Nick and Hanne's wedding - 7th August 1999
Language - Learning
It is a personal joy for me
to be able to preach today at Nick and Hanne's wedding. Ruth and I have known Nick for quite a
while, and we share some very unusual and special history. We've only met Hanne a couple of times, but
we knew from the first time we saw her that one day this was going to
happen. This was because when we first
saw them in Bristol, although they were just good friends, any good friends
that went shopping for home decorations together were soon going to get
together! I thought seeing as they are
both TEFL teachers it would be good to see what we could tease out of that
experience to set them on their way as husband and wife.
So...I am very pleased you
have decided to register on the course, today, Nick and Hanne. You will appreciate, of course, that merely
registering does not mean that you immediately become native speakers of love,
or indeed that you will automatically become very good at it. You should hear the pidgin-love spoken by
some couples who have registered for this course! Learning to speak the language of love is a long process, indeed
in this life I cannot guarantee you will become fully proficient speakers, but
I can assure you that you will find it an intensely rewarding and ever
expanding experience, and one which will take you to the limits of the language
in a way in which no other method of training known to mankind can. Anyway, I am delighted to see from your form
that you do seem to be the definite article.
And I also notice that you have put in a bit of pre-course studying
already.
I am so pleased you have
committed yourselves to studying together long-term. Some people seem to think this is a rather preposterous idea,
they would rather study for a term or so with one pupil, and then start from
scratch again with another a few years later.
This has always seemed to me to be a rather silly concept. Surely the great benefit of any language,
especially love, is found in its long term use? I had the opportunity of a flirtation with written Chinese
characters once, but decided against the relationship because, being in China
for only two years, I couldn't see the point.
Now, if I'd stayed in China for my whole life, that would have made it
all worthwhile. It's only by deciding
from the outset that we are committed to the study of love that we will really
be able to throw ourselves into learning how to speak it at any meaningful
level.
Anyway, let's have a look at
what's important in learning the language.
My experience of students is that it's the ones who keep on using the
language, practising and practising day and night, who improve the
quickest. After all, that's what the
language is for isn't it? And it's also
fairly true to say that if we stop using the language of love, being
inventive with it, thinking of new ways of expression, we become rusty pretty
quickly. We can't just rely on what we
have said or studied before to keep us going.
Another principle of learning to love, too, is that we learn best from
our mistakes. The best students aren't
the ones who are always being so careful that they virtually never say
anything, the best ones are those who talk and talk, and can recognise when they
are wrong and do something about it.
Ogden Nash had something to say on this:
"To keep your marriage
brimming
With love in the marriage
cup,
Whenever you're wrong admit
it,
Whenever you're right, shut
up."
The beauty of registering
long term for this course is that it frees you up to make mistakes without
thinking you have failed the whole thing.
You are now free not to be Mr or Mrs Perfect all the time, and you are
free not to expect the other to be Mr or Mrs Perfect. No doubt you will become extremely adept at noticing each other's
grammatical errors, and will probably become irritated by each other's
linguistic foibles, but you have all the time you need to amend these errors
and move on. In relation to this, you
will not find it helpful in learning to speak by concentrating on the other's
progress, rather to look at your own.
Any good teacher knows that correction is sometimes useful, but
encouragement of the other is the best resource, and it is better for the
learning process if the other is left to recognize and correct their own
mistakes. And pay attention to your own
syntax, the way what you are saying is being constructed, but not too much to
the other pupil's. Often we can get so
precise about the structure of what our fellow pupil is saying, that we
fail to appreciate the true meaning of what is being expressed. I have come across a couple of examples of
this. A friend of mine asked his
prospective father in law: "I'd like to marry your daughter." The man replied: "Have you seen my wife?" "Yes" my friend said, "But I still prefer your
daughter." Or there was Mrs Brown,
who complained to her husband saying, "Mr Smith always blows his wife a
kiss when he leaves for work in the morning.
Why don't you do that?"
"But I hardly know the woman!" replied poor Mr Brown. When the language seems clumsy and
irritating to us, we need to listen carefully to what is being meant. Then conversation can continue, and who
knows, perhaps we will get better at our syntax the longer we talk.
