Tag Archives: biblical literalism

Meaning and Meaninglessness

The subject of meaning teased me in my youth though it never was allowed to flourish until I started college and began to escape biblical literalism. This escape was into a gradual appreciation of the metaphor which didn’t fully materialize until a prescient friend gave me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets and W.H. Auden’s collected poetry in my mid thirties. My life has not been the same.

Meaning involves intricate and intimate experience with difference. Until one encounters meaning, he lives in a sterile universe of sameness usually marching lockstep with those of a similar orientation to life. A quest for meaning inevitably leads one to a face-to-face encounter with meaninglessness for the one cannot exist without the other. For example, there is no blue without non-blue. Now I have been blessed as my venture into meaninglessness has been gentle for it can drive one stark raving mad. I think I am fortunate to have what the poet John Keats described as “negative capability,” the ability to live with pronounced self-doubt, insecurity, and emotional fragility. It is no accident that since the gift of poetry in my mid-thirties I have been immersed in poetry and literature for there I find metaphor which allows me to find an anchor in what would otherwise be an overwhelming mystery, a mystery that the linear thinking in which I was stuck for 35 years cannot abide.

One of my most beloved poets is Emily Dickinson and she wrote a poem which so beautifully captures the internal descent where this meaning is found.

BY EMILY DICKINSON

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

‘Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

Culture Wars and Fear of Uncertainty

Words can Kill…or at Least Deaden!

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Blogging the past three years has been such a wonderful experience for me. One of the nice things is that it has put me in touch with interesting people from around the world people who have books, movies, and experiences to share and thus broaden my life. But yesterday, I received a comment via email from a “real-time” friend who I only recently met which further stimulated my thinking about words and their relationship to reality; or, the converse of that notion, “words and their lack of relationship to reality.” This person is a local artist/musician and is preoccupied with a similar concern of mine—words and their “meaning” they have in the depths of the heart, a “meaning” which is completely missed if we live only on the surface of life and take words…and the rest of our experience…only on a surface level. The following is an excerpt from Martha’s email:

A book I look at from time to time by Leonard Shlain would no doubt interest you, Lewis if you have not already read it! “The Alphabet vs. the Goddess” where this binariness is explored throughout history. He presents things in a left-brain right-brain paradigm and would probably agree that labeling was the end of beauty. I am fascinated by brain scans of children when taught that a color has a name. Can you imagine simply experiencing the color blue, all through your body and senses, before you were told that this experience was associated with the label “blue?” The scans show the brain tingling in all its parts and portions, lit up! When scanned later, once the label “blue” is assigned, the brain activity becomes very localized to the verbal areas, and I dare say, the experience is also tempered down. I just don’t want anyone’s light to be under a bushel and my mission in life is to wake up those experiential aspects that true artistry awakens, no matter the medium. (http://marthashepp.com)

Martha’s thoughts brought to the table an additional dimension to my post of yesterday, illustrating how that there is a sense in which words can kill…or at least deaden…and keep us on the surface level which in the Christian tradition is known as “the letter of the law.” The brain scan research she referred to is just stunning.

Martha’s observation brought to my mind a marvelous poem on this subject by Carl Sandburg, a poem which captures poetically the “diaphragms of flesh negotiating the word”–attaching a subjective experience to a word which has currency “out there”. But this experience, there on the threshold of consciousness, introduces us to a “verbal order” (i.e.l patriarchy) which some of us spend the rest of our lives finding the courage to lay aside…in some sense…and allow the words to have meaning again.

PRECIOUS MOMENTS by Carl Sandburg

Bright vocabularies are transient as rainbows.

Speech requires blood and air to make it.

Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,

While diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,

In the moment of doom when the word forms

It is born, alive, registering an imprint—

Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.

The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Ecce home had meanings: Behold the Man! Look at

Him! Dying he lives and speaks!

(NOTE: If you check out Martha’s web site—where you will find some of her art and clips from her music…make sure you read her “Artist’s Statement.”)

“This Spirituality Stuff is Nuts!

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“This stuff is nuts!” I would periodically make this observation with my Sunday School class when I returned to the Episcopalian church in the spring of 2011, doing so with feigned frustration Now, I did so only after they knew me well enough to know that I was not being serious, but was only reflecting the cognitive dissonance between the mature approach to spirituality the class afforded me and the very linear, legalistic spiritual mind-set that still lay in the depths of my heart.

