November 1, 2009: Language and Violence – Michael Hidalgo

We have reduced human beings to statistics, commodities, objects removing the truest identity of any person, and that is Image Bearers. This is not a call to be polite, to be passive, or to be the kind of people who simply choose the easiest way. This is a call to remove ourselves from the violence that our culture does to us everyday. 

This is not always punching somebody in the face, but it is speaking of them as something other than who they really are (slander is to characterize people as something they are not … and slander is language that grows out of anger, rage, and malice). Many would wonder where the idea of violence is in our culture … maybe it is all around us, and maybe we are in it. 

We do not recognize that we often are so saturated in our culture that we no longer hear or see the violence that is all around us. But it is here. We are an angry culture precisely because we have submitted ourselves to the social-political-corporate mentality of bigger, stronger, faster, more productive … we have begun to align ourselves in the most subtle ways within this world. As such we have learned to cover over who we really are. 

We need to understand who we are called to become we need to look beyond the anxiety that our culture creates in us. When we do we will find fear, beneath that we will find hurt and beneath the hurt will be guilt. This guilt produces rage and hatred which comes out of our own frustrated desire to be who we were created to be, and that is people who are dearly loved. In every feeling, look deeply. Explore without ceasing. At the bottom there is love, which is who God is, and we are made in his image.