“This is one of my soapbox topics,” said Audri Svay, a pastor at Eel River Church of the Brethren in Indiana. Her soapbox was planted firmly in the title of her talk at the Brethren Press and Messenger dinner: “The Power of Words to Form Identity.”
Even when someone is complimenting a person, those words can have the paradoxical power to limit who that person is. For example, receiving a compliment about the way we sing, we may take that as a signal that we’re not good at other things. As for negative comments, their effect can be life-long.
Svay gave several examples from stories in John L. Bell’s book The Singing Thing. Some individuals in these stories were singled out by teachers when they were young children, and told not to sing. Others were told by fellow congregants at a church that they sang so badly they should not sing in public. People can remember the exact circumstances of such traumatic incidents, even if they happened decades earlier.
“What words have you internalized?” she asked the audience. “The way you answer the question ‘Who are you?’ [demonstrates] the power of words to form identity.”
In her case, Svay has always struggled with the fact that she looks younger than her years. People often assume she is a teenager, not a woman who is a faculty member and professor at the college level. “We are all forming opinions of each other. We are constantly making assumptions…and we can be wrong in those assumptions.”
One especially fascinating story came out of her work as a teacher of young children. In a playground incident in which two children cut in line to go down the slide, and were asked to go to the back of the line, one child complied. The other refused to leave the line and eventually she escorted him away from the other children. The child announced he was going to cut in line again because, as he interpreted what had happened, “I’m a bad person.”
“You are not a bad person,” Svay insisted. “You are a good person who is upset.”
Examples from the Gospel of John showed how the words of others could have led Jesus to define himself differently. Future disciple Nathaniel wondered if anything good could come from Nazareth. Others identified Jesus as “the carpenter’s son,” as if it were not possible for him to aspire to be anything else.
In the end, Svay suggested our own answer to who we are is up to us, not to others who would define us. And she suggested that the definition offered by Jesus for his disciples–“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another” (John 13:35)–is a good start.
“We can grow into our identity as disciples by loving one another through the words we choose to use.”