Scott's Spot

I love the Nativity story as much as anyone.  In my family, we had a Christmas Eve tradition of gathering in the living room around the tree and hearing the story retold by whomever was the youngest family member able to read from the tattered children’s Bible we had.  In our small-town Methodist church basement, there was the annual Christmas pageant staged by the children’s Sunday School classes, complete with shepherds’ crooks and costumes fashioned from bed sheets.  Told and retold in story and song, the narrative of the birth of Jesus is so much a part of the Christian upbringing, so enmeshed and embellished with different cultural and family traditions, that we are likely encounter it at some point each year with nostalgia, misty eyes, and a lump in the throat. It’s certainly a compelling story, with elements of young love, a grueling journey, political intrigue, and special effects.  The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke each share a version of the “arrival of Jesus.” 

In response specifically to the tragedy in Orlando, and generally to the state of our national discourse, I wrote the following essay, published today in our local newspaper. “Words are things,” the inimitable Dr. Maya Angelou once said.  “You must be careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance.  Don’t do that.” She continued, like a prophet, “Someday, we’ll be able to measure the power of words.  I think they are things.  They get on the walls.  They get in your wallpaper.  They get in your rugs, in your upholstery and your clothes, and finally, into you .” As an educator, I learned early in my career that a single word, rightly chosen or ineptly used, could make all the difference in my students’ likelihood to grasp a difficult concept.  Later, as a school district leader, I was taught again and again, often in very difficult situations, that the words I chose could be consequential—for better