Weil's wall

My last post used traditional religious language. I talked about God, and discerning God’s will, and what we might mean when we claim that this is what we are doing. But I also alluded to the fact that some Quakers don’t use “God-language” at all.

A comment on the blog picked up on this, and talked about how language can function either as a barrier or a bridge. And I recognise that my own use of religious language can create a kind of barrier: some people will feel excluded by it, or will conclude very early on that what I am saying is not for them. What should we do when communication meets this sort of barrier?

I was reminded of a paradoxical suggestion that Simone Weil makes in “Gravity and Grace” - that the identical thing can sometimes be, at one and the same time, both a barrier and a means of connection. She gives the example of two prisoners in adjoining cells who learn to communicate by tapping on the wall between their cells. The wall is both the thing that divides them, and their means of communication (hence connection). I think this story has something to say to our issues about religious language.

There are three unsatisfactory ways in which Quakers can (and sometimes do) respond to a wall created by the use of divergent language. Better options are available, but they are hard work and require patience.

One unsatisfactory response is to recognise that the wall is there, but to try and persuade ourselves that it doesn’t really matter. This is the response that says, ultimately the things we are concerned with can’t be put into words anyway. This move wants to replace speech with silence. But Quaker practices around silence can easily (if we’re not careful) turn into silencing. The Quaker path isn’t primarily about silence - rather, it’s about a kind of dialectic between silence and speech. The Quaker silence, at its best, is vibrant: a place where people can be heard into speech. The price we pay is that sometimes people are heard into disagreement, and we need to reconcile ourselves to this.

A second unsatisfactory response is to try to pretend that the wall doesn’t really exist at all. This is the move that says, we’re using different words, but we all really mean the same thing. It sounds tolerant, but it’s a repressive form of tolerance, because it tries to stifle the possibility of genuine divergence. In truth, there are four possibilities: we use the same words and mean the same thing; we use the same words and mean different things; we use different words but mean the same thing; and we use different words and mean different things. And we can’t rule out any of these four options at the outset.

The third unsatisfactory response is what you might call the Pink Floyd option: “tear down the wall”. In other words, if particular forms of language turn out to be divisive, we need to abandon them at once. But what would happen in Weil’s prison, if you tore down the wall between the prisoners? Perhaps the prisoners would meet each other face to face. Perhaps. Or perhaps they would turn their backs on one another and each hide in a corner of their respective cells, because the necessary foundation of trust for face-to-face communication hadn’t been established. I’m put in mind of something therapists sometimes say, about respecting the client’s resistances. When it comes to the Pink Floyd option, I want to know when and how the wall comes down, and who decides.

Is there a better approach? Yes: it’s to leave the wall in place for now, but start tapping on it from both sides and see what happens next. One person tries to explain why they use the language that they do, and how they understand it. The other person does likewise. And pretty soon the linguistic barrier between them has become the starting-point for fruitful discussion, and the thing that stopped them talking has become the thing that they talk about. Perhaps after a bit of tapping, the prisoners decide that they will jointly dismantle the wall, or a bit of it - a few bricks, so they can speak directly as well as tapping. Or they make a plan that one day they will walk out of their respective cells and meet somewhere else entirely (Rumi’s field?).

You may have heard of “Chesterton’s fence”. This is the principle that says, never dismantle a fence until you understand why it was put there in the first place: more generally, don’t change a system until you know why it is the way it is. I’m proposing a comparable principle of “Weil’s wall”: which goes, when faced with an apparent barrier to communication, ask whether you can turn it instead into a basis for connection.