Lesson Seventeen: Listen for Dangerous Words
My family watched “The Sound of Music” on New Year’s Eve again, as is our tradition. I’ve seen it at least a hundred times, but this time, I saw something new.
In the scene when the children were introduced, the Captain used the whistle and Maria refused to take it. I realized that this is what the movie is about and why it deviated so much from the true story of the Trapp Family Singers.
The children have names. The housekeeper and the butler have names. The nuns have names. Even Herr Zeller, the Nazi sympathizer, has a name.
Maria didn’t just bring music back into the house, she brought humanity.
The children saw her as an object, a fraulein until she saw them first. She asked their names, ages and something about themselves. She paid attention and knew when Louisa tried to trick her. Then she opened the children’s eyes to see her at the dinner table by describing how vulnerable she was.
She asked for material to make them clothing, but he refused. Then, she taught the children how to sing. She taught them how to use their own voices.
It was hearing his children sing that sparked the transformation of Georg's heart, which allowed him to choose the path of love.
When the orders came, he chose to leave everything behind and climb over the mountains, rather than become a Nazi.
The movie tells us the secret of how not to become a Nazi: we must refuse to take the whistle and choose to see the image of God in one another.
In the movie, it’s not subtle; they used a literal whistle, yet it took me dozens and dozens of viewings over decades to pick up on it.
Dangerous words work the same way. We don’t always see or hear them even when they’re right in our face because they don’t sound dangerous.
I’ve been thinking about the wisdom of Yoda: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”
The dangerous words that lead to suffering don’t always sound like anger or hate, they simply erase identity. They harden our hearts through indifference.
That’s why good people do nothing while evil persists; not because of hate, but because “good people” are conditioned to not see the victims as human beings.
There are a lot of things that are happening now that scare me, but none more than the deliberate word choices those in power are making to dehumanize everyone who does not meet their definition of American.
That Christians are leading the way in the dehumanizing effort is abhorrent. It’s a complete rejection of Jesus.
It is the vocation of Christ-followers, to see the image of God in every human being. It’s even in the movie!
Maria was a representative of the Church, sent to do God’s will. Maria loved first, just as God first loved us.
As Christians, we are not called to love in response to how we are treated or because people followed the rules; we are called to love first because God loved us first, while we were still sinners.
When we fail to see the image of God in each and every one of our neighbors, we allow evil to triumph.
This is part 18 of a series inspired by my reading of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons Learned From the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder as part of my effort to offer Christian insight to those wondering what to do in this moment.