Helen Keller and the Gift of Language

 

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  The first daughter of a loving family, she was a healthy, growing child.  Speaking at 6 months, walking at a year old and, like any other child, a bundle of energy that kept her parents busy and on edge.

Then, when she was nineteen months old, the unthinkable happened.

Historians and doctors have sought to piece together what the sickness that visited poor Helen during that season was; at the time they called it “acute congestion of the stomach and brain”; whereas more recently many have speculated that it may have been some kind of Meningitis; but irregardless it manifested in a terrible fever that clung to the child so mercilessly that the family doctor did not think she would live.

She quotes in her first book “The Story of My Life” that “I still have confused recollections of that illness.  I especially remember the tenderness with which my mother tried to soothe me in my waking hours of fret and pain, and the agony and bewilderment with which I awoke after a tossing half sleep, and turned my eyes, so dry and hot, to the wall, away from the once-loved light, which came to me dim and yet more dim each day.”

The devilish fever finally did lift, to the cheers of her family, but their joy was turned grim when her parents realized that it had taken both her sight and hearing.  The shock eventually wore off, and days turned into years of frustration and insufficiency; where the child became increasingly aggravated at her inability to communicate with others and her parents ever aware of how powerless they were of any way to help her.

And then the story takes a strange turn.

Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone.  Who, after learning how to transmit sound through electrical signals, created the Bell Telephone Company which enabled people in two completely different places to have a conversation.

But what most people don’t know about Dr. Bell is that he had a huge heart for those who couldn’t hear.  Both his mother and his wife were deaf, and he founded many schools and programs to help in deaf education.  In fact, many of his inventions, including the telephone, were the byproduct of his larger quest to help the hearing impaired.

It is a singularly fascinating thing, that the man who is most known for expanding the communication abilities for those who could hear, was himself burdened in his heart to help those who could not.

But his desire to help the deaf also included working directly with those who were hearing impaired, a fact known by the first doctor that Helen’s parents tried, who recommended that they meet with Dr. Bell to hear his recommendations about educational institutions that could help Helen.  Mr. Keller was able to get Helen an audience with Dr. Bell, who still made time for her even though he was busy helping to start AT&T, which was to become one of the largest companies in the world.

Helen remembered the encounter and writes that Dr. Bell “held me on his knee while I examined his watch, and he made it strike for me.  He understood my signs, and I knew it and loved him at once.”

Bell recommended that Mr. Keller contact the Perkins Institute in Boston, where he was able to request a teacher who could begin Helen’s education.  They responded that they had found a teacher and that she would come the following spring.  Her name was Anne Sullivan.

Helen grew increasingly restless and aggravated stating in her book that “the desire to express myself grew.  The few signs I used became less and less adequate, and my failures to make myself understood were invariably followed by outbursts of passion.  I felt as if invisible hands were holding me, and I made frantic efforts to free myself.  I struggled – not that struggling helped matters, but the spirit of resistance was strong within me; I generally broke down in tears and physical exhaustion.  If my mother happened to be near, I crept into her arms, too miserable even to remember the cause of the tempest.  After a while the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.”

And then on March 3^rd 1887, Anne Sullivan came.  Ms.  Sullivan had worked at the Perkins Institute and had a unique compassion for the blind because she herself had lost some of her sight when she was younger, only to, by the Grace of God and several medical operations, gain much of it back a couple of years later.

The young teacher went to work immediately with Helen, having the girl touch objects and then signing the letters for those objects in her hands.  Helen, would then repeat the signs back, thinking that this was some kind of game.  This went on for days, until one afternoon Ms. Sullivan placed Helen’s hand under a faucet of running water and then signed into her hand w-a-t-e-r.

It was at that moment that something clicked in the girl’s mind.  Helen writes “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.  Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.  I knew that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.  That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!  There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

Ms. Keller went on to learn many words that day, and then later on, with her teacher’s help to read, write and even speak; becoming a woman who would write numerous books, meet 12 presidents and travel the world giving speeches on overcoming disabilities and not allowing yourself to be a victim of your circumstances.

The Heros in Helen’s Story

It’s hard to read about her story and not be moved.  There are many heroes in the story including Helen’s parents who are described as having “a sad heart and many misgivings” when they were trying to figure out how best to help their daughter.  There is Dr. Bell, who managed to find time for the disabled even though he was leading the company that would bring the telephone to the whole world.

And then there is Anne Sullivan, whose compassion for Helen is an inspiration to special needs teachers everywhere.  Special Needs workers give themselves to help difficult and disabled kids, who, without their intervention, would likely be unable to get an education, which would likely leave them unable to take care of themselves as adults.  Certain occupations are worthy of respect:  members of the Military put themselves at risk to keep our country safe, as do Police Officers and Firefighters; all such individuals in various ways put themselves in harm’s way to help others.  The teachers of kids who are either disabled or are struggling to find their way in this world, may not (usually) have a profession that requires them to put their lives on the line, but it is one that is filled with constant frustration and irritation due to the difficulty that the children have with navigating life and their choice to embrace this vocation shows that they are compassionate, good-hearted people who want to help the most vulnerable.  Ms. Sullivan was one such person who God used to open the up the world to Helen.

But as effective a teacher that Anna Sullivan was, Ms. Keller would have never accomplished the things she did in life had it not been for her deep longing to understand the world and connect with other people.

