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sophiaserpentiaThis is the second part of my first entry a couple of weeks ago on the decay of meaning over time as reflected in scripture. It ties together a number of things i've written over the last year or so on my ever-evolving relationship to religion, belief, faith, meaning, discourse, scripture, doctrine, and compassion.
A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."
And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.
I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.
And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.
To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.
I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.
So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.
For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.
Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.
[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]
So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.
Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.
Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.
A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."
And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.
I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.
And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.
To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.
I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.
So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.
For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.
Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.
[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]
So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.
Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.
Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 06:58 am (UTC)Mind if I quote this?
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Date: 2007-11-29 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 03:28 am (UTC)