Before You Speak: The Small, Holy Danger of a Human Voice

The ancient Greeks noticed something we notice every day, usually about four seconds after we have said the wrong thing.

It is not only what you say.

It is how you say it.

You can tell your husband he forgot the milk. This is a fact. You can tell him he forgot the milk as if he has personally betrayed the dairy industry, the family budget, and the covenant of marriage. Same fact. Very different weather in the kitchen.

Hermogenes of Tarsus was a Greek teacher of speaking and writing who lived in the second century, when the Roman Empire was running much of the known world and people still understood that words could help run it too. In his book On Types of Style, he studied the many ways speech works on human beings. The English scholar Cecil Wooten translates Hermogenes’ main kinds of style as clarity, grandeur, beauty, rapidity, character, sincerity, and force. Other translators use slightly different English words, because Greek words can be roomy things, with several shades of meaning. But the point is simple: words do more than carry facts from one brain to another.

Words can comfort a frightened child.

Words can make a lonely person feel less alone.

Words can turn a room cold.

Words can make a person stand up straighter.

Words can invite. Words can accuse. Words can heal. Words can hurt in ways that last a long time, sometimes because the words came from someone we trusted to be careful.

We live in a time that loves clear information. We like facts, bullet points, fast answers, efficient meetings, strong opinions, and arguments we can win before lunch.

But human speech was never meant to be only data transfer.

A voice is more than a loud thought.

Hermogenes begins with clarity. That makes sense. If no one can understand you, all your fine thoughts are just furniture in your own head. He cared about clear words and clear order, about speech that did not make people wander through a fog with a flashlight and a sandwich.

Clarity is a kind of love.

A doctor has to tell a patient difficult news. A teacher has to explain a hard idea to a student who thinks she is dumb, though she is not. An employer has to correct someone who made a mistake. A parent has to tell a teenager the truth after a big fight.

In every case, there is a temptation to hide in vague language.

“We need to revisit your performance.”

“Things are complicated.”

“You know what you did.”

Sometimes the person does not know what they did. Sometimes they know, but need help seeing what comes next. Sometimes they are scared enough already without having to decode a message as if it came from a secret government office.

Clarity says: Here is what happened. Here is why it matters. Here is what we can do now.

That is not soft. It is kind.

Then there is grandeur, which means speech that lifts us a little. Not fancy speech. Not a man using the word “utilize” when he could simply say “use.” Not a wedding toast that lasts thirty-seven minutes and includes the groom’s middle school baseball statistics.

Grandeur means words that let us see more than the small hurt or fear right in front of us.

Hermogenes included several kinds of grandeur, including brilliance, solemnity, force, and rich expression. This is speech with room in it.

A priest speaking to people who are grieving should not act as if grief is a small inconvenience. A friend sitting with a woman whose husband has died does not need to explain death. He needs to honor the great dark thing that has happened.

Sometimes the best sentence is: “I am here.”

Sometimes the best sentence is no sentence at all.

St. Charles de Foucauld was a French priest and hermit who lived among the Tuareg people of North Africa. He believed in friendship, closeness, and a quiet life among people before trying to make speeches at them. He understood that presence can be a kind of language. You sit beside someone. You stay. You do not run away because you have no good advice.

That is a grand thing.

Beauty may sound like the least practical part of speech, but it may be the part we need most.

Beauty is rhythm. It is grace. It is the right word arriving at the right time. It is a parent saying, “You are more important to me than this argument.” It is a teacher finding a picture or story that suddenly lets a student understand something that had seemed impossible.

Beauty is not fake sweetness. It is not putting lace curtains around a lie.

It is truth that has remembered it has a human face.

Jesus speaks this way all the time. He talks about birds, lilies, lamps, seeds, coins, vineyards, sheep, fathers, sons, weddings, bread, and feasts. He could have spoken in long lectures about divine providence and human anxiety. Instead, he points to birds.

Look at them.

Consider the lilies.

That is not less true because it is beautiful. It is true in a way that gets under the ribs.

Hermogenes also wrote about rapidity, which is speech that moves. It is quick, clean, alive, and does not sit on the listener’s chest for twenty minutes explaining itself.

This is a rare gift.

Some people apologize as if they are making a documentary about themselves.

First there is the opening statement. Then the background. Then the childhood. Then the explanation of why the thing was not exactly their fault. Then the director’s commentary. Then, perhaps, around minute twenty-six, a small apology limps into view.

Try this instead:

“I was wrong.”

“I hurt you.”

“I am sorry.”

Then be quiet.

