honest than the young who say it as it really is.

For those of us who were brought up and trained in the Catholic tradition it is very difficult to avoid ‘churchy’ and ‘traditionalist’ language. This makes some sense within the narrow box we call Catholicism but outside of that it can come across as somewhat weird. To outsiders it doesn’t seem to be grounded in reality and so while Catholicism is founded on the Incarnation of God becoming human, yet the message comes across as other worldly and not grounded in the human story. What fails to come across is that the Christian journey is fundamentally about becoming fully human and fully alive. It is not about getting to heaven when we die it is more about coming down to earth while we live. It is in the embrace of all that it means to be human, and never by avoiding it, that we find our way to God.

The manager of a large dogfood company called his top executives for a meeting to discuss their new product that had been launched months earlier. What do you think of our new product he asked? Wonderful they replied, it’s the best on the market’. ‘Do you like the labelling? ‘Definitely’ they said, having designed it themselves. ‘What about our marketing and advertising,’ he asked. Its excellent, they all agreed. With all those positives why is it that we have lost so much of the market share. ‘Its those blooming dogs they said, they just don’t like the stuff!’ I sense that the Christian message today is often being presented in quite unpalatable language that is not suited to our age. When ministers of the Good News bemoan the fact that the message is not being received or people are not interested it could well be that the fault lies not with the message but with the messenger’.