"...we of the nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any god of whose character she can be an adequate expression. Truly all we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world."
- from William James (Harvard philosopher, brother of Henry James, founder of American psychology), "Is Life Worth Living," 1895, the first English language use of the word #multiverse.
I've got another book coming out early next year. To my great surprise, it's not either of the books I'd been working on recently. THE YEARS DRAW NEAR, my half-finished manuscript on faith and aging in America? Nope. IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY, my two-thirds completed Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance? Uh uh.
It's a book I first wrote back in 2015 and self-published for the devotional use of my little congregation. THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, as it's now called, recenters the Lord's Prayer as part of a personal prayer life. As the prayer that Jesus explicitly taught, it pushes back against our tendency to approach the Creator with requests for power and prosperity. It gets us out of our individual and collective solipsisms, which is kinda sorta a prerequisite for being a disciple of Jesus.
As nearly ten years had passed since I wrote the first draft, I had some significant reworking to do, which is why it's helpful to have a competent and thoughtful editor. Dated references were removed or changed. Flagrant errors of reasoning or continuity were corrected.
One of those reworkings was a little unexpected. Ever since I was an undergrad majoring in religious studies at the University of Virginia o-so-many-moons ago, my go-to Bible translation has been the New Revised Standard Version. It was my jam during my M.Div. and D.Min. studies. It's the translation in my pulpit, and in the pew-racks of my little church. I've commended the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible to numerous folks.
The NRSV was reworked in Twenty Twenty Two, and became the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
Some of those changes were trivial, and many are entirely comprehensible. But some of the updating seemed less a matter of improvements in linguistic scholarship and new textual resources, and more a matter of taste and nodding to contemporary culture.
Of more significance to my book on the Lord's Prayer: among the changes in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition was a rewording of the teaching of that prayer in the sermon on the Mount. I had an entire chapter dedicated to reflecting on the underlying meaning of "hallowed be thy name," with a focus on the word "hallowed." I'd used the NRSV for all scriptural quotations throughout the book, which presented something of a problem.
In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, it no longer used the word "hallowed," replacing it with the more awkward phrasing "Let your name be revered as holy." Clumsy though it might be, "be revered as holy" is a conceptually accurate effort to transpose the Greek Ἁγιασθήτω into English. It means the same thing, even if multiple words are used where once there was but one, so it's not a question of mucking with the meaning.
Rather, I shall surmise, it's because the word "hallowed" is slightly archaic, something we don't say often in day-to-day conversation. That's a point I reflect upon at length in the chapter, and a fair observation.
As it was, it blew a giant hole in that entire chapter. I had a choice, then. I could reconceptualize and rewrite it because the translation that I'd used had been changed to no evident purpose.
Or I could simply change the translation I used.
With some regret, I chose the latter. For consistency, I then systematically updated all of the scripture references in my manuscript to the New International Version, which is a perfectly valid and scholarly translation.
Not a big deal, in this cut-and-paste era. No harm, no foul, and I still use the NRSVue on regular occasion.
But it did get me to thinking: If in our faith we called to live out a discrete culture that does not conform to the expectations of broken and fractious humanity...must our choice of language be axiomatically governed by that which ain't the Beloved Community?
And why would we expect contemporary discourse to have words for that which is holy?
We have those words. And learning unfamiliar words isn't a chore. It's good for mind and soul.
I read an article recently on the recent rise of emoji as a means of human conversation. Emoji, in the event you haven't used them, are those little smiley emotive-doodaddies that we now seem to tack onto most of our net-communication. In the absence of face-to-face cues, we increasingly use those little symbols to help us express ourselves and to indicate that our statements aren't meant in a negative way.
That, and ending every sentence with an exclamation mark! Because we're really happy to be talking with you! And we don't want you to interpret our use of a common period to mark our muttering disinterest in you as a person. We really don't. Really. Really! Honest. ;0)
But emojis, which I use some variant of regularly, represent a strange devolution of language. With the web-fed roaring flow of written words becoming almost unmanageable, we find ourselves falling back into a form of communication that is ancient and early in the development of writing. Emoji are more akin to pictograms or hieroglyphics than modern language.
The answer? Because emoji just can't do it. As symbols, they are...well...too simple. Too clumsy. While they can modify or flavor other language, they bear the weight of a story. Or so I was reasonably certain.
But how to confirm that?
I went to an emoji dictionary, and to Genesis Chapter One, and took a swing at translation. What does that first day of creation look like, rendered entirely in emoji?
The past couple of nights, I've settled in to engage with an old friend. Clive Staples Lewis was a major part of my childhood and my youth. My encounter with his mind and with his faith left me with a Christianity that has been able to robustly engage with reality. I do not fear science, nor am I troubled in my encounter with other faith traditions. Much of that has to with the gentle, earthy, intelligent faith that radiates from both his fiction and his theology.
So I've been reading The Weight of Glory, a refreshingly short collection of his essays and "sermons." His mind and his use of language continue to be taut and delightful, even after all these years. It's one of the reasons I continue to consider him a primary spiritual teacher.
