Yes, words matter!

Remember that old saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?" Don't you believe it; not for a minute. Bones heal far more rapidly than deeply wounded self concepts.

After 30-plus years in counselor education, student services administration, the private practice of individual, marriage, and family private practice settings, and for the last 19 years ministry and pastoral care settings, I can tell you that many more hours were spent seeking to help people believe they were lovable - whether to God, others, or themselves - than whether they would recover their physical strength.

It's not just what other people say that is hurtful, it is also what parents, coaches, best friends, lovers, or even life mates fail to say that lead me to say words matter. If you've never heard a mother or father say "I love you" or "I'm so proud of you," or "you are so special," you likely know how it can still hurt sometimes years after that person who was so important to you has gone.

It is not just what others say (or don't) to us that is so critical. Even more is the number of times we repeat in our heads "I must not be lovable," or "I must be ugly," or "Why would God love someone like me?" After all, someone may say something nasty to you once or twice, but you and I can keep repeating such things over and over again in what is called "self talk."

I don't just know or believe this as someone who has studied and practiced in what are labeled the "helping professions." I'm one of many men (and probably countless women as well) who struggled with self esteem issues for years, because I rarely - if ever - heard my father say, "I love you," or "I'm proud of you." Although I've learned from many others that I "was the apple of my father's eye," hearing it from others didn't compensate for not hearing it directly from Dad. I know in my head that Dad didn't want me to get the "big head," but that's not the same as what it could have meant to hear him say he was proud of what I had accomplished, rather than always hearing how I could have done better, or more, or ...

But my concern these days is not simply about how you or I feel as individuals about the words directed our way. My concern is much more about the ramped-up rhetoric that has become so toxic in politics, religion, race relations, treatment of those referred to so often in the Bible as the "least of these," and so forth.

It is not simply on talk radio or during political election cycles that nasty things are said; it seems to have become an incessant reality in our culture to say whatever, whenever, however, no matter who is being targeted. Unfortunately, some religious leaders across faith traditions, and some adherents to various religions, including those calling themselves Christian, seem no more sensitive in this regard than those who make no profession that their faith is motivating their hostile reactions to others.

With the recent assassination attempt on the life of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, I am haunted by the question of whether or not this country is going to experience another cycle of attempts on the lives of those very public figures on whom we so readily project all our frustrations and anger.

I remember too well the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated - I was a senior in college driving to a graduate school interview. I remember so well the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as at that time I was the director of a minority admissions program at a public university in Michigan. To compound the national tragedy, my relationship with the inner city black youth from Pontiac and Detroit - with whom I'd previously been very close - was never the same. I remember all too well the day that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated - another national tragedy that became even more up close and personal when I learned that my childhood idol, and my older sister Nancy's classmate, Rafer Johnson, was one of those who helped wrestle away the gun Sirhan Sirhan used to kill Sen. Kennedy.

I still remember the profound grief spouse Kathy and I felt as were at the gates of the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, as a security guard pointed out to us which house in the compound belonged to the various family members, This was on the very day the funeral train carrying Kennedy's body passed through this community that had meant so much to him and his family.

I pray that our history will not repeat itself, but I sense that many of the factors that made the Sixties so volatile are alive and well today, including the "targeting" of those with whom we disagree. In our culture, tragically in my mind, we say things such as "words are cheap" or "talk comes easy." There are, however, cultures where it would be unthinkable to say that words don't matter.

For example in the Hebrew language the word, "dabar" means both speech and action. Same word. You only know which is meant by analyzing the context in which the word is being used.

In spending some time doing archaeology work in the Middle East, where we lived in Arabic housing, ate Arabic food, and supervised Arabic workers on the tell, I learned firsthand that a person's words were considered to be as, if not even more, important than a person's actions. I was grateful to return to the U.S. after time overseas that took me to and through 27 countries, and now these many years later I remain to live in a country where there is freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

However, with freedom comes great responsibility, and I don't believe we are currently behaving very responsibly in the way we treat local, county, statewide, or national political leaders, or in the way we treat people of faiths, lifestyles, or convictions that differ from our own. My hope and prayer is that each and all of us will realize that the language we use, along with the behaviors we exhibit, have the power to heal and the power to hurt; the power to promote peace, or to incite animosity.

When animosity is ratcheted up in inflammatory ways, fringe figures who cannot distinguish between rhetoric and reality sometimes take it on themselves to seek to achieve final solutions by inflicting the ultimate loss of freedom on those they have come to hate: namely taking the lives of such perceived enemies.

So, do words matter? You bet they do.

Bill Peterson is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Coeur d'Alene.