Pop 89: New Year, New Word
By Madonna Hamel
Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Helen about the meaning of a word. Words are our thing. We met in art school; I was drawn to her love of language, puns in particular. She lives in Nova Scotia now, but we try to keep in touch over the phone. And, without fail, we talk about words: how to pronounce them, where they come from, why we don’t use certain ones anymore, and why we can’t stop using others. Helen is an excellent communicator. She chooses words carefully. In fact, every New Year’s Eve, she jettisons a word that is more a hindrance than a help; then, just before the clock tolls midnight, she yells out a word she intends to carry into the next year.
My family took up Helen’s New Year tradition. One of my sisters even keeps a list of all our words over the years. The week before every year’s end, we give consideration to which word we’d like to ring into the New Year. The point is not so much to improve our vocabularies as to alter our perspectives and behaviours; the words represent postures we take toward life, attitudes or habits we’d like to lose or gain.
Last year, I rang in the New Year in with the word: “Rest.” It was a hard time of travel and worry and multiple family health concerns. In the flurry of back-and-forth doctor visits and late-night calls, rest was hard to come by. The author, Elizabeth Oldfield, sees “rest” as the positive side of “sloth.” I chose the word to remind me to make an effort to “be at rest” or “rest up” in a way that meant both to be at peace with one’s own inner turmoil. And, also to not just have my engine on idle, but to park it and turn it off when it’s time to sit and sleep.
And, as the year progressed I saw the deeper meaning of “rest.” When conversations slid into arguments, or ideologies took over from personal experiences, when polarizing stances obscured the nuanced and contradictory mystery of paradox I was able to just let it go. “Give it a rest.”
I recently attended a retreat led by author, psychologist and teacher James Finley. He quoted the mystic Meister Eckhardt as saying: “The nature of a word is to reveal what is hidden.” Finley is one of those teachers who quietly but most definitely helps the rest of us get in touch with the faint stirrings of our relationship with the divine. Those stirrings, or quickenings, as he calls them, are often so brief and subtle that we miss them entirely.
As a culture, we are perishing from a lack of language of care and tenderness, acknowledgement and thankfulness, disarming humour, and sudden wonder. We are inundated by hateful, careless, glib, and dehumanizing language hurled back and forth between extreme views we simplistically name “Right” and “Left,” who seem to be more consumed with contempt for the other “side” than common-sense explanations as to what they consider a healthy worldview.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” is one of my favourite carols. But I’m plenty dismayed to hear that malls, schools and festive gatherings have nixed singing it at the risk of offending nonChristians. Then I get angry and fall risk falling into the insane behaviour of hating the haters, judging the judgers and dismissing the dismissers.
I don’t want to argue with you, and I will never holler for you to remove your Buddha bust from your garden or the dream catcher in your window, let alone fight to ban yoga in the park or a pow-wow at the rink. I wish we could all be merry together and, rather than form rigid camps of offence and defence, use our energies to share the anecdotes that brought us to our particular beliefs. Rather than repeat the resounding “story of power”- i.e., who’s got it, why did they take it, how do I get it back - we could engage “the power of story” (to quote the title of the late, great Harold Johnson’s last book). Because everyone has a story that is uniquely their own, and everyone has a right to tell it and be heard.
I’ll leave you with this long, timely quote on the “weapon of language” from the British author Dorothy L. Sayers., written in 1944. You may know her as a writer of detective novels, but she was also a theologian and philosopher.
“Nothing is more intoxicating than a sense of power: the demagogue who can sway crowds, the journalist who can push up the sales of his paper to the two-million mark, the playwright who can plunge an audience into an orgy of facile emotion, the parliamentary candidate who is carried to the top of the poll on a flood of meaningless rhetoric, the ranting preacher, the advertising salesman of material or spiritual commodities, are all playing perilously and irresponsibly with the power of words, and are equally dangerous whether they are cynically unscrupulous or (as frequently happens) have fallen under the spell of their own eloquence and become the victims of their own propaganda.
When we first began to realize the way in which the common sense of Europe had been undermined and battered down by Nazi propaganda, we were astonished as well as horrified, yet there was nothing astonishing about it. It was simply another exhibition of ruthless force: the employment of a very powerful weapon by experts who understood it perfectly against people who were not armed to resist it and had never really understood that it was a weapon at all.”
If you choose to follow our “new word for a new year” tradition - first, before midnight, burn an old one, one that represents something you want to banish from your life, like “fear” or “hate.” Then, at the stroke of midnight, sing in the new year with your new word. And then, God rest ye!