One thing hit me, straight off the git go, and that was a challenge in the titular essay to the idea of defining ourselves by negation. Is the highest value "unselfishness," he asks? He'd been hearing that, evidently, and had an issue with it.
Why should we assume that "selfishness" has a right to dominance, with the good only existing in relation to a dark but more essential state of being?
Instead, it is more transforming and powerful to assume that our purpose is the good, which exists as a free-standing potential reality that is fundamental and positive. This, he articulates as love, in the most radical sense of the word. Let "love" exist as an affirmative, potent, gracious primacy in our self-understanding, Lewis suggests.
His observation sent my mind cascading off in several directions, which my mind tends to do. One reaction touched on an old pattern of thought, having to do with the way our culture views actions taken for the benefit of others. These are the things we do together for joy or for compassion. These are the arts, and music, and working together for the good of all. We make gardens. We feed the hungry. We visit the prisoner. We worship and teach. We sing and dance and share our stories and our art.
When we create organizations for the purposes of creating the good, we have a name for them. Or rather, we have a new name for them.
We used to call them "charities." Charity means "love," from the Latin root word caritas. These were collective undertakings of love, community efforts done for the purpose of manifesting a more gracious state of being in the world. But beginning in the late 1980s, our language began to change.
What mattered to our secular market culture was profit, and the power conveyed from the generation and accumulation of capital. So what had once been called "charity" became defined as a negation, a shadow state of being. They are not "love organizations."
They are "non-profit organizations." And so "nonprofit" became the defining term for that form of activity, something we do when we're not doing "profit," the thing that is most important in our culture.
Outside of our fiercely market-driven nation, an interestingly parallel semiotic event occurred in the social democracies elsewhere in the world.
There, it is government that has primacy, setting the boundaries for culture through the use of law, regulation, and coercive authority. In Europe and elsewhere, what had been known as "charitable" organizations now became increasingly known as "nongovernmental" organizations.
In both cases, what had been an affirmative statement became a negation.
For ten years of my life, before I entered the pastorate, I was immersed in the world of studying nonprofits. The whole time, this negative ideation troubled me. Well, not the whole time. I did actually get some work done, when I wasn't musing philosophically out of the window of my office.
This telling way of using language to indicate dominant cultural values really did stick with me.
Because business and government are all well and good. But profit and power should not be given primacy of place in our self-understanding. They are not our purpose.
After something of a hiatus, I'm back into my doctoral program, which got stalled out this last year for a range of reasons. The writing project that was to be the book-length output of my D.Min. was so fundamentally changed as it ground through the proposal approval process that it ceased to be interesting or innovative, which doesn't exactly help motivate a body to get it done.
The large independent study project I'd hoped would give me my last six credit hours pranged off of professors who were simply too busy to take on the reading. The two elective courses I'd signed up for to replace them were both cancelled.
But when life hands you lemons, you make life take the lemons back, as Cave Johnson elegantly put it. So I've managed to remotivate on the project writing for next year, and found two courses that are 1) interesting enough to actually qualify as electives and 2) not cancelled.
My reading for the first of the courses began last night, as I worked my way through much of a book on narrative therapy and pastoral counseling. It's actually rather useful stuff, and I find the therapeutic model it presents to be promising both interpersonally and spiritually. We are creatures of story, we human beings, and understanding how we can change our own narratives about ourselves and our relationships is key to healing our wounds and transforming our lives.
So far, the book talks about the need for the "guiding professional" to empower individuals and couples, giving them the tools they need to understand and reclaim their own stories. Meaning, when you and the missus have lost track of why in the hell you got together in the first place, there are ways you can get that back. Or get back something better and more resilient. Which is an excellent thing to know, and to know how to do. Useful, in a healing sort of way.
What I've found myself noticing, though, is the language. It's written by a Presbyterian pastor, a professor of pastoral counseling, and the language and structure of the book is…well…academic. In fact, it's ragingly, blazingly, relentlessly academic. It speaks in the strange and stilted tongue of leftist academe, which has two unfortunate side effects.
First, the shadow side of writing for a "professional" audience comes when the things you are teaching really *could* be accessible to everyone. Because as I read, I keep thinking, you know, this stuff isn't nearly as complex as the language being used to convey it. There's no reason that it needs to be written this way.
In fact, it seems oddly ironic that it is written as it is written. If your whole model for healing the broken soul of a relationship is "empowering" people, then writing a book that a pastor can't share with couples who are struggling seems peculiar.
Sure, it's good for me to have the tools. But it's equally important for me to be able to teach those tools to those who come to me with their pain. And unlike books written by evangelicals and the self-help folks, this one just can't be shared.
Second, I know that this language cannot become my operating language. The more deeply we steep ourselves in language that is not broadly accessible, the more that becomes the way we think. And when we think using terms that limit our ability to broadly convey concepts, we start losing the ability to get our message across.
When you've got good news to share, when there's real healing potential in it, that can be a wee bit of a problem.
Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language. The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue. It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University. The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it. Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation. Those wacky socialists and their educations! Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life. It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:
After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming. I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game. One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack. It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.
