“I have heard the slander of many. Fear was on every side.”
David, in Psalms 31:13a
In
his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T. S. Eliot included a
line that I have never been able to forget since the first time I read
it in high school. That line is this: “When I am pinned and wriggling
on the wall, . . .” The imagery of that phrase is brilliant; it
describes the utter helplessness felt by someone stuck in a situation
beyond his control. The man in Eliot’s poem felt as helpless as an
insect caught by an insect collector and pinned to a specimen board
along with other insects. The only remaining reason for that poor
creature to exist, then, is to be a gazingstock for the curious, an
object to be talked about the way visitors to an art museum gaze at
artwork and then discuss it among themselves. “Pinned and wriggling on
the wall.” Not quite dead yet, but immobilized and unable to escape the
fatal pin through the mid-section.
The
invisible pin that immobilizes and kills people is talk, and the
collector that pins righteous people with an evil reputation is Satan.
Once pinned, a person may wriggle in protest for a short while, as
insects may do when they are pinned to the specimen board; however,
there is no escape, and soon the pinned individual becomes to everyone
only what he is labeled as, and nothing more. In the end, he becomes no
more than a thing to be looked at and commented upon, and eventually he
decays in his appointed spot, along with the other lifeless specimens
on the wall.
My
father warned us that slander is murder. He made that statement
because he understood that if you ruin a person’s reputation, you kill
his influence, and if you kill his influence, he is, in effect, dead to
everyone around him. My father didn't know T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, but
he was an astute observer of life, and he saw how often and how easily
an envious soul can leave others, even innocent people, “pinned and
wriggling on the wall”. Their pointed words pin souls on the wall of
people’s minds, and then leave them there to wriggle a bit before the
struggle exhausts them, and they die.
Reputation
can be a deadly thing. If someone you know dies the slow, agonizing
death of a ruined reputation, be very sure that you are not the one who
pinned him with it. God has promised that He will destroy whoever
slanders another (Ps. 101:5), and for that reason, we know that Solomon
was wise to say that whoever dares to be a slanderer is a fool (Prov. 10:18).
