Sticks and stones may break my bones,

But words will never hurt me.

I remember hearing this rhyme in early grade school. Someone had been called a name. Someone else had “tattled” to the teacher. And the teacher’s reaction was this rhyme.

Bullying and name-calling were variously accepted by adults and kids. On some level, we were expected to develop a stoic, thick-skinned attitude toward derogatory names. Sticks and stones might physically harm us, but words could be rendered innocuous by ignoring them, dismissing them or developing that equally-vicious verbal comeback.

But, I wonder. Are words so harmless?

I remember how I felt when I heard that one of my father’s co-workers had told him to “go back where he came from.” Where my father came from was Poland, via a Russian prison camp and an English air base where he flew Lancaster bombers. My father learned his English as an adult at this air station.

Dad still speaks a heavily accented English, and is still, on occasion, dismissed as less than intelligent or worthy of attention.

I remember a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in a small Alaskan town. Clothilde, one of four African-Americans living there, shared this story. Clothilde had grown up in St. Louis, Mo., in the 1940s.

She was in her early 20s when she first visited the deep South. She told us how she got on a bus, sat near the front, and was ordered by the white driver to move to the back. When she would not, the driver stopped the bus, stood over her, called her a derogatory name, and waited until she did move. The shame she had felt in that moment, some 40 years past, still existed in her voice and face and posture as she related this incident.

In Missoula, Mont., in the 1990s, a man named Matt Hale and his Church of the World Creator leafleted neighborhoods – mine among them – with their messages of anti-Semitism and homophobia. The folks of the town, predominantly Christian and heterosexual, rallied to offer opposition to the hate-filled sentiments.

Churches, civic groups, the police department, neighborhood associations and individuals tried to provide some measure of comfort and feeling of safety to our Jewish and gay communities. But the words in Hale’s diatribes, with their barbs of hate and the whiff of potential violence, lingered long after the last pamphlet was thrown away.

In November of last year, Thomas Harnett, an assistant attorney general for Maine, spoke to a Bangor gathering about the Maine Civil Rights Act, the Maine Human Rights Act and the Civil Rights Team Project.

The Maine Civil Rights Act prohibits physical force or violence or the threat of violence, motivated by bias based on race, color, sex, physical or mental disability, religion, ancestry or national origin or sexual orientation.

A “hate crime” is one motivated by bias against the victim based on one or more of the above factors. The Maine Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodation and credit, based on the above criteria. The Civil Rights Team Project goes into Maine elementary, junior and senior high schools, educating our children about these laws and talking about name-calling, bullying, bias – and the power of words.

What struck me about the project was its understanding that hate crimes – hateful actions against the “other” – almost always start with demeaning, hate-filled speech. The actual crime may be perpetrated with sticks and stones, but words, and the feelings they provoke, are often the spurs toward violence.

The project suggests that words may not be so harmless. Hate-filled words should not be easily dismissed.

Our greatest moral teachers – teachers like the Buddha, Jesus, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. – used their words to embrace those who were seen as social lepers, strangers and outsiders. These teachers call us to follow their examples.

As we move into the Chinese and Islamic New Years, into Black History Month, through the cold and dark of winter, may we appreciate the power that our words hold to inspire, to heal, to help, to bless. May we open our hearts and doors to those we see as the strangers among us.

May we practice the kind, the inclusive, the welcoming word.

Suzanne Wasilczuk is intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor. She may be reached via bdnreli

gion@bangordailynews.net.