"What we have here..."

Cool Hand Luke. There’s a lot wrong with this 1967 film, but there’s something so right:  The famous, often misquoted line, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” The line is spoken by the character Captain, right after hitting Paul Newman’s character and pushing him down a small ravine. In the movie, the line comes on the heels of Luke’s (Newman) smart alec reply to Captain, after Captain tells Luke that the chains he is wearing (Luke is a prisoner on a chain gang) are for his own good. Luke’s comment? “I wish you’d stop being so good to me, Captain.” 

That line was on my mind as I walked my dogs this morning in the early, autumn-like air. They were on the scent of only God knows what, and were zigging and zagging in random fashion all over the sidewalk and the easement. At one point, Hank decided to zig and June decided to zag, and somehow their retractable leashes (yeah, I know, their short leashes would likely be better for morning walks, but here we are) got wrapped around my body. In an instant I paused my True Crime podcast on my headphones, did a kind of twirl and jig to get untwisted, and started to chuckle as the quote flashed like a lighted sign in my mind, “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

As I’ve reflected some more about communication and communication failures, I found myself wondering about all of the ways and for all of the reasons communication tends to break down. There are communication breakdowns that happen in an email, a text, or on social media because tone and facial expressions are absent tools that are helpful in interpreting what’s being said and how it’s being said. Communication breakdowns happen with our spouses when we make assumptions that the other person will take care of something else. Sometimes we think we told a co-worker or a partner about a meeting we have at a particular time, but it turns out that message never made it from our “To-Do” lists into an actual conversation. We fail to communicate effectively with our kids, sometimes forgetting that listening–truly and deeply–is as much a part of communication as speaking is. And we even have communication failures that happen inside of us without any other person involved.

That last one, I think, is somewhat trickier to identify, and yet it carries a weight that is so profound that it impacts nearly everything else in our lives. It is a communication failure between our heads and our hearts. 

You would think that with all of the body’s sophistication, failures to communicate would be few and far between, and yet they are nearly as common as breathing. We get an illness that might slow us down a little, and our brains try to reason a way out of it so that our hearts won’t have to be resigned to acceptance and taking the necessary rest. Our hearts will remind us that someone we love is dying, but our brains will try anything to force by sheer will some different outcome. Our schedule will look impossible for the day, and our brains will tell us that we’ll still be able to get it all done and be able to make our child’s sporting event, or be able to keep dinner plans with our friends or our spouse, but our hearts hold the deeper, disappointing, truth that we won’t be making anything of the sort. Our brains tell us that we can multitask in order to make it all happen–that we can be bigger, stronger, faster, and maybe even still look smokin’ hot doing it, while our hearts hold the wisdom of our true capacity. Even in grief, denial is usually our first step–our brain’s feeble attempt to protect our tender hearts from feeling the shock of a loss. It’s like we get it through our heads, but we just can’t bear to break it to our hearts.
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In Matthew chapter 3, John the Baptist calls us to change our hearts and lives, or to repent. While this word has gotten a bad rep from some who have misused it as an action that reminds us how terrible we are, I can’t help but think that it might have a very useful application to help with communication failures. Maybe our failure to communicate–whether with others, with God, and within ourselves–is crying out to us from the wilderness of our own lives the way John called out from the wilderness in our sacred stories? Could it be that a communication failure between our heads and our hearts is asking us to change how we’re living or how fast we’re living? Could it be that a communication failure with our children is our invitation to make a change from listening in order to respond to listening in an effort to understand? What if we practiced letting our heart work as intended, and not calling it “broken” during times of loss and grief? What if communication breakdowns aren’t the end of the story we are writing as people, as partners, as parents, and as professionals, but instead are the beginning of a transformative story? OUR transformative story–the beginning of our very own repentance–a complete change of OUR hearts and OUR lives? 

Well, I don’t know the answers there–at least not for you. But what I do know is that when communication failures happen, what we have is more than just the failure itself. What we also have is an opportunity–to turn back to God, to turn back to one another, and to turn back to the image of God we were created to be. For it is in the turning and re-turning–in the repentance–where transformation and change are born. 

Learning to turn someplace new with you,
Pr. Melissa

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