Speaking in Language We Can Understand
We, human beings,, speak, write and generally communicate in language that makes “sense” to us. We draw from images containing associative meaning to express our perceptions of “truth” and “reality”. As new language is developed, words coined and more precisely narrowed and defined, our ability to articulate what it is that we really mean is enhanced. This process of expanding language and in so doing becoming able to more clearly understand the nature of reality and the accompanying possibilities may be exactly what is necessary for us to live in the depths of our being. And thus drawing ever closer to that divine character of Christ in us.
By necessity, language has always been expanding. Ancient languages expressing spiritual and cognitive truths, as they became perceptively archaic and antiquated, were supplanted by languages more receptive to growing and broadening, incorporating the definitions of new words, and thus conveying to the then and now contemporary minds, the substance of what is being communicated. This process in no way subjugates the ancient languages as inferior or unable to convey truth and reality in the context of their respective cultures. Our contemporary problem is the literalism we associate and apply to the interpretation of the images conveyed through these ancient writings. We contemporaries in our insistence on narrowly defined absolutes fail to comprehend and appreciate the richness and all the ancient language contains expressed in so few conceptualizations. We seek to translate word for word, concept for concept, expecting that our committed dedication to literalism is in fact the only infallible means of passing on the spiritual truths understood by our ancient forbearers. We fail to realize that our literal interpretations are not the full truth as understood and received by our ancient ancestors. Our literalisms, word for word, concept for concept, story for story, fails in that we do not live in the same world paradigm as the original. Our world, as may be experienced by an ancient, may well be perceived as a step into the “Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits” and even as we may conjure our own perceptions of fantasy. But our world is not the world of the ancients. Yet there is a common spiritual connection between us. And there is common spiritual reality to be experienced. Our contemporary problem is that we too often try to conceive and realize that truth in a paradigm perception as foreign to us as if we were living in another galaxy and life is no longer carbon based but silicon based.
The ancients, for all we know, did not have the scientific understandings available to us. That does not preclude the lack of understanding as to the what and how of what was to be realized in human spiritual capacities. Their communications may appear less sophisticated and descriptive, but that would only be to the undiscerning eye and mind. The richness of the language and the concepts conveyed may well have, and I believe assuredly, expressed in terms relevant to their world view, the actualities of spiritual reality that we, in our literal hopes, have found so elusive. Elusive, yes, but only as we fail to engage in the mind that would speak in our time to our present-day cultures.
1700 years ago the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Narrow literalisms, and dogma based on shallow cognitive reasoning supplanted the actual faith in what is the innate divine life in humankind. Political convenience became the rule of the church and alliance with secular rulers the sought after prize to prop up and maintain the appearance of life in the now starving deprived body of Christ.
But life had not been totally lost, and in times manifested, only to be squelched. Persecuted, made the subject o inquisition and crusade, feared for what it could become. Spiritually outside the bounds of religious hierarchal norm, control would be lost. How could a society possible exist and function with each individual acting in personal and immediate relation and response to that divine nature within? Orthodox doctrine may have casually expressed an allusion to the indwelling Spirit, but to actually understand and realize the experience of such a reality was beyond the literal cognitively bound mind-set of what had evolved. And so the rule of “law” prevailed, convenient to the relations with the state to maintain order and as necessary or desired dominate and control.
But you cannot capture, control and dominate the Spirit of God in humankind indefinitely. Where God (as we may call him, but only as reference for now) resides in humanity, God’s life, the Logos, the Word, Christ, WILL be made manifest, in our cultures and times, in language and concepts that WE – the bearers of the divine life – can comprehend and communicate. And as we do, we may realize all that has eluded us in our quest for what is God. It is not to be found in “ancient fairy tales” clung to as literal absolutes. It is to be found in the divine nature resident in us all, speaking in language you can relate to and follow. As is currently being realized, science may well not be the enemy of faith, but rather substantiate it.
