02-07-2007 10:50

The ritual of language

Jerry, 
 
I have found your 1/20/07 “Clarifications” comment extremely valuable and welcome. You have articulated (much better than I) what I believe are core challenges in attending to and communicating about human faith and practice in any form. I’ll write more about this below, but first I want to thank you for helping to move my own reflections on the “problem” of faith language to a new level. 
 
The timing of your comment roughly coincided with my realizing what a trove of thoughtful writing I’ve stumbled into by exploring the Quaker blogosphere. More specifically, I have begun both digging back into and read forward through a number of blogs written as part of a growing conversation among Friends “across the schisms” (as one of them puts it), seeking to share what is being very loosely called the “Convergent Friends” movement. 
 
You may already have seen the quotation from one of the writers, Robin Mohr, on the Second Month update of the http://seympeace.org website, together with my editor’s note referring Friends to more of the discussion at http://seympeace.org/index.html#convergent. 
 
Liz Opp writes in “Do I have to be a Christian to be a Convergent Friend?” http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/07/do-i-have-to-be-christianto-be.html that she wrestles with the term “convergent,” yet she lists the following as what she unites with: 
 
• That there are Friends, from no particular branch and from every branch, who are in love with what we understand is part of early Quakerism. 
 
• That we love and yearn to be faithful to the Spirit and to live into God’s love, regardless of how we name that Presence. 
 
• That integrating our faith and our practice is key to renewing and sustaining a rigorous, transformative Quakerism. 
 
• That retelling our personal stories and sharing our historical narratives about who we are as Friends and who we have been as Friends will help convey our faith to those who worship among us. 
 
You expressed so well that “the words do not communicate the experience.” Words can only refer speaker (or writer) and audience to mutually shared denotations and connotations. Within a community which shares a language, what is shared is the implicit, if not explicit, agreement, first, that a word sufficiently well represents for me the experience I want to communicate, and, second, that it represents the same experience (or close enough to “the same”) for you. 
 
As you say, this might not even work well regarding objective experience (“blue,” “tangerine,” “shattering glass”), if someone in the community hasn’t had that experience (or can’t perceive it, or perceives it differently). With subjective experience, anything which we have to refer to with abstract labels (“God”) or metaphors (Sufi images such as “the Beloved,” “the Friend”), the challenge even within one community becomes much greater. 
 
You also named a powerful insight with your use of the phrase “the ritual use of language.” I want to gather some of your key observations here: 
 
• That the dichotomies used in religious discussion really refer to “characteristics of our ways of understanding rather than characteristics of the things we are trying to understand. In the best case, the dichotomies are about our perceptions and the limitations of our perceptions more than about objective reality.” 
 
• That “the distance between the two extremes [of ‘god language’ and ‘non-god language’] is sometimes more about expectations about the type of language required in testimony than about depth of spirituality.” 
 
• That there is a special case in which “ ‘sacred language’ is used not to point to any realities so much as part of an attempt to reach more religious depth by a sort of ritual use of language.... The language is part of ...how we think we need to talk and act to find the depth.” 
 
I believe this goes right to the core of the perceived problem.  
 
(Note: I emphasize the word “perceived,” because it need not be a real problem—if we learn how to listen as Quakers aspire to.) 
 
In our secret hearts, each of us knows an essential and sustaining Reality, one which is greater than yet not contradictory to mundane reality. Some of us are not given to be able to talk about this Reality—to ourselves or to anyone else—with original language which “works” adequately. We therefore draw upon the ritual language of our faith community to do both this private and public talk. (This is what I have called elsewhere our “native religious language.”) 
 
Some of us—whether we remain in our original faith communities or quest out (or are expelled)—are given to seek more personal articulation of that Reality. We find that we need to do this, because what the traditional words and metaphors connote no longer meshes well with our personal perception of sacred experience—or even confounds or contradicts our self-talk about that experience. 
 
The perceived problem arises when we try to talk with others about sacred experience. If we or they or both of us get stuck in “expectations about the type of language required in testimony,” the conversation is in effect doomed. None of us will be able to listen past the language well enough to hear the Reality from which the other’s genuine “depth of spirituality” arises. 
 
Jerry, I’m very grateful to you for these insights and phrases. 
 
When I started writing a response in late January, I was still looking more specifically at the Wallace article. In a separate comment, I do think I want to draw forth from it and consider further those passages in which he appears to be advocating a specifically traditional Christian belief in his use of Christian language. I am not certain that Wallace insists on an exclusive belief, but I want to see how his language resonates—or doesn’t—with mine. 
 
Meanwhile, I’m glad for our discussion, and I hope you and other Palmetto Friends will explore the larger conversation going on now “across the schisms.” 
 
Blessed Be, 
Michael

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