"The Life of Words "

READING

From "I Could Tell You Stories," by Patricia Hampl

My Czech grandmother hated to see me with a book. She snatched it away if I sat still too long (dead to her), absorbed in my reading. "Bad for you," she would say, holding the loathsome thing behind her back, furious at my enchantment.

Did she read English? I'm not sure. I do know that she couldn't - or didn't - write it. That's where I came in.

My first commissioned work was to write letters for her. "You write for me, honey?" she would say, holding out a ball-point she had been given at a grocery store promotion, clicking it like a castanet. My fee was cookies and milk, payable before, during, and after completion of the project.

I settled down at her kitchen table while she rooted around the drawer where she kept coupons and playing cards and bank calendars. Eventually she located a piece of stationery and a mismatched envelope. She laid the small, pastel sheet before me, smoothing it out; a floral motif was clotted across the top of the page and bled down one side. The paper was so insubstantial even ballpoint ink seeped through the other side. "That's OK," she would say. "We only need one side."

True. In life she was a gifted gossip, unfurling an extended riff of chatter from a bare motif of rumor. But her writing style displayed a brevity that made Hemingway's prose look like nattering garrulity. She dictated her letters as if she were paying by the word.

"Dear Sister," she began, followed by a little time-buying cough and throat clearing. "We are all well here." Pause. "And hope you are well too." Longer pause, the steamy broth of inspiration heating up on her side of the table. Then, in a lurch, "Winter is hard so I don't get out much."

This was followed instantly by an unconquerable fit of envy: "Not like you in California." Then she came to a complete halt, perhaps demoralized by this evidence that you can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

She sat, she brooded, she stared out the window. She was locked in the perverse reticence of composition. She gazed at me, but I understood she did not see me. She was looking for her next thought. "Read what I wrote," she would finally say, having lost not only what she was looking for but what she already had pinned down. I went over the little trail of sentences that led to her dead end.

More silence, then a sigh. She gave up the ghost. "Put 'God bless you,' " she said. She reached across to see the lean rectangle of words on the paper. "Now leave some space," she said, "and put 'Love.'" I handed over the paper for her to sign.

She always asked if her signature looked nice. She wrote her one word - Teresa - with a flourish. For her, writing was painting, a visual art, not declarative but sensuous.

She sent her lean documents regularly to her only remaining sister who lived in Los Angeles, a place she had not visited. They had last seen each other as children in their village in Bohemia. But she never mentioned that or anything from that world. There was no taint of reminiscence in her prose.

Even at ten I was appalled by the minimalism of these letters. They enraged me. "Is that all you have to say?" I would ask her, a nasty edge to my voice.

It wasn't long before I began padding the text. Without telling her, I added an anecdote my father had told at dinner the night before, or I conducted this unknown reader through the heavy plot of my brother's attempt to make first string on the St. Thomas hockey team. I allowed myself a descriptive aria on the beauty of Minnesota winters (for the benefit of my California reader who might need some background material on the subject of ice hockey). A little of this, a little of that - there was always something I could toss into my grandmother's meager soup to thicken it up.

Of course, the protagonist of the hockey tale was not "my brother." He was "my grandson." I departed from my own life without a regret and breezily inhabited my grandmother's. I complained about my hip joint, I bemoaned the rising cost of hamburger, I even touched on the loneliness of old age, and hinted at the inattention of my son's wife (that is, my own mother who was next door, oblivious to treachery).

In time, my grandmother gave in to the inevitable. Without ever discussing it, we understood that when she came looking for me, clicking her ballpoint, I was to write the letter, and her job was to keep the cookies coming. I abandoned her skimpy floral stationery which badly cramped my style, and thumped down on the table a stack of ruled 8 1/2 x 11.

"Just say something interesting," she would say. And I was off to the races.

I took over her life in prose. Somewhere along the line, though, she decided to take full possession of her sign-off. She asked me to show her how to write "Love" so she could add it to "Teresa" in her own hand. She practiced the new word many times on scratch paper before she allowed herself to commit it to the bottom of a letter.

But when she finally took the leap, I realized I had forgotten to tell her about the comma. On a single slanting line she had written: Love Teresa. The words didn't look like a closure, but a command.

SERMON

Patricia Hampl launched her career ghost-writing her grandmother's letters, embellishing them with family stories told without permission. This charming but devious start suggests the power of words to do good, keeping alive the precious connection between two sisters separated at an early age, and the hint of betrayals to come. At ten years old, Patricia Hampl was already busy creating a narrative version of life, which is not the same thing as life itself.

Words have a life - and a truth - of their own, which can produce distortions. "I conducted the unknown reader," she writes, through the heavy plot of my brother's attempt to make first string on the St. Thomas Hockey team. . . ." True. "Of course, the protagonist of the hockey tale was not 'my brother.' He was 'my grandson.'" Not true. "I departed from my own life without a regret and breezily inhabited my grandmother's." And so on, back and forth, until she admits that she even complained about the inattentions of her own mother, who was "oblivious to the treachery." And would have been furious had she known.