You will, of course, find a
lot of the course hard slog. There is
vocabulary to learn, revision to be done, exercises which seem to rob love of
its joy. But you do need to get through
these and remember what the point of all this studying is: it's to reach the pure joy of communicating
with each other at a level which is so intimate, the only thing we can compare
it to is the love God has for the human race.
There is no other purpose to this language than that. Enjoy it.
Take risks. Don't ever be
satisfied with the level you've got to - there is always more to be
learnt. You are flesh and blood which
can be touched and held, but you are also an impenetrable mystery to each other
which words will only skim the surface of.
We see many couples who have been on the course for a long time who get
stuck at the functional level of language.
They know the basic vocabulary, the structures they need, and they can
get by on it, but that is far as they ever get. Avoid functionality. And
don't feel you have to speak in the same way to each other - you need to
develop your own individual styles.
Your most dynamic exchanges will come as you share your linguistic
variety together. Aim for poetry,
lyricism, mystery. If you learn to
speak the language of love with this kind of wholeheartedness, any children you
will have will not have will not need to go to classes to learn it, they will
pick it up naturally from you.
A few problems to be aware
of: Avoid both getting stuck in the
passive at the same time, using sentences such as, "It's my turn to be
loved." Strive to be the first
to use the active verbs of love. Not to
be loved, but to love; not to be consoled, but to console. View one another neither as subjects nor
objects. Concentrate on the third
person singular - he or she - rather than the first person singular - I. Better by far is to as often as you can, of
course, to use the first person plural.
Try not to use the possessive pronoun, or to get into excessive use of comparatives,
either between yourselves, or with other couples enrolled on the course. There will always be those better and worse
off than yourselves. And finally
remember that there are no conditionals in the language of love. We often try and write them in by instinct,
but they tend to warp the whole fabric of the language itself.
A bit of practical
advice: Try to get a balance between
the verbs "to be" and "to do". You will find you need both, and people tend to neglect the
first. And can I recommend plenty of
regular conjunctions. There is nothing
like a conjunction to assist the free-flow of the language of love. I must admit to being rather keen on
conjunctions, so much so that my wife tells me often that I have conjunctions
on the brain. I would however warn
against the practice of trying to prefix a conjunction with an imperative. In fact, you will find that a conjunction
rarely follows an imperative in my experience.
Any attempt to do this usually results, I am afraid to say, with a large
glass of cold water being thrown at one's face.
But where will your language
find its true meaning? It is in the
very source of the unique language you are tentatively learning to speak. This is the language of love which brought
all things into being, and is the grammatical structure which is the ground of
everything, and of the language of love which your union is founded upon. In the beginning was the word, and the word
was with God, and the word was God. The
language you are learning does not exist in a vacuum, but finds its context in
the God who has the first and last word in the meaning of love. Jesus said, "I am the Alpha and the
omega". It is he who knows the
language back to front, he is the whole alphabet. It is in him that all our attempts to speak this language will
find any true meaning. He is the
greatest teacher, the most precise grammatician, the most fluent
conversationalist in the language of love.
He has studied well, and knows the cost of love and its triumph. You will find that at love's darkest hour,
when you struggle to find any words at all to say to each other, he is the only
one who has the knowledge of love sufficient to give you the next
sentence. And you will know that when
the joy of speaking this language leaves you wordless with wonder, it is then
that you will glimpse a taste of what it will be like when one day we will all
be truly native speakers of the language of love. Now we speak only in part, then we will speak fully. Never believe that the language you learn to
speak as a couple will ever be able to be enough for you. But be encouraged that in entrusting your
studying to the care of love's originator, every attempt to love will make some
sense, that angels will rejoice, and that when the complete comes, the partial
will end.
To conclude your induction, I
will quote a cynic who said "Marriage is not a word, but a
sentence." I pray that your
marriage may not just be a sentence, but may be a book of poetry, constantly
growing and finding new and exciting avenues of speech. May it enrich those around you, bring you to
new horizons of life together, and bring glory to your creator, who is Love
Himself.