placebo

I have been marveling over—which is to say, doubting—a bit of recent health news: 59% of people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome who knew that, as part of a study, the doctor was merely giving them sugar pills for their condition reported relief from their symptoms. There are so many ways to interpret these findings. That merely being paid attention to by a doctor has a curative effect. Or that taking action about a medical problem—even if the action is merely participating in a study in which one is given sugar pills—tells the body to heal, and the body pays attention. That, by extension, taking action about any problem, no matter what the action is, has a potential curative effect. Or, the doubting side of me says, maybe Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not a physiological condition at all but a psychological one. Or maybe it's indeed a physiological ailment that tiny amounts of sugar somehow addresses. The only real conclusion I have so far come to is that the brain is a mystery. Such a mystery.

Somewhere in the course of my ponderings, though, I looked up the etymology of the word placebo. Whoa! It is the first word of a response in Latin that mourners repeat in a traditional Catholic service for the dead and came to refer to the whole service. The response itself is the Latin Vulgate translation of Psalm 116:9, “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” which in English is “I will please the Lord in the land of the living.” This is also how the line was translated in the Douay-Rheims, a Catholic Bible translation based on the Vulgate that was published around the same time as the King James Version. In most other translations—all Protestant translationsi as well as the New American Standard version currently popular among Catholics—the verse reads something like “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”

How the word placebo came to mean what it means today is a curious tale. Apparently, people crashed funerals in medieval times, and these people came to be called, derisively, “placebo singers,” because they sang that repeated response in simulation of mourning in order to get at the food the mourning family provided. From there, with help from Chaucer, the word came to be used more generally in reference to flatterers and freeloaders and eventually to any pretence designed to “please” someone else—which in medicine would mean, as placebo is defined in my American Heritage Dictionary, “A substance containing no medication and given merely to humor a patient.”

I’d like to commit a semantic anachronism—a bad habit of people who preach, for example, that since our English word hilarious comes from the Greek word for cheerful, hilaron, then it must be that God loves a “hilarious giver” in 1 Corinthians 9:7—and read that weird Douay-Rheims translation of Psalm 116:9 as “I will humor God in the land of the living.” Such an odd idea, putting one over on God, but I kind of think that’s what I’m often trying to do. Singing placebo. And God knows it. And, incomprehensibly—as incomprehensibly as knowingly taking a placebo can cure Irritable Bowel Syndrome, as incomprehensibly as our brains work—God interprets my song as all the righteousness I’ll ever need.

Indeed, singing placebo is the essence of the verse on which I sailed into faith—“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1 TNIV). As in this verse, when one knowingly takes a placebo, hoping and knowing become synonymous, and—inexplicably—we are cured.

choose, choosing, choice, chosen

Last night my 17 year old daughter Lulu and her friend and I discussed wealth. I had heard part of an NPR broadcast on the subject and was intrigued when some wealth scholar discussed historical differences in how wealth worked. Previously, people used to amass wealth and then live from it. So, as I pointed out, in Jane Austen novels, people were routinely described in terms of how many pounds a year they lived from. Their base income defined them, but they seemed to live pretty nearly the same lives as those with less. The broadcast went on to say that the wealthy these days, by contrast, must keep buying more and bigger houses and yachts and so on. These things—not the money they live from—define them. These things also place them outside the life of ordinary people. They live a life removed.

Another expert on the broadcast pointed out that, though the U. S. is so wealthy that even our poorest would be seen as rich by global standards, nevertheless, no matter how much money they have, Americans generally consider, not themselves, but only those who make twice as much as they do to be wealthy. Thus, none would refer to themselves as "wealthy."

I told the teenagers that from now on I was going to regard myself as and call myself rich. After all, I enjoy a house, daily showers in hot water, virtually any food that I can think of (and find ingredients for, here in the Oklahoma countryside), the leisure to run 21 miles a week, a gorgeous vista of fields and trees and birds from my living room (aka office) window, several dependable sources of income (jobs, husband's job, savings), and so much more that I can’t begin to list it all.

To my surprise, Lulu—who, like most teenagers and many adults in my acquaintance, seems frighteningly acquisition-minded—ardently agreed. In her Western Civilization class—which she disparagingly referred to as her “Bible study,” because her Christian professor often discusses matters of faith—she had studied what she called the “seven cardinal virtues,” companions to the seven deadly sins. One of them, she said, referenced just such views on wealth as I was expressing (who knew?!) but she couldn’t remember the word for it, so this morning, while she slept, I did some research.

Temperance was probably the word she was looking for, and it’s a good one. But my research brought me to a broader expression of the notion as one of the more encompassing “four cardinal virtues,” prudence. The word has a history as meaning not caution but something more like practical wisdom and was seen by Greeks as well as medieval Scholastics as the root of all virtue: the ability to choose wisely.

Choose is such an interesting word. It is about what we take from what is around us. It speaks of lesser and greater options, of freedom. Things that are especially luxurious are called choice. And, beneath the surface of all chooosing lies rejection. In the context of faith the word choose references all those meanings and more.

I think of Mary’s stressed out sister Martha versus Mary herself, listening and resting at Jesus’ feet, having, as Jesus said, “chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). Mary was certainly prudent, a good steward of her wealth.

