Babel and the World We Live In

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

I remember during Junior High School doing a dumb science project on animal communication. I didn’t do any experiments, just read about bees and dolphins. I even made a clay dolphin for the exhibit that looked more like a walrus. There are people who think to this day that walrus have a highly developed sense of communication. The project was dumb because everyone knows that some species of animals communicate perfectly well with each other. In fact, there is only one species in the world that is really in question, and a billion science projects couldn’t begin to solve the mystery. Can human beings communicate?

I’m constantly reminded of this mystery. It is strange and peculiar that the vast majority of our own species are incomprehensible to us and we to them. I’ve heard recently that there are over 10,000 different languages, with different grammar, vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation. What makes this complicated is that all this shapes how people think. A language can create a framework for how the world understands itself and for how people themselves are understood.

So trying to translate from one language to another can be impossible because our language has made us strangers and sometimes enemies. Language can be impossible to translate because many words have a tilt of meaning that simply can’t cross over to another language. As the saying goes, “Something really does get lost in translation.”
But the human communication problem goes a great deal deeper than that, doesn’t it? She says, “I tell him and I tell him, but he just doesn’t get it.” Is he just not listening, or in a way are they speaking and hearing in different languages? Then there are the occasions where we actually use words for disguising what we really mean.

In the book of Genesis there is a story about confused and confusing language. Anxiety had crept in and the people were afraid, the story says, of being scattered. They said, “Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top to the heaven, make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered across the earth.” So anxiety turned to pride. They wanted to get famous, build a tower as tall as God’s. As they built, they probably sang “Stairway to Heaven.”

God in Genesis 1 had already told the people to spread abroad, scatter, and care for everything on earth. But here is a fortress mindset. Culture is curved in on itself to build something spectacular exclusively for themselves. God saw it and said, “Look at what this kind of togetherness is doing! There is no end to the mischief and meanness this kind of unity can make. Come let us go down and confuse their language so they cannot understand what they are saying to one another.” And down at the tower, contractors, builders, supervisors, and architects, all in mid-sentence, began to sound like gibberish to each other.

So now they scatter because together they are incomprehensible. Babel is the name of the world that we live in. Blizzards of words come out of our mouths, but we are not really speaking to each other. This is global and local. The West and Middle East do no understand one another. Parents and children cannot understand each other. Husbands and wives baffle each other. Conservatives and Moderates talk past each other. Babel thrives on bumper stickers. Deacons and pastors, youth and adults, lay and clergy in our churches bump into each other all the time.

Doesn’t most of this failed speech come from having isolated ourselves, fearing the call to go truly outside ourselves? So we build lunatic towers to our kind, to our way, for our interests. We become so self-obsessed that we wear earphones that play our own voices back to us. Truth is, we are baffled by others and we baffle them.
If I have learned anything as the Executive Director of Virginia Baptists, I have learned that unity is never found by grasping for unity and trying to build something impressive just for ourselves. Our wholeness as a people and as individual churches is found only in getting out of ourselves, moving past our anxiety into engagement with the world, with one another, and with people who are not us. The Spirit of God wants this and will give this to anyone who will have it.