At Oxford, the academic term that begins in January is known as Hilary Term, because it begins on or near the feast of Saint Hilary. Wags like to point out that Hilary is the patron saint of backward children. Be that as it may, the Church calendar is crowded with saints for all occasions, occupations, and opportunities.
Recent years have seen three books addressing youthful traumas caused by stammering, and in early May the calendar of saints contains an obscure blessed, Notker Balbulus, a medieval monk who is the patron of people who stammer. At his monastery in Switzerland, Blessed Notker composed Gregorian chant, and during the liturgy he found release from his impediment, since no one stammers while singing. Another saint who could also be a patron for stammerers gets a day in early November, Saint Charles Borromeo; despite his stammer, his musical skills are not well known.
In the secular arena, the film The King’s Speech (2010) helped bring serious and sympathetic attention to the mysterious phenomenon of stammering. For a long time before that film, the most familiar cinematic depiction of stammering had been the announcement by Porky Pig that the movie was over. Like making fun of dwarfs or fat people, stammering was always good for a laugh.
The books alluded to above are two novels, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006) and Vince Vawter’s Paperboy (2013), and a memoir, Scott Damian’s Voice: A Stutterer’s Odyssey (2013). Before encouraging readers to explore those books, I must note that my preference for the word “stammer” over “stutter” is simply because I find the latter all but impossible to say.
Mitchell’s and Vawter’s novels are largely autobiographical, and they recount what it is like to be a boy with a stammer. Mitchell’s novel is set in 1982 in a fictional village in the English Midlands, where the boy narrating the tale encounters numerous adventures and misadventures, all the while hearing people speak fluently in a range of accents and dialects, whether British, South African, or North American. Vawter’s story is set in 1959 Memphis, Tennessee, and woven into the boy narrator’s struggle with speech dysfluency is the place and time’s sometimes violent divisions of class and race.
Damian’s memoir presents a candid, unvarnished recollection of growing up a stammerer and the youngest in a Catholic, blue-collar immigrant family in late 1970s and early 1980s suburban New Orleans. Whereas Mitchell is a celebrated novelist, perhaps his most famous effort thus far being Cloud Atlas (2004), and Vawter is a retired newspaper editor, Damian is a professional actor. Thus, like Jimmy Stewart and other actors who have dealt with stammers, Damian has had to grapple with a speech impediment in order to make a living. As a man of faith, he shows in his slim and briskly-paced book how his religion has helped him in his struggle.
A turning point for Damian was an English teacher, Brother Raphael, on the faculty of Christian Brothers Academy. Brother Raphael recognized in the fifth-grader something more than a boy who was tongue-tied. “Lad, this will pass,” he said. “I promise. Don’t let this dictate your worth and who you will become.” Brother Raphael then encouraged the boy’s love for literature and especially for acting.
Before long Damian also found an inspiring outlet in the church choir at his parish. Like Notker in the ninth century, he noticed that, however briefly, singing frees one from stammering. A dozen or more years later, Damian discovered that performing at the Actors Co-op based at Hollywood Presbyterian Church also helped. The prayers of committed Christians who were also dedicated actors went a long way towards much-needed inner healing.
It is not giving anything away to say that Damian also turned to less spiritual means of coping. The story takes Damian through his college years and some of the seemingly obligatory physical indulgences associated with university life. We follow him into his thirties, getting settled in Los Angeles and, at the Actors Co-op and elsewhere, getting surprised by the role that God and prayer again play in his life. Now forty, Damian can say, “Stuttering does not define me any longer; I now define it.”
It was the lesson Brother Raphael sought to teach him, not to let stammering dictate his worth or who he would become. The lesson someone who stammers must learn is in the end the same as what everyone must learn: Who we are is not the same as what we are.
In theological terms, it is the difference between person and nature; one has any number of natures, such as, in Damian’s case, son, brother, student, actor, writer, citizen, parishioner, but none limit his person, his identity as a child of God. In that list of natures, having a stammer is on the order of having color blindness or diabetes or freckles; none of them changes one’s unique relationship between creature and Creator. We go awry if we see the core of our being as one of our natures rather than as our person.
We are told in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 7, that Jesus healed a man who had a speech impediment. Upon healing him, Jesus told the man and his friends not to tell anyone about it, but they hurried off and told everyone they could find. Human nature never changes, so their exuberant disobedience sounds familiar.
It is a paradox that people who stammer find ways to tell others about their impediment and how they have by and large transformed it, while it has also changed them and helped them grow. Saints and kings, actors and authors show that our natures need not define or limit our persons. The real mystery may be why we need to learn that lesson again and again.
Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno. He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.
Brother Bruno,
Your post on “Finding One’s Voice” is excellent. I use that exact title for a speech I have given dozens of times in schools, book events and to groups of speech pathologists.
Also, I am unabashedly proud to be mentioned in the same sentence with David Mitchell, one of the the 21st Century’s outstanding writers.
Congratulations on your outstanding post.