As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention. At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song. It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage. In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.
When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all. For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons. The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born." And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time. It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew. Only geekier.
I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:
So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game. I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.
Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language. It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.
Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real. But words? As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself. They can evoke. They can suggest. They can point to, and lead to, the Holy. But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.
Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them. As MacDonald puts it:
God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.
Over the past week, one particular image has made the rounds through my social network. My corner of the twitterverse and my Facebook neighborhood is unsurprisingly inhabited by a fair number of progressive Christians, most of whom feel considerable solidarity towards the Occupy movement. The image that's been passed along and shared by at least a dozen folks from within that self-selected group is apparently either a Keynote or a Powerpoint slide, converted into an image file. OCCUPY CHURCH, it proclaims, followed by a list of demands.
It's got a slightly casual font, the requisite bullet points, and a picture of the inside of a very traditional church. Somewhere, some leftist pastor talked this one out in front of a group, before pitching it out to their social network. I considered reposting it on several occasions, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Why? Because it's not quite where it needs to be if it is to be OCCUPY CHURCH. It's not bad, mind you. But it's not there yet. Let me elucidate:
First, it's not got the lingo down. Yeah, the language might warm the cockles of the hearts of progressives, but it's too generic and secular. There's not a single thing in the entire list of demands that would identify this as being pertinent to faith in the Nazarene. Yes, you can get to every single one of those principles from the teachings of Yeshua Ben Yahweh. That's certainly how I get there. But the slide itself seems oblivious to the context into which it needs to speak. Change the picture and the word "church," and this could easily be the list of demands from the Governing Central Council of Occupy Boise. That dog don't hunt, people. If you want to speak into a faith context, then respect the language of that community, and the faith ethos that defines it.
Second, it's a list of demands. As such, it comes across as disconnected from the community into which and for which it presumes to speak. Honestly, it's a tich reminiscent of the Judean People's Front. Sorry...that's the People's Front of Judea. If you want to make demands of church, then, brothers and sisters, you first need to be church. And if you are church, meaning you speak as a person who is living into the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, then, dagnabbit, include yourself into those demands. It's not an "I demand that you." It's a "Christ demands that we." If it isn't a "we?" Then it's culturally imperialistic.
Third, if you're going to Occupy Church, then you need to be willing to get people into church. The oldline pews in that slide are notably empty, eh? That means...and I know this is a hard one for progressives...that you have to be evangelical about it. Yes, EEE-van-Jell-ickle. That word means good news, after all, and when Jesus talked good news, it was first and foremost to the poor, the struggling, and the disenfranchised.
You don't need to be a self-righteous, judgmental New Pharisee. You don't need to spew fear and Hellfire and Brimstone at gays and women and Democrats. But you do need to tell people about the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that they feel it's worth listening and joining in. Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
So, in the interests of not just complaining and actually doing, I've reworked the slide a teensy bit. That reworking is above. The symbolically imperfect six bullet points have been replaced with a perfect seven. The demands are the same, but inclusive and participatory, and clearly rooted in our sacred tradition. References are included, because for many Jesus people, that's kind of important. And it does talk about encouraging others to join in. Because if you don't do that, you don't have a movement, now, do you?
The deeper I get into reading for my course on leading diverse communities, the more I'm filled with a sense of despair. Much of the thinking behind the books I've been reading is fine, albeit a tich on the leftist side. Well, more than a tich. It's full throttle liberal academe in it's most stereotypically inaccessible glory. For the past few days, I've heaved my protesting mind through page after page filled with phrases like:
"...the binary finds its place, is protected from its dichotomizing and territorializing ways, and so flowers within that teeming, polymorphic milieu where Word and Spirit are enlivened in ever-new combinations."
and
"Latino(a) theology should also be willing to traverse the boundaries of group knowledge and interest in order to envision and articulate a social ontology that can more tangibly enable relationships across personal and group difference."
Being of a lib'ral smartypants persuasion myself, I know what these things mean. I understand why they are written. I even agree with them, more or less. But I find them nearly as mindbendingly frustrating as the writings of Joel Osteen, for completely opposite reasons.
It doesn't matter that the various theologies of liberation and the particularist theologies of academic feminism think that they're oriented to and addressing the needs of the oppressed and downtrodden. If you want to empower someone with knowledge, they first have to have some clue what you're talking about.
As Paul showed all us Jesus people when he taught on the Areopagus, common language is the foundation of relevance. And to be blunt as a bludgeon, the oppressed and the downtrodden are more likely to find relevant insights in the gibbering ecstasy of glossolalia than they are in the self-indulgent semiotics of academic theology. That seminarians and Ph.D. candidates can make ten thousand compound sentences dance multivalent on the head of a freakin' pin means jack-squat to the souls who cry out from the depths of the world's oppression.
I don't mind reading this [stuff], honestly. But what I don't want to do is write it. Because if I get in the pattern of writing that way, then I'll get in the pattern of thinking that way. And if I start thinking that way, I'll render myself useless.
Alrighty. Calm down. Deep breath. I've got more reading to do.
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