“We want to melt the stars.”
A number of years ago, Rev. William Sinkford, the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, made a statement about the lack of religious language in our movement, calling for an exploration into a “language of reverence.” Tucked away on the UUA website is a page of sermons that stemmed from that call, reactions on all spectrums.
This one, by the Rev. Fredric Muir, is particularly thought-provoking. Writing in 2003, Rev. Muir speaks to a continuing issue in our movement — how do we utilize religious language inclusively, without dogma, and without alienating individual theological positions?
Rev. Muir serves the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, Maryland, and will lead a worship service tomorrow morning before Plenary (business meeting) here at General Assembly. I have broken the sermon into two parts, the second of which will appear tomorrow.
Watch Your Language, part 1
by the Rev. Fredric J. Muir
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
— Madame BovaryLanguage is important. How we understand the words we speak, how others hear the words we speak is very important.
In his essay, “The Speaking and Writing of Words,” Frederick Buechner recalls a vacation trip to Versailles — his first trip there — and how excited he was to see firsthand sights which he had only read about or seen in pictures. What eventually proved hard for him was having no one to share the experience with. Maybe a similar kind of thing has happened to you; I know it’s happened to me. I can think of times when I’ve been watching a movie, or television, or I’ve been to a place that is so unbelievable, and I wish there was someone there to share the event, to listen to my words of excitement or disappointment. I remember the first time I went to the Caribbean and went snorkeling, it was like being in a National Geographic Special. I kept shouting to those around me — whenever we’d return to the surface — “Can you believe this?” I couldn’t imagine doing it alone; it wouldn’t have been the same. Or the first time I went to the Philippines, it was incredible. And everybody around me didn’t speak English: I wanted so much to speak my words of excitement and astonishment. It was similar to what Buechner experienced; it was as though speaking the words to a companion was the only way to make the sights and events a reality; as though the words were performing a “midwifery function,” as he says, “by making what you see to be real.” The language we use, the words we choose to use, are so important. Sometimes we just take it for granted.
There are at least three ways to understand this relationship between our reality and the words we use to describe reality. One is mentioned by Ian Frazier in On the Rez. Frazier’s book is about a lot more than the relationship he develops with an American Indian. He also does an insightful job of discussing the plight of American Indians. At one point he describes his drive from New York City to the Northwest. As he crosses the Great Plains, he names location after location that use Indian words. He has no idea how the names translate, but he’s certain that the words refer to events, places, or something of significance to the tribes that once lived there. And though that language — the words — was once important to whoever lived there, now time has passed by the language, and the words are no longer relevant. Related to this, Frazier tells the story of a missionary that once served the Lakota. One of the things Father Buechel did was to compile an 853-page dictionary, perhaps the first dictionary ever of the Lakota language and Frazier describes going through and marking some of the words. Here are his favorites:tacaka, the roof of a buffalo’s mouth (not an everyday word that we might use!)
cuiyohe, moccasins made of old hides that have served as tents
glinunway, to arrive at home by swimming
iyuso, when a man wades through water and gets wet in spite of lifting his legs
opaskan, to melt by lying on
tacanhahaka wapaha, a headdress made from the upper end of a buffalo’s spinal column
woeconhla, to consider something hard work when it is notGranted, the words don’t quite keep their integrity when translated into English, yet time has passed them by and the only way we know about them is because of the very deliberate and intentional work of a Jesuit missionary who was serving the Lakota 150 years ago.
Another relationship between words and reality is one we may be more familiar with: When our experience exceeds our vocabulary. Usually this takes place in the sciences, for example, in genetics. Scientists reveal things for which there are no words, no name. Several weeks ago when I was talking about Darwin and evolution, it occurred to me that he ran into this problem all the time. Either he would discover things for which there were no words, or the word that Darwin really wanted was already being used by somebody else to describe something very different; there wasn’t a vocabulary to describe what he had found. In science, it’s often the case that researchers are far ahead of human experience and as a consequence the vocabulary doesn’t exist to describe a new reality.
Then there is a third relationship between words and reality that I will mention. This one is described by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a Manhattan rabbi, who had a member of his congregation come to him a couple of days after September 11, 2001: “’Rabbi, I live on the Upper West side,’ she said. ‘My windows are covered with the grime that has drifted uptown since … you know. I need to clean my windows, but I’ve got to believe that there are ashes of the dead in that dust. It doesn’t seem right to just have the windows cleaned. What do I do?’” (Olam)
Sometimes the words and language that we use simply can’t describe our experience; the words don’t exist, our vocabulary fails us. Maybe the words are there, but they don’t quite fit what we are experiencing. So we come up short; we come up feeling hollow or shallow. It’s in this last category — this third relationship between words and reality, when the words don’t exactly work — where we find the language of faith, religious language.
Let me give you a shortened list of the kinds of words I’m talking about (I’ll read them from the Table of Contents of my book, Heretics’ Faith). Words like angels, Armageddon, authority, beloved community, the Bible, born again, death, demons, Easter, epiphany, evangelism, evil, faith, family values, idolatry, high holy days, grace, Jesus, Messiah, miracles, pagan, pantheism, polytheism, prayer, Sabbath, saints, sanctuary, sin, spirituality. There are many more. What do those words mean? How do we come to grips with these words, these seemingly old words? What are the experiences these describe?
Faith language is difficult for several reasons. One reason is because the words are tied to religious dogma, often Christian dogma. Because of the association we have with it — because we reject that creed or dogma — we have chosen not to use those words.
Something else that happens is that we associate these words of faith with a particular group, even an individual, and with this association comes a certain ownership by them. Or put another way, we don’t own the language because we decided it’s theirs: In making this choice, we have given away the language of faith, we’ve rejected the words and refuse to use them. In one sense then, we have been co-opted by orthodox dogma and those who have claimed the words as theirs: Faith language has been taken from us, or let’s say we’ve decided to let others have it.
But this isn’t the only reason why religious language is no longer used by many Unitarian Universalists. Sometimes there has been a difficult family, personal, even a cultural and historical association with religious words. For example, if you went to a parochial school, perhaps you were instilled with a sense of guilt, dread or bad feelings that are linked to certain words and circumstances. Perhaps the way you deal with this is simply to reject the use of the language, because you have chosen to deny or not address whatever happened back then, that history, that person, that family.
This is what can make the language of faith or religious language so difficult. It’s like reading an old map. On some old maps you see that the geography is the same and many of the places still exist, but the names aren’t quite right. The analogy to faith language is this: Sometimes the experience and feeling is still there but the language doesn’t exist to describe it in the way you’d like. So what Unitarian Universalists are really good at is dipping into the dictionaries of other disciplines to describe these feelings and experiences. We dip into the language of science; we dip into the dictionary of psychology; sometimes we borrow words from politics, to describe what ordinarily the language of faith would be describing, but we can’t do that because we’ve rejected the use of those words. Unfortunately, what can happen is that we are left with nothing else but science, but psychology, but politics to describe the experience. This quote from Madame Bovary describes our predicament and condition: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” We want to melt the stars. But what we have is a language that doesn’t quite work because it’s a cracked kettle which won’t produce the sounds we desire.
to be continued
Source: “Watch Your Language” by Rev. Fredric Muir, who serves the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, Maryland, preached February 3, 2003.
Tags: deepening, Fredric Muir, General Assembly, language, reverence