This was not an ordinary Christian church as it permitted a Sunday School class of this sort, one which emphasized a non-dual approach to Holy Writ and the Christian tradition. Each week we would meditate for 20-30 minutes and then discuss the book we were reading at the time, each book reflecting the non-dual approach to reality/Reality. And our discussion was personal, not being a mere regurgitation of the “party-line” that the church or the Christian tradition suggested. This discussion was an open, honest exploration of spiritual teachings and the meaning they had in our day-to-day life. But, with this “non-dual” emphasis we usually waded deeply into the aether, into the nebulous dimensions of spiritual life, “wrestling with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and finding that our faith in God, in the human enterprise, and with each others deepened in the process.

And, from time to time I would abruptly interject our discussion with, “This is nuts” and then share how dissonant our discussion was with my past but also how absurd it would be with most people in our community, not to mention the world. For our world is very linear and depends on our ability to mute the “non-dual” dimension of our heart and mind in our day-to-day functioning and fulfill our responsibilities in our personal and professional lives. And the people in this class were highly functional, highly educated and accomplished people who were very adept in making their way in the linear world. But their presence in this class, and their discussion of the subject matter in the class, revealed their awareness of another dimension of life that was very important to them and actually gave meaning to their day-to-day life.

This experience taught me that it is possible to live in two different worlds at once, the “common-sense” world that people take to be real as well as the spiritual world that I was facetiously describing as “nuts.” For, when we venture into the realm of the spirit, we are led beyond the pale in a certain sense, into a realm where words cannot capture the matter we purport to discuss. And this does not mean that these words are unimportant. They are. But they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves; or as the Buddhists teach, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Shakespeare Visited Me This Morning!

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Oh I love Shakespeare! He is one of my best friends, often visiting me in the middle of the night with memories of a finely-coined expression or phrase which plums the depths of my heart. But oh how I loathed him when in high school for he refused to speak plain English and then my teachers so often demanded that I memorize passages from his plays and, even worse, interpret them. The interpretation really frustrated me and even angered me at times making me want to cry out, “It means just what it says. There’s nothing more to say about it, damn it!” My attitude stemmed from the biblical literalism that I lived in at that time, its hermeneutical style being best expressed as, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But decades later Shakespeare and his ilk began to penetrate the pristine literal citadel in which I was imprisoned. And what devastation it has brought me! All things felt most certain are now seen as ephemeral and I am often left with doubt and anxiety with despair lingering not far behind. But I would not go back for all the money in the world as life is to be lived not to be escaped from with “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

For, the “devastation” I refer to has merely been the disillusionment I have had to encounter as my pretenses have been shattered and I’ve been left with nothing but naked reality. And, T. S. Eliot was right, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” In the “devastation” I’ve lived in for thirty years plus, structure has evolved but it has been fashioned out of Hope, setting it apart from the specious, fear-based ego contrivance that I was enconced in the first half of my life.

My life now features an openness that I used to avoid with a passion, an openness that Richard Rohr has described as “The Naked Now.” This openness can be described as a Presence which allows me to more fully accept the world as it is with less of a demand that it conform with my preconceptions. I no longer have the comfort of pretending I have no preconceptions.

Franz Kafka said that a literary work must be an ice axe which breaks the sea frozen inside us. That “ice axe” which first came my way in my teens has found me a challenge…and still does…but like any literary work, I’m an unfinished product; and we are all a “literary work,” a tale being told. Yes, perhaps one that often appears is being “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Richard Mourdock’s God

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Richard Mourdock’s observation about God and rape speaks volumes about himself and the inner machinations of his own heart. I have suggested before that our view of God speaks much more about our own heart than it does about God. Mourdock’s God is confined to time and space and He is meticulously, even mechanically in control. Therefore if conception occurs in rape, then God must will it. His God is a really big guy sitting up on some celestial throne, very far away but definitely “out there” in terms of time and space, and pulling the strings of our day to day life.

I believe strongly in God. But I don’t believe in my belief of God. God is beyond my belief. My belief is a work of faith. My faith has deepened once I came to realize the limitations of my own reason and its ability to grasp and own God. But I must reiterate that I am not disavowing the role and use of reason. It is a gift from God and must be used. But it can easily be misused to contrive a belief system which is actually only a reflection of our childish, self-centered ego. “They call it reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe) Or, another quote the author of which I no longer recall, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

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