We all do it: use words to construct a life. As a preacher, I've told so many stories about my childhood that I can't remember anymore what really happened. My brothers have told me they have a different version of the same events. I realize that by stretching for some deeper truth in the stories I tell, I may have fabricated something else.

It's not that I have told lies: rather, I have served up my life in narrative form, which has its own rules and purposes. How will it sound to the listener? Will a deeper truth, excavated from my human experience, make its way out and speak to you? That's why I do it.

Our faith tradition has something to do with it. We don't read scripture as the word of God. It may reveal moral insights or it may repel us with stories of wrath and retaliation, but whatever it is, it is not literally true. During the nineteenth century, Unitarians expressed one of their differences with Christianity by rejecting the authority of scripture. They found it instead in themselves (a confident move) and in the human ability to discern the truth on our own. In the beginning, the Word may have been with God, but now it is with us. What we do with it is just as powerful.

We all carry with us the emotional imprint of words, for better and for worse. A teacher's praise, a bully's taunt. An observation from others that brings home a painful realization about ourselves. The first time someone said, "I love you." The way people who love us can hurt us with critical comments, or worse.

Most of my life regrets have to do either with something I said, or didn't say. I can forgive myself more easily for misbehaviors and mistakes than I can for words I have spoken thoughtlessly. And though I may play fast and loose with my family history, I am cautious - perhaps too cautious - about what I will say at other times.

Sometimes silence is not passive. It is the active withholding of words. Whether playfully, as in the children's story we heard earlier, when the child commands her mother to "say it," or disappointingly, as in those times when we could have spoken the truth, but didn't say anything. All these words, spoken and unspoken, rattle around in our lives and are very much part of the story.

People who use words for a living know the consequences. Patricia Hampl's memoir "I Could Tell You Stories" takes an unflinching look at some of them. A poem she wrote about her mother is one of her best, she thinks. But her mother hates it. It reveals something about her that she would prefer to keep hidden. She gives permission to her daughter to publish the poem only because she loves her.

Patricia Hampl is proud of the poem. "I felt heroic in a low-grade literary sort of way," she admits, liberating her mother from "the prison of her dank secret." She uses the poem to teach writing seminars, readers use it to study the mother-daughter relationship, but her mother only feels used.

Patricia Hampl loves so much what words can do - and believes so passionately in their "essential goodness" in commemorating, honoring, or simply noticing life,[1] that she asks, "Who could object to that?" "A lot of people, it turned out," she continues. "My mother was only the first."

I read from her book: "I've lost quite a few people along the way. And not to death. I lose them to writing. The one who accused me of appropriating her life, the one who said he was appalled, the poet miffed by my description of his shoes, the dear, elderly priest who said he thought I understood the meaning of a private conversation, this one, that one. Gone, gone. Their fading faces haven't faded at all, just receded, turned abruptly away from me, as is their right."

Words have the power to destroy relationships, undermine self-esteem, and erode integrity. Patricia Hampl keeps the letters she's received from the people she lost "stuffed in a file drawer" she never opens. She leaves "the letters in their proud silence," rather than be reminded that she has "killed again," as she describes her actions. Patricia Hampl observes that "writers - and readers - believe in the fiction of telling a true story." But "the truth is: The constraining suit of words rarely fits."

And the rest of us - who may not use words for a living, but cannot live without words - are left to wonder about it for ourselves. Words have power. Even when we use them casually, don't write them down, or talk about others, they construct a reality around us, hover over us in the air, or lurk in the back of our minds. Their power is not just in the stories we tell.

The Buddhist tradition wisely acknowledges the use of words as an ethical discipline. "Right speech" is one element of the eight-fold path, and followers are advised to use words carefully, kindly, and truthfully. What follows from this teaching is that the use of words requires practice.

Some of the most important words in life, from "I love you" to "I forgive you," take time and effort to learn how to say. Not everyone grows up with a mother who says "I love you" whenever her little girl wants her to. Some mothers allow their daughters to use their words in poems only because they love them. Most of us have to dig deep to say the words we most want to say.

Sometimes reticence and fear cause silence; sometimes good judgment. We don't always get it right, but if we realize that it takes discipline and practice to use words well, we get it wrong less often. And that means fewer broken hearts, more happy families, and less regret all around.

Words create life: not just the alternate world of stories, but the life we share. Words join us together, tell us the truth, and express, however incompletely, our experience of being alive. May we use them well, and with gratitude for the power they give us.

All the direct quotes in this sermon come from Patricia Hampl, "I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory" (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). [1] In her book "I Could Tell You Stories," she uses these words, although this is not a direct quote.