| September 20, 2009 | Religious Words that Mean Something Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster |
Over the years it has been a strong reminder to me that I have not joined a revealed religion but instead have set out on a religious quest. Its attribution of divinity to the notion of “Light” goes in a direction different from the one in which I have gone in quite some time. It is not that I can prove it wrong, necessarily, but that for me and many others it has become an inappropriate or even an inaccurate way of expressing from where inspiration for living comes. At least for me its 19th century concepts of divinity and sin tend to convey less and less meaning as the modern world evolves in increasingly non-theistic directions.
However, there certainly is strength and motivation in this hymn. The words “glimpses of thy truth sublime” point to that transcendent wonderfulness of existence which can still be deeply meaningful to the person who approaches life, ultimately, as a glorious mystery. Also, this hymn asserts the reality that these glimpses shine “forever new” and are as available to the modern mind today as they were in ancient times. The anthropomorphic picture of divinity to which these words refer may fail fully to symbolize reality for many of us today but they point to an aspiration that continues to move the human spirit. Rather than being taken for what they literally mean, for many today the power of these words comes from their aesthetic appeal.
Actually, this is true of a good bit of our effort to express ourselves religiously. The words we say, the songs we sing, and the symbols we use tend to rely more on their emotional appeal and the reminiscences they arouse than on whether they say precisely that which is truly in our minds and hearts.
As a result, it is not easy to communicate in religious term. Even Unitarian Universalists find it difficult. There are many words we use -- or refuse to use -- that exemplify this problem. There are red flag words that some of us think we have to use because they seem to get close to what we mean and no other words seem adequate. But, often these are words that either turn others off so that they will not hear what we mean or set them off on a harangue because they object to what they think we mean. Here are some: sin, sacred, soul; guilt, God, salvation; prayer, sacred, repentance; revelation, righteousness, transcendence. Here are some others: reason, self reliance, intellect; evolution, science, existentialism; agnosticism, atheism, humanism. All of these words (plus many others) turn someone off or set them off. You can make your own list.
And yet, without these words, the language left to us seems cold, impersonal, and empty. The problem isn’t whether we mean what we say but whether we understand the tools with which we try to say what we mean. This problem is as old as human beings. A short verse by Sir Thomas Wyatt states this modern and ancient problem. In the early 1500s, Wyatt wrote:
Throughout the world if it were thought fair
Words enough a man shall find:
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
Their substance is but only wind. …
But well to say and so to mean
That sweet accord is seldom seen.
What happens is that, along with the red flag words we use, too often what we say does not truly match what we mean and we end up speaking words that only buzz the air. You know what a buzzword is. It is when breath vibrates the vocal cords and a sound comes out without conveying any real meaning -- a word whose substance is only wind, as the poem puts it. A buzzword only sounds authoritative or technical or meaningful. Any of the words I’ve mentioned so far can be a buzzword if it is used to convey concepts that are still fuzzy in our minds. Sir Thomas Wyatt may have had such words in mind when he wrote his poem.
But beyond Wyatt’s “well to say and so to mean" is another perhaps more insidious word usage, which occurs when we treat them as magical incantations. Some folks seem to think that simply saying such words makes them real. That mindset is quite like what once happened in a high school English class. The teacher was stressing the importance of a large vocabulary and said “Use a word ten times and it’s yours for life.” And, faintly from the back of the room came the sound of a young girl chanting: “Fred. Fred. Fred. Fred. Fred...” Too often in their minds, when people say God or resurrection or humanism or evolution, it’s as if these words were the very things to which these words only refer. It’s as if using them establishes as fact the existence of the things which they stand. Magic.
Forgotten is something axiomatic about words and the things words represent. It is this: a map is not the territory it depicts and a word is not the thing toward which it points. To treat the word itself as somehow sacred is to cut off its power to point to the reality for which it stands. For instance, to think that the word “God” not only may stand for the profound essence of existence and the continuing creativity present in this world but is, in some magical way, that essence itself is to foreclose real access to the reality of that essence. And, further, to expect only the word “God” to be used to refer to that essence devalues, if not demeans, other valid expressions pointing to that reality.
This makes the word “God” itself into its own idol. And, that is a main reason that many among us, although they assume a reality toward which the word “God” points, will not use that word because of its idolatrous effects. And not just "God" is at stake. I have heard people use the word “evolution” in much the same literalistic, idolatrous way, although not so many seem to be as addicted to this misuse, as yet, as are addicted to the misuse of the word “God”.
In all this, where we are likely to get confused relates to the nature of the thing toward which a word may point. There are hard, tangible objects and actions that words represent. Say “table” and you bring to mind a hard, flat object. Say “run” and you clearly know to move quickly. But, say “faith” or “hope” or “spiritual” and what do these words bring to mind? Certainly nothing hard and flat – nor even physically active. Rather these are aspirations, or states of being, or motivating ideas; they are words on which we may take some kind of action – physical mental, emotional, or spiritual. To give the words that represent our aspirations, states of being, or motivating ideas a sense of hard, tangible existence disengages us from the reality of our day-to-day world. It is to consign ourselves to a circular thinking that starts in fantasy and ends in fantasy. This is quite like the drunkard who asked a man for a dollar. “Why do you beg?” the man asked. “To get money for booze,” the drunkard replied with unexpected honesty. “Why do you drink?” the man inquired again. “To give me courage to beg,” came the answer. This circular process is not much different from praying for faith in order to have the faith to pray, as I once was instructed to do.
