We start our faith journey when we are brought to baptism and those who sponsor children (parents and Godparents) are asked to do one thing and one thing only. This is for us a very difficult thing to do as our secular culture is mightily opposed to us doing it. The one thing they are asked to do is to show the child how to love the other, God and neighbour. This is highly contraindicated for a western culture that is derived from the self being the only thing that matters. Selfishness is inbred in us and can be considered to be a hereditary trait that would be considered evolutionary beneficial for the species as it ensured survival of the weakest from birth. Thus part of the child growing in faith is to be taught how to control their selfish needs and consider others especially when they begin to verbalise. This is because as soon as we begin to utilise our tongues for communication we begin to understand the nuances of deceit and power for ourselves through manipulation whilst using words.
As we grow older, our self orientated culture primes us, in such a manner, to achieve our desires to become more prominent in society or increase our popularity by doing and saying things to "win over" the majority. In other words, we do not necessarily tell the truth but only what our constituents wish to hear, so that we can attain our goal rather than the goals of the community. We allow our desires to overrun and manipulate our tongue, guiding our speech and our attitude. We have no control as we cannot control our desires and so we let our tongue run away with a multitude of promises with little truth. However, we need to learn to control our tongues which means we need to control our desires so that they conform with the desires of God rather than human desires. The tongue is the symptom rather than the causal root of the problem. Yes, like any good programme we do need to eradicate the symptoms but the better way is remove the causative agent. This is the difficult task of the Godparent and parent to guide the growing child in this process of control.
In our speech we also tend to forget that we have other ways of communicating and more often than not it is our non-verbal communications that constantly create the challenges that we find in life. How many times have, I wonder, we heard the cliche from an grieved person "I didn't say anything wrong". We scratch our heads and nod wisely when we actually hear the words agreeing that yes they did not say anything wrong. The issue is in how or in what manner that they stated the innocuous words. We can say I love you in so many different ways that some are loving and others convey our utter distaste. Children say what they mean without any form of or degree of attitudinal change as this is a learnt behaviour. Thus, parents and Godparents need to be quick to steer the growing child away from the issues that may begin to grow and foster as they repeat what others demonstrate. Sometimes the learning is unconscious as this is how they obtained what they wanted and were not chastised as a youngster. However, when we begin to acknowledge that we need to be aware of non verbal communication we can begin to correct our own behaviours as well as those around us. We need to mirror the attitude of the young child with their innocence rather than manipulate to obtain what we want through tone, and misplaced attitudes.
Everything that we do must be focused on the one thing that we profess as Christians. Our profession of belief in Christ and followers of Christ suggest that we should place before us the one single goal of love of God and neighbour. The singularity in this duality is the one word love. No matter what our thoughts, our deeds or our words may be they should be centred on this singular thing called love. The wife held up at in the last chapter of Proverbs displays this wisdom. Christ attempts to pass this understanding on to the disciples by his words and actions. Yet we still fail because our desires are not aligned with Christ or with the wisdom that is imparted. We still look to the symptoms of our loose tongues to remind ourselves of the control that is required rather than looking at our hearts which are the root of the issue. In participating in an act of communication we need to be aware that all our ways of conveying information are open to abuse. We just need to look at the Evangelical Christian voice as they criticise the Graham dynasty to see how easy gaffes create issues. In receiving others as a young child we welcome the unconditional love which is God's and begin to convey it to those in our community, we begin to prove our words by the wisdom and action of our hearts. It is not just the sleight of hand produced by our tongues. In controlling our communication we are more able to convey God's love and the Christ that lives within us.
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