Tower of Babel

“I believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”

We stood in the vestibule, my friends and I. They were trying to give me directions as to where we were meeting for coffee. I just wasn’t getting it. Finally in desperation, they got out their phone and accessed Google Maps. Suddenly I understood. We were finally speaking the same language!

As I have replayed this scenario over in my head, I began to realize that what I had experienced then was not unlike the reverse of what is written in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. It is a story I have always understood was designed to explain why there are different languages across the world. But as I had just experienced, sometimes when we are speaking the same language, we are in fact not understanding what the other is saying. In this case it was easily rectified because [a] both my friends and I knew that I just ‘wasn’t getting it’ and [b] they quickly reverted to using a visual aid to help me understand.

But then what about those others times, those times when either you, or whoever you are talking with, don’t realize that either one or both of you are not understanding the other? I suspect that happens more often then we think. That is how misunderstandings happen, how feelings get hurt, how ideas get lost. The above quote is by Rupert Ross, from his book ‘Dancing with a Ghost: experiencing the Indian reality”. Ross, a retired assistant Crown. Attorney, who worked with First Nations in remote northwestern Ontario, had many experiences during which neither side understood the other was saying despite that fact that they were, to all intents and purposes, speaking the same language.

The key to that understanding is not speaking the same language but rather realizing that what is heard is not what is meant. Realizing that although an onlooker might think you were speaking the same language, in fact you aren’t. You aren’t because your upbringing, the society you have lived in up to this time, your education and your religion, all shape how language is understood in the present. Is this perhaps the another meaning behind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel? That in reality we are all speaking a different language. That we can’t understand the other because what we hear means something different to each of us. That language is not the real barrier to understanding but rather it is our ignorance and lack of understanding of the others’ story.

I wonder……

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