Linguists and philosophers have been trying to correct this kind of circular reasoning by making language more precise. This has been attempted largely by trying to make only factual statements - factual statements being thought in this instance to be the only statements that are true. On the level of our material life -- the level of relating to things that clearly can be demonstrated to be there -- this certainly makes sense. On this horizontal plane of life on which our science, mechanics, and economic life necessarily must proceed, this must be so. Otherwise we would once again be living daily lives immersed in fantasy and magic.
However, facts and hard data are not all there are to life. There is a depth dimension to our being - a dimension where our perception of who we are, what we are, and why we are depends on analogy, simile, and inexact figures of speech: metaphors that point beyond themselves to larger gestalts of meaning -- meanings that are larger than the horizontal sum of their parts. We tend to forget that the more precise our language becomes, the more of our subjective, our depth experience of life is thinned down and left out.
What I am talking about is that area of ourselves that the theologian Paul Tillich has called our ultimate concern. This is actually our religious dimension and it is a dimension of depth that impinges on every human function and act. This dimension underlies (or transcends, if you prefer) each aspect of science, art, poetry, or daily life and unites them into a whole which, while it is beyond sense perception, touches us through our feelings and intuition. It is a dimension that opens up to us only as we respond with the full force of our being, only as we are able to focus on it with a care or a concern that makes it of ultimate worth and importance to us. Not to recognize this dimension does not argue against its existence; it only demonstrates that we may be so concerned with tangibles that intangibles cannot break in on us.
This religious dimension (this dimension of depth) when acknowledged helps us get our speaking straight. To admit this dimension and to be open to it enables us to see new levels of truth that speak to us through our poetry and through that indefinable gestalt which great drama, painting, and music produce. And, on occasion, it enables us to see truths in the awesome spectacle of an infinite, active universe that even the most prosaic of scientific speaking cannot ignore.
The point of all this is that the way we use religious words, at times, leads to more misunderstanding than understanding - even in the sacred precincts of our secularized religion. Even we Unitarian Universalists sometimes reify our words; that is, we give them a concrete, tangible reality they do not possess or we expect saying the word to create that for which it stands. Often, we get into disagreement when we try collectively to focus our attention on those aspects of ourselves or of life in which we find depth and meaning. We get uptight depending on what word is used to signify such an act. For instance, the word “meditation” satisfies some, only the word “prayer” will do for others. "Ponder" or "reflect" are other favorites. Often missed in the process of debating these words is the likelihood that we are all pointing to the same thing but only using different words with which to point. “Impenetrability!” That’s what, in our more Humpty Dumpty moments, we find ourselves saying! We are taken aback when the Alices among us don’t know how to respond to us. And we may justify ourselves by saying that we pay our words well by giving them our own definitions every Saturday night.
This, essentially, is why I don’t get particularly uptight over the traditional words in Easter cantatas or even many stately Jewish and Christian hymns. For me they are just the tools of metaphor. And metaphor is but a means of pointing to something real that can’t be said in any other way. It is by metaphor that the idea of the music of the spheres, which we can “hear” deep within ourselves, can be symbolized. It is by metaphor that the images of angels and stars can stand for a deep sense of rapture and meaning that comes on us when we look out onto a world which we feel in our bones contains more good than we can imagine. It is by metaphor that the conviction that the human being is of profound worth and, in a profoundly worthful world, can be symbolized by the birth of a holy infant. Equally, it is by metaphor that the natural world can be seen as a proper support of human well being; and by metaphor, that the cosmos can be seen as a challenge to be and do the highest within us. It is by metaphor that we look into one another’s eyes and see a world of sharing and mutual support. But, if I forget the metaphor and expect all this to be fact, I have forgotten the function of language and have lost myself in a world of my own fantasy. Or I have allowed someone else’s fantasy to invade my mind and displace my reason.
A complete set of viable modern, nontraditional religious words and symbols may not yet be available to us but we can still speak meaningfully about matters of deep religious significance. We can do so, if we keep in mind that the religious dimension is real - as real to our hearts and minds as the concrete physical world is to our hands and senses. We still have the power of metaphor to serve us. Metaphors today may not be as grand as medieval theology would like, but they are real, nonetheless. Metaphor does carry messages that we can receive by opening our understanding to it.
So, how do we say religious words that mean something? We use the words we have -- whatever they are -- always remembering that they are only pointers toward our meaning, never allowing them to displace the message we want to convey. This, of course, means that we have to listen as we speak. We have to listen to how the other person is receiving what we say and then try to take the "buzz” and the “magic” out of our words so that they hear from us meaning, not wind. We need to try hard to communicate with them from the depth of our ultimate concern.
To bring this to a close, let’s take a few moments to reflect on the words of an ancient Chinese sage. He said, “There are some things that you can talk about, and some things that you appreciate with your heart. The more you talk, the further away you get from the meaning.”
And another ancient sage said, “A bait is used to catch fish. When you have gotten the fish, you can forget about the bait. A rabbit trap is used to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, you can forget about the trap. Words are used to express meaning, when you understand the meaning, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who forgets about words that we may talk.”
A question to ponder: How can our words be so clear in their meaning that, after the meaning is known, the words cease to matter?
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