Helen describes her time before the coming of Ms. Sullivan like being lost “at sea in a dense fog”, “without a compass” and having “no way of knowing how near the harbor was”. And as said earlier she credits language, the living word, with “setting her soul” free.

We are Wired for Language

It was the phrase, the living word, that got my attention while reading her autobiography.  The Gospel of John is my favorite book in the Bible, and more specifically the first chapter of the book of John, is my most often read portion of Scripture.  I keep going back there and I still don’t fully grasp what the Holy Spirit is saying through this passage, but, as we are about to see, I think some of it is connected to Helen’s story.

Mankind was made in the Image of God, this means many things, one of which is that God, the Soul-Giver, made us conscious, autonomous beings who, through our five senses, are able to experience the world.  And as we perceive the world we inherently differentiate and categorize things.  We look at a couch and see it as being a separate entity from the rug that it sits upon.  We hear a meow coming from a kitten and distinguish it from the background noise of wind and the rustling of leaves.

From a young age we learn that these things are associated with sounds, words.  This is mostly taught in the home as parents and siblings teach children which words to use to refer to these different things.  When we go to school, we are taught that these words can also be associated with symbols that we see with our eyes - the written word.  The blind are taught to associate bumps on paper with words, ie Braille.  The deaf are taught hand signs.

We are internally wired to accept this – that things can be communicated through symbols associated with their meaning - and children effortlessly adopt the language they are brought up with.  This gives us the ability to understand the world we live in by breaking it down piece by piece and consequently allows us to re-arrange those parts in a way that facilitates life.

Language in Work and Relationships

Adam’s first job was to cultivate and tend the Garden that God had put him in (Genesis 2:15).  He was able to do this by taking his observations of plants, water and sunlight; condensing them into a cause-and-effect understanding through the use of language; and then applying that knowledge to the Garden to maximize its production of food and arrange its plants so that they would grow beautifully, filling his and Eve’s days with prosperity and awe.

Language also gave the first couple the ability to fellowship with one another.  Men and women were made for each other, it’s clear just by looking at them, but Scripture reveals something deeper than just righteous sexual ethics in Genesis 2:18, which is that individuals weren’t made to be alone.  Biblical Marriage, which is the lifelong promise between one man and one woman to abstain from sex with anyone other than each other, is one of Christianity’s great gifts to the world.  Many studies have been done that show that kids and societies do better when people stay married.  The spouses themselves do better as well.  But the beauty of this relationship is dependent on the gift of language.

Language as the Middleman to Discovering the Mind of God

This is why John 1:1 is so compelling.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

John 1:1

Before Christ came to the earth, He was the Word, in Greek the Logos, the Source and Channel of all Wisdom and Understanding.  And we see in Genesis that God actually created through words.  God says “Let there be Light” and then light comes into existence.

Thus, we see that Language is a part of the process of the creation of the universe.  God speaks things into existence from His Eternal Plan. The order goes like this:

Idea -> Word -> Thing

For man though the discovery of wisdom, which is an understanding of how God has created the world to function, goes in the opposite direction.  For us, we observe reality, give the various pieces names and that helps us to grasp the mind of God.  This order is below:

Thing -> Word -> Idea

As we can see in both cases, words are the intermediary stage, which in man’s case allow us the ability to identify cause-and-effect connections between things, which ultimately gives us a glimpse into the mind of God when He created the universe.

Collaboration in Language

But Genesis describes a two-way aspect of language that is worth noting.  While it’s true that God speaks certain things into existence; for instance light (Genesis 1:3) and expanding space (Genesis 1:6); at other times He speaks to enact processes that generate things according to broad types or kinds*, as He did with plants (all the types of vegetation, plants, and trees - Genesis 1:11) and animals (water animals and flying creatures - Genesis 1:20 and livestock and crawling things and animals of the earth - Genesis 1:24), which He then has Adam name the particulars (Genesis 2:19). 

Thus, there is a collaboration of language between God and Adam in the Garden.  There are some words that God invented and used when He created the world and the are other words that Adam invents and uses to describe the things that God made.

One cannot help but speculate about this original language, one crafted in some ways directly from God and in other ways by man in the unbroken Presence of God before his mind had been warped by sin.  I will speculate more about the language of Eden, one that was spoken for a very long time, in my next post, but for now I think it’s good to have a moment to recognize that the innate framework of our minds causes us to easily associate symbols with things, ie – words, and thus gives us the ability to understand the world and have fellowship with one another.  We didn’t give ourselves this internal wiring, rather this is a gift from God, who formed us in His Image.

All of this would have been lost to me had I never come across Helen’s story, and this speaks to how easy it is for us to be ungrateful.  We have been given so many things, that, when examined in detail, point to a Transcendent Source, a Master Mind who formed us and enabled us to experience the world that He sent us into.  But because we don’t recognize these blessings it leads to our apostacy (Romans 1:21).

So perhaps we should take a few minutes to give thanks to God, who not only formed our soul, put it into our body and sent us into the world that He created; but that who also gave us the tools to think and talk to one another. 

Thank you God for the incredible gift of language.

 

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*This could be an intermediate material process or a non-material supernatural process.  If it’s a material process it could be evolution, though I personally don’t believe there enough evidence to believe in evolution.  It could also be a material process that we either haven’t discovered yet, or is now undiscoverable because the earth has been cursed and no longer operates as it once did. I wrote a whole book about all of this titled Science, Scripture and the Beauty of God