Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies Quotes

“The story is told of Mother Theresa that when an interviewer asked her. "What do you say when you pray?" she answered, "I listen." The reporters paused a moment, then asked, "Then what does God say?" and she replied, "He listens." It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one’s own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“The best listeners I know pause over words. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it,’ they muse, or they ask. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ The consciousness that every word is a choice, that each word has its own resonance, nuance, emotional coloring, and weight informs their sense of what is being communicated. This kind of listening comes close to what we engage in when we listen to music...A good listener loves words, respects them, pays attention to them, and recognizes vague approximations as a kind of falsehood.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Conversation is an exchange of gifts. Native American tribal wisdom teaches that when you encounter a person on your life path, you must seek to find out what gifts you have for one another so that you may exchange them before going your separate ways. This seems true even of daily encounters with those we know well. We come into one another's presence bearing whatever harvest of experience the day has offered, and we foster relationship by making a gift of what we have received.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“In reading a recent novel, I myself was convicted by a comment the mother makes to her adult daughter: ‘My dear, you’ve missed so many opportunities to say nothing.’ We do miss these opportunities, as well as opportunities to say less and say it more judiciously. And so we miss particular delights of finding words and speaking them into silences big enough to allow them to be heard.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“...there is no question that precision is difficult to achieve. Imprecision is easier. Imprecision is available in a wide variety of attractice and user-friendly forms: cliches, abstractions and generalizations, jargon, passive constructions, hyperbole, sentimentality, and reassuring absolutes. Imprecision minimizes discomfort and creates a big, soft, hospitable place for all opinions; even the completely vacuous can find a welcome there. So the practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort; it may also require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we "feed on" in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“We have become desensitized, in ways discussed earlier, to the electrifying power of the well-chosen word. But sometimes it breaks through like a ray of light through a cloud bank. We all know the experience of reading or perhaps writing a sentence that evokes with absolute laser-like precision a particular feeling, atmosphere, action, or thought which, being named, seems to take on brand-new life.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Let me tell you a little story, is one of the treasures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Stories are the oldest and most valuable equipment we have as a human community and as a people of faith. The power of stories lies not only or even mainly in their explanatory function, or in the ways they mirror a community back to itself, or in the examples they provide, or the analogies. That power lies also in the way stories allow us to focus and give shape to our hopes, and to come to terms with the inexplicable and bewildering freedom we have as creatures made in the image of God.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Good conversation is a courtesy, a kindness, a form of caritas that has as its deepest implicit intention binding one another together in understanding and love.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one's own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true. It may be that we don't often enough consider conversation as a form of social
action, as a ministry, or as a spiritual discipline. That it may be all three, and that it is a significant part of our life and calling as people of faith, may be more evident if we consider what good conversation does.
In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Anyone who speaks through electronic media has had his or her patter carefully shaped by a script; the delivery - tone, intonation, emphasis - has been rehearsed:' He adds, "TV kills the human voice. People cannot argue with anything on the screen. TV images pass by too fast for young minds to consider or analyze them." No matter how "lively" the conversation modeled on television, the medium itself works to suppress the spontaneity, imagination, and attentive listening required in actual conversation.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“...spoken confession releases us into forgiveness. Speaking enacts the attitude of repentance that is the precondition of healing and restoration. Like the naming of God's attributes and promises in praise, the particularity and specificity of what is named accounts for much of the psychological efficacy of confession.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Like metaphor, paradox as a habit of mind preserves us from simplistic linearity and literalism and keeps us attentive to the complex ways in which, so often, the opposite is also true. This habit of mind is deeply biblical; indeed, to listen for the uses of paradox in Jesus’ recorded teachings is to recognize how it always points us to a higher plane of understanding. To grasp paradox is a prerequisite not only for fathoming spiritual truths (and every spiritual tradition resorts to paradox to get at what is true as if there is no more direct route to truth), but also for thinking complexly and compassionately about this-worldly issues that affect us daily: how the rich may be poor; how power is a form of vulnerability; how saying no may be a way of saying yes.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“...in providing refuge and in challenging us - [stories] are instruments of healing. For all these reasons, the power of story is one we must not abdicate. The church needs to be a place where stories are told, where we are invited back into the stories we live by, and where we come to find ourselves at home again in a dwelling made of words that is reconstructed in every telling. We need good storytellers to keep us alive and imagining. The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer. They have an incantatory, invocational function. They call forth and focus our dread and desire. They are vehicles of confession, thanksgiving, petition.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates...livelieness in our use of language, both oral and written, matters: how lively language is life-giving - how it may literally, physiologically, quicken our breath, evoke our laughter, raise our eyebrows, open our hearts, renew our energies. Lively language invents and evokes and sustains.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“The dumbing down, oversimplification, or flattened character of public speech may make our declamations and documents more accessible, but it deprives us all of a measure of beauty and clarity that could enrich our lives together. In more and more venues where speech and writing are required, adequate is adequate. A most exhilarating denunciation of this sort of mediocrity may be found in Mark Twain's acerbic little essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," in which he observes:

