Keep your words sweet

While working on training material for a communications course recently, I was reminded of something one of our teachers told us way back in Grade 9 (or Standard 7).

Hurtful words may be forgiven, but they can’t be taken back. (Photo; morguefile.com)

In class we were discussing the issue of calling people names and the hurt caused by our words. Our teacher told us that one can never take back the spoken word. And I have never forgotten that advice.

My dad used to tell us to remember always that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you”. But I remember being very hurt by the words of children in my neighbourhood.

As a child I was very timid and thin, and children had all kinds of names to call me — so much so that I feared walking past certain children’s homes on my way to the shop because I dreaded them spotting me and calling me names. It hurt me terribly at the time.

Once my mom went with me to one of the children’s homes to speak to her parents about her calling me names, and I remember her mother being very dismissive and saying to my mom: “Ag, she didn’t mean to hurt your daughter.”

It’s interesting how often people are dismissive of the power of our words. “Oh, she was just teasing”, or “He didn’t really mean it”, or even “Maybe you are too sensitive” — these are phrases frequently used to explain away hurtful words.

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of just how much words can hurt when I spoke to a woman in one of our training workshops who shared that during an argument with a friend of hers many years ago, the friend had said to her: “I regret that I ever met you.” For a short while thereafter their friendship ceased, but they became friends again and have remained so ever since.

Now, many years later, she realises that those words, and the hurtful feeling, have always stayed with her. She has never forgotten it.

She says she does not know whether her friend remembers saying those words to her, but she has decided to bury it and not bring it up now, nearly 15 years later.

Whether this remark was deliberately malicious or just thoughtless, its effect has not gone away. Words that hurt people can stay with them for a lifetime.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis spoke about how we should speak to and about our brothers and sisters. The pope said: “In our day we think that ‘not killing our brother’ means simply not actually murdering him — but no. Not killing our brother means not [even] insulting him, the insult comes from the same root of the crime: hatred.”

During arguments or times of high emotions, when it is so easy to say hurtful things to one another, we ought to remember the counsel of the Sufi mystic Rumi: “Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.”

Proverbs 16 reminds us that gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body. A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

How beautiful does this sound, but how difficult it is to always remember and accomplish. Soft and gracious words can be spoken only from our heart, where God dwells. Hurtful things are spoken from a place of hatred.

In her novel Salem Falls, Jodi Picoult says: “Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”

And so, my dear beloved Standard 7 teacher had it right all those years ago: “You cannot take back the spoken word.” With that in mind, let us keep our words sweet.