“something else was needed to deepen our meaning and purpose. . .”
Today we continue with Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas, and her fantastic Berry Street Essay from 2003, “Images for Our Lives.” Part one can be found here.
In this segment, Rev. Hallman references two poems — First Lesson, by Philip Booth, and The Rowing Endeth, by Anne Sexton. Because of copyright issues, the poems are not printed in their entirety in the essay, though links to the full texts are provided.
Come back Monday for the conclusion!
“Images for Our Lives”
by Rev. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Berry Street Essay, 2003, part 2 of 3
I recently spoke to our Adult Sunday School Class in Dallas on the topic “Why I am not a Theist”. They packed the room to hear what I had to say, because of course they thought I was. Why did they think I was a Theist? Because I use the word God. Because I pray in the midst of the worship service. I was embarrassed a bit myself, to find that I had failed to make the distinction that the use of metaphors and poetry and scripture has to do with religious imagination, and not with one theological category or another. We had a lively and productive discussion that day, as I spoke, as I am today, about religious language, and how it communicates the depths of experience, and that it isn’t always what it seems.
I remember years ago, when the Principles and Purposes were being formulated in meetings all across our continent, Peter Fleck, of beloved memory, who was on the committee to synthesize those formulations—Peter Fleck said that he had noticed a curious thing. When he asked individual UUs where they stood theologically, he said, “They would juxtapose two seemingly opposite theological categories together. Like Christian-Humanist, or Agnostic-Christian, or Rational-Mystic refusing to align themselves with one distinct theology.” Peter was puzzled by this.
I now think it was the beginning of our attempts to extricate ourselves from the hard theological boundaries within which we had closed ourselves off from one another and from our experience of religious imagination, and deep reality.
When I arrived at Theological School, I found there were other languages of currency, other ways we were extricating ourselves from the boundaries of theological language and categories. These languages were mainly psychological and political. The psychological to give meaning and the political to give purpose. We learned the language of ethical discourse, and of course the languages of various theologies, as well. But the real categories of discussion among us were psychological and political. Gone were the earlier days of humanist/theist debates. In their place were struggles to integrate our ministries with the problems of the world and the pathologies of our lives.I was later to be intrigued by Harry Scholefield’s story of having undergone several years of Freudian Analysis in Philadelphia. He had been invited into the Psychoanalytic Institute, in a special program for people who were professionals in areas other than psychology. He ended up immersing himself in analysis. He told the story of the importance of his analysis to his ministry in a Berry Street Essay in 1962. He spoke then on the topic “Motivation in the Ministry” which was published as “Psychoanalysis and the Parish Ministry: Some Reflections on Unconscious Motivation in Preaching and Present Trends in Pastoral Counseling.” Harry could also speak the language of the political life of his times. He was a well known Peace and Fair Housing activist in San Francisco, where he was minister for the largest portion of his career.
I came, during my Theological Years and afterward, to respect deeply the power of psychological and political thought and action and language in the shaping of who we are and what we are to do in the world.
And I also came to understand that pathology could not be the only focus for our inner work, and saw too many political activists who burned out because their activism was not grounded. There was something else that was needed to deepen our meaning and purpose. That something else was the language of religious imagination.
The problem with language is that those words, those simple individual words are slippery little devils. They don’t stay put.
I remember my shock, as a Jr. High Student, when I used the word “queer” thinking it meant “odd” and discovering to my dismay that it was a pejorative label used to mean a homosexual.
I was horrified. Partly because I was in Jr. High. Partly because I didn’t mean what people thought I meant. But I was most horrified that the word didn’t mean what I thought it did.
Until that point I had assumed that words meant what they meant. That words stood still. They stood firm against all the vicissitudes of life. And in that moment, my faith in language was shaken. Words could add meaning, they could change meaning, they could turn on you. I was shocked. (I should also add that at that time in my life I was a Religious Fundamentalist, as well. It may have been that more than my faith in words was shaken that day.)
And then I was to discover,—then I was to discover that the word, for example “God”, could become the victim of what Whitehead called “Misplaced Concreteness”. Words, over time, could lose their rich, metaphorical, living depth, and become concrete—rigidified and lifeless. The imaginative vitality could ebb away. The word “God” could die.
So if words don’t stand still, if they are subject, over time to misplaced concreteness. If they don’t necessarily represent one theology or another. If they are inadequate, even when they serve political and psychological purposes, even when they give us some meaning and purpose–. If words need to point to the depths of lived experience, (the religious existential dimension of life). If we live more deeply than we can think. If we are currently in a crisis of language (which I believe we are). If we are truly to minister in the fields of human need, what will save us from ourselves?
My answer is Poetry.
Now if that answer disappoints you, I will only ask that you stick with me. If verbal though we all are, poetry was an add-on in High School, a linguistic burden in college, and another complex system of signs and symbols to learn in graduate school—let me quickly explain that by poetry I mean words and phrases, even whole narrative stories that point beyond themselves to the depth of human experience. I believe that poetry is scripture. I believe that scripture is poetry. I believe that poetry is the way deep truth is transmitted person to person and generation to generation. I believe that when Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth/but tell it slant” she was speaking of metaphorical truth, the poetic truth that nourishes the heart, and opens the mind, and communicates to the depths. By poetry I mean the products of the religious imagination.