A real apology needs space around it. The other person may need to breathe. They may need to be angry. They may not be ready to forgive you before the soup gets cold.

Rapidity is not rushing. It is knowing when more words will not help.

The friend whose world has come apart may not need your best thoughts. They may need you to sit there with them. They may need a hand on the shoulder. They may need someone to say, “I do not know what to say, but I am not leaving.”

That is enough.

Then comes character.

People hear our words, yes. But after a while they also hear the person inside the words.

They know if we tell the truth. They know if we listen. They know if we enjoy being right more than we enjoy being kind. They know if our humility is real, or if we are just wearing humility as a clever hat.

This is why the same sentence can land so differently from different people.

“I am concerned about you” can be loving. It can also mean, “I have been waiting all week to say this.”

Families are experts in this field. A whole family can have a conversation using only eyebrows. Married people can hear seventeen meanings in the word “fine.” Teenagers can say “whatever” in a way that suggests the moon has fallen out of the sky and somehow it is your fault.

Romano Guardini was a Catholic philosopher and priest born in Italy and raised in Germany. He wrote deeply about what it means to meet another person. He reminded readers that people are not objects to manage, fix, label, or use. They are persons. They are mysteries. They are not problems with shoes on.

This changes the way we speak.

Every conversation puts another person in our care, if only for a minute.

Sincerity is not telling everyone everything.

You do not have to tell the grocery clerk about your childhood wounds because she asked whether you found everything all right.

Sincerity is simpler than that. It means being real. It means speaking without hiding behind a costume.

Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She died at Auschwitz in 1942. Before entering the convent, she wrote deeply about empathy, about how one person can truly meet another person’s experience without pretending to own it.

Sincerity makes that kind of meeting possible.

An exhausted mother can say to her child, “I am upset, and I do not know what to do with this yet, but I love you.”

A husband can say, “I was trying to win. I forgot to love you.”

A friend can say, “I do not understand your pain, but I believe it is real.”

These are not polished sentences. They do not need to be.

They are human sentences.

Finally, there is force. This does not mean shouting. The loudest person in the room is often just the person most worried that no one will notice he has nothing to say.

Force means speech with moral weight. It is the voice that names wrong when wrong must be named. It is the courage to say, “No.” It is the courage to say, “This is hurting people.” It is the courage to speak when silence would be easier.

St. Oscar Romero was the archbishop of San Salvador who spoke against violence, injustice, and the killing of the poor. He was murdered while celebrating Mass in 1980. His words had force because they came from prayer, courage, attention to suffering, and love for the people in front of him.

Force without love becomes cruelty.

Truth without tenderness becomes a weapon.

Beauty without truth becomes a pretty lie.

Sincerity without wisdom can become performance.

Clarity without character can become cold and hard.

Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher who worried about the misuse of words in public life. In Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, he warned that language cut loose from truth can become a tool for controlling people. We know this in our bones. We have all heard speech that sounds polished and powerful but leaves us feeling somehow smaller.

Good speech should not make another person smaller.

For Christians, all this comes together in Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of John calls him the Word made flesh.

Think about that for a minute.

God does not send only a message. God comes near.

Jesus does not merely hand out information about love. He eats with people. He touches lepers. He asks questions. He tells stories. He looks at frightened people. He weeps with friends. He speaks hard words when hard words are needed. He stays silent when silence tells the truth better than self-defense.

He calls people by name.

After the Resurrection, he says peace to people who had failed him.

This is what Christian speech is meant to be like. Not perfect. Not polished. Not preachy. But incarnate.

Present.

True.

Loving.

The deepest question before we speak may not be only, “Is this true?”

It may be, “What do I want to happen in this person when they hear me?”

Do I want to help, or show off?

Do I want to heal, or unload?

Do I want to invite, or win?

Do I want to tell the truth, or use truth to make somebody pay?

Most of us know the awful feeling of getting the perfect words ten minutes too late. Most of us have said something sharp to someone we love. Most of us have hid behind jokes or sarcasm. Most of us have won an argument and lost something much more important.

But there is always the next sentence.

We cannot fix everything in our families, our jobs, our schools, our parishes, our Church, or our country.

But we can pay attention to the next sentence.

We can refuse contempt.

We can lower our voice.

We can say, “I was wrong.”

We can try another way to explain.

We can listen.

We can choose not to hand back the wound we were given.

Words do things.

They close doors.

They open doors.

And perhaps one of the great Christian arts is learning to speak so that another person walks away remembering not only what we said, but that while we said it, we remembered who they were.