But then there’s the term “God’s chosen people” and how offensive that sounds to any who do not regard themselves as such—the rejected. Also, there's the whole concept of election—a fancy theological word for some Christians' belief that the saved are "chosen" by God and cannot choose God for themselves, sort of the spiritual opposite of seeking—and Jesus’ cryptic parable of the king’s son’s wedding banquet which those who were invited were all too busy to attend. So, the king sends for the people of the street, “the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests” (Matthew 22:10). Everything sounds good up to this point, but then, of these new guests, one forgot to wear his wedding clothes and is bound hand and foot and thrown “outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13). For, Jesus explains, “many are invited, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). I get really worried about what I'm wearing (at this moment, still, to my shame, my nightgown and housecoat—more evidence of my great wealth!) whenever I think about this story.

“I chose you,” Jesus is always reminding his twelve main followers, emphatically reminding them in John 15:16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” The rest of the followers, though, seem to choose Jesus on their own, by my reckoning, sometimes going out of their way to do so. Zacchaeus climbs a tree. The Roman centurion (an officer in charge of one hundred soldiers, in case you’ve always wondered, as I have, what that word meant exactly) sends a servant. The Canaanite woman with the demon-possessed daughter runs after Jesus and wails, so embarrassing and outraging the disciples that they want to send her away. Even after Jesus himself rejects her, saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24), she kneels in the dirt before him and begs and reasons and counters his own arguments and eventually gets what she wants. And Jesus describes her behavior—the wailing and begging and reasoning and arguing; in short, her persistent choosing—as “great faith” (Matthew 15:28).

sanctimonious

One of my most pernicious sins—aside from plain old meanness, to which I'm prone from time to time and for which I have myriad rationalizations, which I won't go into just now, though I'm tempted—is sanctimony. Defined in most dictionaries as feigned piety or righteousness, the word has nothing to do with pretense in my private lexicon. Rather, it is the overwhelming sense of my own moralness, often in the face of someone else's misery or despair.

I will lay it before you. When confronting a tragedy of some unknown unfortunate, my default inner response appears to be not pity or compassion or even that most generous of pomposities, indifference. Instead, a sticky, unswallowable sanctimonious ooze of fills me, collecting like snot in my sinuses in the night. However arduously my soul within me moves and twists, however hard I gasp for a breath of genuine love, sanctimony oozes and seeps, filling the passageways of the spirit and choking me with the unlovable lovelessness of thinking others’ miseries earned and myself—for not being like that—holy by comparison.

The word sanctimony is a strange one. In English, it is used almost exclusively in its adjective form, sanctimonious. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin cognate sānctimōnia, which means, simply, sanctity or holiness. The English word sanctimonious was used that way for many centuries, until it acquired, notably via Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, its current disparaging sense as not sanctity but hypocritical sanctity, not holiness but holiness feigned, not righteousness but a show of righteousness.

Many words that once denoted sanctity have become similarly disparaged in contemporary usage, but sanctimonious is the worst of all. Few these days like to be called "pious" or "righteous," but none want to be called "sanctimonious."

And rightly so, I would argue. The sense of one’s own relative holiness is poison to every holy impulse. And hypocrisy seems lamentably inherent in every conscious holy act.

Nor is sanctimony constrained to those who wcall themselves Christians. Many of my nonbelieving friends and acquaintances wax sanctimonious in matters of social justice or green living or animal rights or whatever happen to be their personal holinesses.

As for my own sanctimony, I wish there were some solvent to dissolve it or at least break it up some and let it sink below my breathways to join the other wastes I produce until the glorious day when it all passes from me entirely.

selah

I really like that there are untranslatable words in scripture. For one thing, they make you slow down and speculate and consider—which is, in fact, one of several ways scholars propose we understand the biblical word selah, an untranslatable word used 71 times in 39 of the Psalms, many of which begin with reference to the musical nature of the psalm, and 3 times in the song that concludes the short book of Habakkuk. (That Habakkuk’s final prayer was meant to be sung is clear from a concluding reference to the director of music and intended instrumentation.) The term may have some musical meaning—like “pause here” or “descendo” or “insert bridge”—that has since been lost. Or it may mean always, which is how it was translated in certain key ancient translations. Its meaning may also draw upon its apparent etymology in the Hebrew word for hang.

All these possibilities come together, it seems to me, in the way I—and, I’m guessing, many modern readers—hear the word as they read through one of those unsung songs of scripture. Selah sounds like exhaled breath, a musical suspension meaning “Hang onto that thought.” Selah seems like the most wise and natural commentary one could make on the nature of the things of this world. It reads like a sigh.

That’s, in any case, how the word seems to operate in reggae songs and in the nostalgically apocalyptic songs of Leonard Cohen I’ve been listening to of late—that is, as sighs or groans in response to a world beyond understanding.

Scriptural sighing also calls to mind, for me, Paul’s intriguing depiction of the Holy Spirit translating the groans of all creation “through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26) as well as Jesus’ frequent exhalations—in his interactions with those around him and in breathing his last upon the cross. In a favorite passage of mine, Jesus sighs in prayer:

Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of
Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. There some people brought to him a
man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand
on him.

After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his
fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He
looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, "Ephphatha!" (which means
"Be opened!"). At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and
he began to speak plainly. (Mark 7:31-35)

Ephphatha. Try to say that word aloud, and you will hear that deep sigh that housed it—a different sound from selah but somehow the same. Selah. Ephphatha.

And that’s the biggest reason why I like untranslatable scriptural words so much. They mimic the wordless, word-hostile nature of our deepest prayers. Groans, as Paul says, “as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22). I remember those exhalations as simultaneously buoyant and unbearable, a joyous agony, an explosion of wordlessness. I felt opened.