First, let me say that I am keenly aware that there are many products of the imagination that are not centered in words. So if poetry seems an extraordinarily limited focus for all the possibilities of metaphorical truth that can communicate the depth—I will admit it is. But again, I want to remember where I am, and who we are, and what we do week after week after week. I know there are many different ministries represented here—and I hope you’ll bear with me if I narrow my scope and talk about words and their uses between and among us, acknowledging that the music and art and even the silences of the soul are more profound than I could speak today. But speaking I am, and so we’re going for Religious Imagination, the verbal expression of the depth of human experience.
Second, let me say that by Religious Imagination, I am not speaking only of the products of the imagination that have explicit religious references.
Consider these few lines as representative of Philip Booth’s wonderful poem, First Lesson, about teaching his daughter to swim:
Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
…lie back, and the sea will hold you.The entire poem has not one traditional religious word in it, as you will see if you read it whole. And yet it associates to deep realities beyond itself and across generations of human experience.
For a time I thought this would be enough. There are certainly enough images and stories out there to take us to the heights and depths of human experience without having to bother with traditional religious language. These poems and narratives would have to fulfill certain criteria, of course. They would have to take on associative meeting, they would have to break concrete meanings open, they would have to be relational, they would have to name experience in a way that takes us beyond ourselves, and even beyond the experience itself. Surely there is enough spoken and written in the literature of humankind to be able to speak to human experience without having to evoke a God, or think about Prayer, or use any of the words that have specifically religious associative meanings—those meanings that are so encumbered as to be almost impossible to use. Or so it seemed to me at the time.
First Lesson should be enough.
But then I heard a simple explanation about a Russian Orthodox Icon. The Priest explained that the value given the icon was in its ability to teach the people who sat with it. “They didn’t analyze it. It taught them,” he said. (“Not very American,” he added.) Being from a more plain tradition, I never pursued iconography, and have always worried about idolatry, but that simple explanation changed how I thought about the traditional words of Western religion. I couldn’t drop them. They had evoked too much for too many people, over too long a time, and I needed to stay connected to the human struggles, the human understandings they represented, if only to inform my own. The “word” God might have become concretized. The “word” God might even have died. But I could not ignore all that it represented before it was rigidified into a state of rigor mortis.
Suzanne Langer, in her book Philosophy in a New Key, was also helpful on this point. She says,
“This tendency is comprehensible enough if we consider the preeminence with which a named element holds the kaleidoscopic flow of sheer sense and feeling. For as soon as an object is denoted, it can be held, so that anything else that is experienced at the same time, instead of crowding it out, is experienced with it, in contrast or in unison or in some other way. . . A word fixes something in experience, and makes it the nucleus of memory, an available conception. Other impressions group themselves round the denoted thing and are associatively recalled when it is named“ (Langer, Philosophy in a New Key p. 100.).
Who was I, to drop these words which had meant so much to our very own spiritual ancestors, as well as generations of human seekers, even if the associations might be complex. And perhaps the word “God” wasn’t as dead as I had thought.
Interestingly, I remembered, too, that Harry Scholefield had called his Freudian analysis, “The relentless practice of association.” He said that whatever associated to the topic at hand in analysis, had to be faced. It was a difficult practice, he said. And one that took years to fully embrace.
Later in his life, Harry was to move his “relentless practice of association” into his meditative times, waiting for the words of poets and scribes to associate with each other, and with his lived experiences. “Sometimes,” he said, “Walt (that would be Walt Whitman) would arrive, and have a comment or two, and then Emily (that would be Emily Dickinson) would join in.” And he said, “Sometimes I had a sense of Presence, of being encompassed about by something larger than I was in those moments, perhaps through the word of a Psalmist, and we would all have a conversation..”
Language is a relational system, Suzanne Langer says. A word, especially one of depth of experience, has many associations, and our job is to be open to those associations, because they take us deeper than we can think. Because we are not observers. We are participating in the conversation with our very lives.
The best example I know of this is by Anne Sexton, in “The Rowing Endeth” from The Awful Rowing Toward God. I can’t quote the whole here, but it starts out like this:
I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.The poet describes a card game with God as the dealer in which she holds a royal straight flush and wins but God—playing with a wildcard—also wins with five aces! You really must read the poem yourself to get it whole.
I didn’t play cards when I was a Fundamentalist, and for sure God didn’t! The God I knew, even with all His spoken and unspoken associations, concretized as He was, is broken open into a dealer who deals, not the plan for my life, but a wild card—untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love.
How could I not welcome such an intrusion into my solidified vision?
If, as Langer asserts, language is a relational system, with associations forming themselves around a more concretized concept, then it is hubris for us to even believe that we can cut out some words, and put others on the back burner, for they will find their way back into consciousness, often in surprising ways.
As Harry used to say, “They just put up a hand, saying, “Wait, I have something to say.”
What we need to do then, is to break open these concretized words, to juxtapose them with words that create cognitive dissonance. For it is in the spaces between the juxtaposition that new associations are created.
The first inkling I had of that was when we began to use the pronoun “She”—“God/She”. People laughed nervously, when they heard those words for the first time. You might not have been there—but it is true. People laughed. It was so strange. So odd.
The idea that metaphors which have suffered “misplaced concreteness” can be brought to life by simply juxtaposing them in surprising ways, is almost too simple.
It creates a cognitive dissonance in the listener that breaks them open—not to new definitions of God, or whatever element of mystery you are attempting to point toward, but to a small portion of reality that they have experienced. Remember, we’re talking about the religious existential dimension of life, not definitions. We’re talking about the products of the imagination here. We’re pointing, not positing.
Source: Part two of three, “Images for Our Lives,” Berry Street Address 2003, Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman, Senior Minister at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, Texas.
Tags: Berry Street Essay, deepening, language, Laurel Hallman, poetry, principles, spirit
