Sticks, stones, and poisoned arrows

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

—James 3:5b-10 (ESV)

When you were young, and someone insulted you or made fun of you, did your parents tell you to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? You know, most pieces of folk wisdom, I can see where they came from, but I have no idea why that one showed up; whoever came up with that one must have been someone who never heard a negative word in their life—or who was too thick-skinned and thick-skulled to notice. Honestly, that’s the dumbest famous saying that ever got famous; to borrow a line from Mark Twain, it’s “the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved.” Granted the harm that sticks and stones can do, it’s generally a lot easier to heal the body than it is to heal the spirit, if only because we can see what we’re working with; and often, it’s a lot easier to wound the spirit than it is to wound the body. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but only words can break me.

This is why James describes the tongue so starkly—it’s a restless evil, a poisoned arrow, a small fire that can set the whole forest ablaze; but though we might find his picture bleak, it’s hard to argue with. Yes, we also say many good things, and yes, we do much good with our words; but as he says, with our tongues we bless God, and with the same tongues we curse those he made in his likeness, and that should not be. For all the good we may do, we can undo many good words with one ill one. Winston Churchill famously said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting on its pants; or to go back to Twain again, “the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.” We might also say that for many people, self-confidence is a fragile flower, but self-doubt is a weed; sow a few seeds of the latter in the garden of their soul, and they may take years to recover. It is far easier for us to speak evil powerfully than it is to speak good powerfully, just as it’s easier to roll a boulder down a mountainside than up it; this is why Shakespeare could write in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

(Excerpted, edited, from “A Greater Judgment”)