Another View 2-12

Though Carlyle Marney died some thirty years ago, my teacher’s final maxim and charge to me remains provocative: “If you do any one thing for the rest of your life, let it be an unrestrained battle to oppose, and to fight upon every front, sick religion.” Then, I was a budding seminarian. Now, in the “purgatory” of my soul’s journey, I have, with each passing year, clarity in the living out of that straightforward directive.

Under the aegis of religion, a bifurcated and marginalized language has been born. Untrue to its etymological origins, the only thing “religio” seems to bind together is one or another “cause” supporting one’s own fanatical biases. Generally, it signals a faith encumbered by propositional dogmas that stridently restrict an encompassing God to rational and therefore much-too-moralistic dualisms. If I have responded to Carlyle Marney’s dictum, it is with a continuing commitment to assist those on this journey in learning to speak an adult faith.

Recently I was asked to clarify what I meant by “language of an adult faith.” Fair enough! I recall poet David Whyte’s line

This is the age of information.

This is the age of information.

…and one good word is bread for a thousand.

It reminds me that we live in an age of sciencism*, meaning that the rational and linear thinking processes predominate our Western methodology; this linear process can result in a simplified and sometimes reductionist way of viewing life. I find psychologist James Hillman’s message to be helpful here: “Words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak. . . A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them.” He continues by drawing an amazing parallel: “Words, like angels, are powers that have invisible power over us. . . For words act upon us as complexes and release complexes in us.” There does need to be a restorative, “re-enfleshing” of the language of our faith. The older tradition of our energized words have become trivialized, even specialized, rather than released to reach their fullness, bursting with dynamism.

So, this, as much as anything, textures my devotion to honor Marney’s challenge. Words and concepts like sin, redemption, hell, heaven, repentance, original sin, the cross, obedience, resurrection, all are filled with magnetism and energy. These and many others have become subjected to the contortions of a Western dogmatic. For too long, exclusivist rights have been given to a “narrowing” rather than an “enlarging” of these great words of faith. There is a deeper complementary structure of mystery abiding within each concept of our great Christian tradition, containing a metaphysic grounded in an “apophatic”** way of seeing language, suggesting the interior universe of Spirit.

Too many are the people who have experienced and felt the rejection of a language laden with a singular way of seeing. They are awaiting the tradition understood by our earliest forbearers of this great faith. It is time we took this tradition back, reclaiming its health, restoring it to its original preeminence. We have adapted to a restrictive and somewhat confining Puritanism born of what has been illegitimately called a “Reformation.” In fact, it was not a “re-forming” at all, it seems to me. Rather, it was the attempt to control human will through constrictors that policed human desire; and this attempt utilized language as its prison. Hence for four hundred years we have now initialed these meanings into our spiritual DNA, as though they were legitimate and first born. In fact, what we have is a bastardization of what was once a language resplendent with imagination and vision, a language that called us “up” and “out” into our truest incarnation, the image and likeness of God.

Playing golf recently with a fellow pastor of this persuasion, I observed that the two young men who were our playing partners were “full of themselves.” They were both in their early thirties, and I remarked to my friend that Narcissus remained healthy and untamed. He replied that God was looking down upon them, pointing his divine finger, warning, “I don’t like you very much.” My heart lurched, and I asked, rather might it be, that God was pointing to them saying, “I will wait until you know how much I love you, and then you will awaken to your truest beauty.” Caught aback, he finally mused, “I like that. I like it better.” He responded to the reminder that God is Love and only Love—not the judgment with which Western thinking has imbued our words.

And so it is! The language of Adult Faith is what the heart knows. The words that animate and represent God for us are alive with the spirit of love that enfolds us humans. And for the early mothers and fathers of the Church, this was the only view.

______

*sciencism – as defined by Houston Smith, differentiated from “scientism,” the latter being the quantitative eye of measurement that lends credibility to all understanding. This would be to the denouement of anything mystical or outside the realm of the rational.

**apophatic – is the negation of all positive names of God based on the affirmation that God is beyond being and thus beyond all positive knowledge, which is inherently linked to being. Another way of saying this: apophatic knowledge is negative knowledge of God; it is knowledge of God in terms of what God is not. This is opposite cataphatic knowledge, which is positive knowledge of God.