Giving voice - Michael McGirr

A few months ago, we discovered that a well-known ballet school was giving a lunchtime performance in a hall not far from our house. It seemed too good to miss.
Our three young children all love dancing, even if, for our two boys, aged five and three respectively, dancing usually means getting dressed up in pirate outfits and terrorising each other with toy swords. The main difference between dancing and duelling is that dancing is accompanied by music, often ABBA, and involves taking a bow at the end.
Clare, our three-year-old girl, is disdainful of such crude performances. She sometimes wishes her two brothers would walk the plank. When she wants to dance, she puts on her pink slippers, her Snow White dress and, admittedly, her pirate hat. We live in a house full of pirates. Clare has decided that she is a Princess Pirate, a higher order of being than a captain or cabin boy, but a pirate nonetheless.
The ballet school was going to perform scenes from Don Quixote, which meant that we had to explain all about the famous knight with the sad face. We had to break the news that whilst Don Quixote did fight with windmills he was not, strictly speaking, a pirate as he had a horse rather than a ship. The boys showed great tolerance and agreed to go along anyway, as long as they could dress up as pirates.
We were a little hesitant because we had recently taken them to see a production of The Pirates of Penzance at the school where I teach and they had dressed for the occasion. The children loved the show but it was all we could do to stop them jumping up and joining in. We needn’t have worried. The boys got through the ballet with only one brief sword fight which was safely quarantined to their row of seats.
Clare was totally captivated by the ballet. At the end, she sat in her seat, unable to move. She had never seen a story told without words before and you could tell that she had fallen in love with something without being quite sure what that something was. This, I suppose, is the real difference between art and a sword fight.
As the boys were beginning to ching-ching their way down the stairs, Jenny noticed that Clare still had not moved. She looked longingly into the space where the dancers had been only a few minutes before. Jenny noticed that she had put her fingers down her throat and was concerned.
‘What are you doing, Clare?’
No response.
‘Clare, why is your hand in your mouth?’
Finally, Clare looked up.
‘I want to give them my voice’, she said.
Finding our voice takes a long time and a lot of wisdom. We can all think of things that we have said in our lives that might better have remained unsaid and of things we didn’t say that we needed to. The only consolation is that if we neve
But I am sure that our Princess Pirate had stumbled across one of the cornerstones of wisdom long before most of us. The surest way to find your own voice is to give that voice to others: helping someone find the words they need to express their truth is as creative as dance. The most profound form of Christian preaching is actually listening.
This year, we spend a good number of our Sundays with the Gospel of Mark. Mark’s raw and immediate encounter with Jesus becomes no more comfortable with the passage of years. There isn’t much dressing up in Mark. In fact, it is the opposite. The story is full of people who are afraid, and meeting Jesus means having those fears uncovered, laid bare. Even words can be a form of disguise.
More than the others, Mark’s gospel is the one in which people are told in no uncertain terms to be quiet. Characters are often warned not to say too much about Jesus, even when they have just experienced something life changing such as a miraculous cure: when the unclean spirits recognise Jesus, when Jairus’ little daughter is healed, when Peter makes his profession of faith, when the disciples come down from the Transfiguration and so on.
This is something of a mystery: Mark’s story begins with a voice crying in the wilderness and ends with the women who find the empty tomb being unable to say a word because they are afraid.
Mark’s gospel is a journey into silence. It believes that the voice we need is not our own. It wants to let Jesus speak for himself in the reality of our fear.