When a person has a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“[George] Steiner makes two other points worth mentioning about the consequences of language abuse: as usable words are lost, experience becomes cruder and less communicable. And with the loss of the subtlety, clarity, and reliability of language, we become more vulnerable to crude exercises of power.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“And sometimes words become objects of interest in themselves. Suddenly we notice them. We see and hear them the way poets do, as having vitality and delightfulness independent of their utility. Language may suddenly appear not as a closed system where meaning is simply constructed or a drably utilitarian system of reference, but as a dance - words at play - words not just meaning or reporting or chronicling or marching in syntactic formation, but performing themselves, sounding, echoing, evoking ripples of association and feeling, moving in curious sidelong figures rather than left to right in orderly lines.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“To see this way fosters not only gratitude but compassion for the creatures we behold. The sustained gaze required to find the adequate word engages us in contemplation and reminds us of the worthiness of what is given to us to witness.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“[Poems] train and exercise the imagination.

Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Everyone who writes with care, who treats words with respect and allows even the humblest its historical and grammatical dignity, participates in the exhilarating work of reclamation. Each essay or poem is its own “raid on the inarticulate,” and every written work that forestalls the slow death of speech is a response to Wendell Berry’s challenge to “practice resurrection.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“The silences in conversation honor and support the words they carry, as water supports the vessels that float on it. Only in silence can the "listening into" take place - the pausing over words, meanings, implications, associations - and the waiting - for the Spirit to speak, for the right response to a surface. At its deepest level, good conversation holds a balance we seek in prayer between speaking and listening, waiting for the unplanned, epiphanic moment that comes unbidden in the midst of what we thought we were pursuing. Those silences also distinguish substantive conversation from idle chatter that fills all the "air time" available, often as a protection against the silences in which a new thought might take us where we're not sure we want to go. When silences are allowed, conversation can rise to the level of sacred encounter.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“But the high play of witty conversation can degenerate into exhibitionistic banter if it is not tempered by an opposite and perhaps even more important virtue, which is the capacity to hold one's peace, to wait to pause for thought, to consent to shared silence. Words need space. Witty, weighty, well-chosen words need more space than others to be received rightly, reckoned with, and responded to. That space, the silence between words, is as important a part of good conversation as rests are a part of a pleasing, coherent musical line.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“The difference between hearing and listening is significant...Listening well means knowing when to interject questions, when to redirect the conversation, and, more importantly, in what terms to interpret the other's narrative. It means recognizing that the speaker is making purposeful choices, consciously or unconsciously, and considering what those purposes might be. It means accepting the tension between making judgments and withholding judgment as the other's story or line of reasoning unfolds. It means hearing and noting the omissions. And it means listening not only through the words spoken, but to them.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Good conversation comes form just such flexibility. As observations come up, it meanders, following a course that tends in a particular direction, but moves responsively in new directions as associations are triggered, words are paused over to consider their implications, examples are invented, connections are made. Like jazz, it is a work of improvisation that entails listening intently for what the others are doing and moving with them. The curiosity which sustains that intensity pauses at every turn to notice what's happening, to raise new questions and pursue them. In a gentle pursuit of ideas, it makes room for the unexpected. Exercised in this way, curiosity becomes an avenue of grace. Conversation pursued in this spirit is full of surprise. It connects one idea or thought or analogy with another in ways that could not have been predicted.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Curiosity. It was Oliver Sacks who first made me reflect on curiosity as a form of compassion. An ingenious and creative neurologist now well-known for his “clinical tales,” he begins his work as diagnostician and healer with the implicit question ‘What is it like to be you?”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“Conversation, like good reading, nourishes.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies