Morning in Minnesota: A Reflection on Language and Sight

I am in Northern Minnesota at a cabin sandwiched between a lake and a swamp. It is beautiful. And this morning I took a walk and wrote the following in my journal:

This is beautiful. I don't have the words to describe what I am looking at this morning. And I worry that with the lack of language, I will be unable to see all that is before me. Yesterday, Ryan talked about an article he read about a study on language. People with only one word for blue lacked the capacity to distinguish between shades of blue. They couldn't see a difference.

But, this is what I can say. I am sitting on a moss-covered log among ferns wilted with a glistening, morning dew, overlooking a swamp lined with rushes. Still, still water, without expression. So still, that things are allowed to grow on it, like a layer of dust, like doilies on a glass table.

And low-angled light cuts through the trees and illumines the underside of sleepy, morning leaves, and makes visible the rise of misty spirits that walk the bog.

And I am still, absorbed into what I see.

So, reflection on my reflection. Our host, Tony, could have described the scene in much greater detail. The kinds of rushes, ferns, trees, algae (or whatever grows on the water). And this undoubtedly would have created a larger space of articulation, undoubtedly deepened my reflection. But with the words I had, common words, lacking any real descriptive precision, I was still able to get at what I was seeing.

My sense of fit between what I was seeing and what I wrote was enabled by metaphor, by what Ricouer calls a predicative impertinence. By employing language beyond its normal semantic field, I was able to evoke what I could not otherwise describe. This is the power of poetic structures.

One more reflection. The more I described, the more I saw. The effort to describe, the attention given to bringing to words, brought out things of which I was not immediately aware. It was, for instance, only in describing the peacefulness of the scene that the light became apparent to me.

I am committed to this practice. To a reflective attentiveness, to writing a world into view.

When the Pieces Fall Into Place Comes the Hallelujah

I've been reading Paul Ricouer off and on for several years now, and rather intensely the past few years. I found Ricouer in Brueggemann's footnotes and have sensed an importance to his work related to my own. That sense has intensified with my PhD work. My prof, Pat Keifert, studied with Ricouer (does that make me a grandson of sorts?) and he has drawn me deeper into his writings. I'm in dissertation stage, and so am about to have to say something fairly coherent about how I'm using Ricouer's work. And I'll just say that has been a daunting prospect until this week.

I'm re-reading From Text to Action and Oneself as Another this week. It's my third time through Text to Action. And this time, pages that have gone unmarked in previous readings have jumped out of the book and grabbed me by the throat. Words that were only signs marking some impenetrable world have now become active agents in a world emerging in my reading.

It's not because I'm smarter. I'm convinced of that. I'm at least aware that my mental-acuity-stamina is reduced. I used to be able to do heavy lifting brain work for the better part of a day. I have to pace myself now. I often feel limited these days, and those limitations seem not related to the amount of information I have, but the capacity to make anything useful of the deeper ends of the pool in which I find myself swimming (or drowning).

What has happened is that thing that comes with time and repetition. The forest has imposed itself on the trees. And its not because I lined out all the arguments in some kind of progression. It happened around one "aha" moment related to the importance of texts for Ricouer. I could have written the sentence, "Ricouer's contributions to phenomenology have to do with distanciation related to his notions of understanding texts." But this week that move in Ricouer, away from Dilthey and subsequently Gadamer, has allowed the scales to fall from my eyes. What once was an overwhelming data set has suddenly become an orienting picture.

This has happened to me before, and I'm sure to all of us in one way or another. But sometimes it seems like it will never come. A new world is coming at us so fast and hard that we feel mostly incompetent. This is especially true, I think, of academic or professional programs that cram a lot into a small temporal window. There's really no other way to do it, but when you're in it you feel like you're drinking from a fire hose. I know students in my grad program right now are reporting a similar sensation.

But the "aha" is faithful. It appears to those whom it has chosen. And its appearing is glorious.

Dylan on a Sunday

I've been thinking a lot about rhetoric and imagination, or maybe better forms or figures of speech and imagination. And I'm making a distinction between forms designed to foreclose and those designed to disclose. A theory, for instance, is designed to foreclose. It's primary function is to explain without remainder. A theory attempts to be a complete account of things. It's design is to orient us and settle things.

Metaphor is different. It is a way of speaking about something in new terms. It is pictoral and as such is trying to push us beyond the limits of straightforward speech. It is designed to disclose, widen and enlarge our landscape of interpretation. It is not designed to explain everything, but to leave open the possibility that there might be more to be said.

For what its worth here, the NT typically avoids the theoretical. There are, for instances, no complete theories of the atonement found anywhere in Scripture. There are, in contrast, several metaphors.

OK, Dylan. Dylan is known for his live takes in the studio. He's not interested in the perfect song. In a recent interview he talks about McCartney and others who in the studio can produce the perfect song. The problem with the perfect song, for Dylan, is that it leaves you with nowhere to go. The trick in performing the perfect song is to reproduce it in exacting detail. It is a closed structure.

Dylan sees his songs as living, breathing things. The album is a performance, a starting place. No perfect songs here. It is an open structure and further performances are variations on a theme. When I heard Dylan live, songs like "Lay, Lady, Lay," "Senor," "Ballad of a Thin Man," were very different from the original recording. The same song, undeniably. But not the same song. There's no reason to bootleg a McCartney concert, but Dylan bootlegs are revelations.

George Harrison invited Dylan to perform with him at the benefit, Concert for Bangledesh. Dylan was concerned about playing an arena and Harrison didn't know if Dylan would show up the night of the concert. Worse, Harrison didn't know that the songs they rehearsed would be played the same way they were rehearsed. And sure enough, when Dylan appeared, he played the same song they had rehearsed in a completely different time signature. Open structure. Not foreclosure, but disclosure.

Life requires both. But Ricouer and others have demonstrated that metaphor is fundamental to our making sense of things. I admit, I'm much more interested in pushing beyond the boundaries then I am drawing them.

The Preaching Imagination, 3

OK, so I wrote tomorrow's sermon this morning. It's a guest gig and with a particular assignment. And the nature of the sermon, the expectations of the moment, have pushed me away from the things I talked about in the last post. I start with the recital of a text, but follow it with a big honking story, a large structure, a big old freaking funnel. Guidelines, instincts, not laws. FWIW.

I've talked a lot about the primacy of the text in shaping the imaginative landscape of the sermon. And most of my habits in concrete sermon preparation are related to the "world" of the text. Let me explain this a bit. Paul Ricouer talks about different worlds related to texts. There is a world behind the text--the world that produced the text full of historical and cultural meanings and a concrete occasion out of which the text emerged.

There is the world before the text. This is the world of meaning made between the text and the listener. This world is the primary world for Ricouer. Once a text becomes fixed in writing, it becomes independent of the world that produced it. Meaning happens in front of the text regardless of the intention of the original author, according to Ricouer. I take Ricouer's point here, though I am more optimistic about the lingering impact of authorial intention. I happen to think, however, that our best window into authorial intention doesn't come from reconstructing the exact historical circumstance, most of which is lost to us, but through attending to Ricouer's third world--the world of the text.

A text has a certain stubbornness to it. It can't mean anything. It can mean things never intended by the author, but its range of meanings are limited to an extent by the actual words and movement of the text. The text does something. It doesn't just lie there waiting for us to read whatever meanings we want into the text. It works on us. It zigs when we would zag. It has its own weather system. We can read in this world thinly, letting bare impressions give permission to take the sermon in whatever direction we care to. Or we can read thickly in the world imagined by the text.

This is more than asking what particular words mean. This is to ask,"what is this text trying to do?" This is a question of power. It is a question of rhetoric, not just literary device. This text has an interest. What is it interested in doing? And the next question is immediately, "what interests are being denied here?"

Take for instance, Genesis 1. This text is doing something, and it doesn't appear to be setting forth an exacting scientific account of the world we live in. It's giving us a sense that the good order we live in and count on is the product of God's word. And to say this is to say that creation is not the product of violence, of warring forces, gods and demi-gods, but of God's good intentions for all the created order. This is the world imagined by the text. And I want to read as thickly as I can in that world.

But there's another thick reading that makes for a good sermon. The sermon is after all, not simply a reading of the text. The sermon is God's word today. The sermon is part of the ecology of God's continuing word. It is supposed to say something about what God's word might be for this moment. So, there needs to be a thick reading of this moment as well. That requires a disciplined life as well.

So, a few commitments I have along these lines.

I read the NYTimes every day as a spiritual practice. I read it knowing full well its interests beyond simply reporting the news. This is part of what makes it valuable. It takes a stance in relation to the world--often one I appreciate, often one I resist. But beyond stance, it leads me into lives beyond my own. I pray for empathy. And I look for what drives people. What interests predominate our world of action?

I try to keep a biography going at all times, for many of the same reasons. I don't want my life to be the only one the sermon passes through. I've read biographies of Mandela, John Adams, Hannah Arendt, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the UN commander in Rwanda, Emily Dickinson, the list could go on. I rarely quote in my sermons from any of these sources. (I'm not sure I've ever quoted Dylan in a sermon). This is part of rending the world thickly. I'm not mining for illustrations. I'm trying to figure out what people think they are up to.

I listen to music. I do this because this is the place where our poets show up today. What is the world imagined by Springsteen? by Dylan? by Green Day? I also watch movies and read the occasional novel. These are the places where "worlds" are constructed, where interests appear. Here's the deal. Most of the people who listen to sermons have more allegiance to the world imagined by Avatar than they do the world imagined in Exodus. I'm not looking for straw men to beat down. I want the partnership of others who are imagining worlds so that one I invite others into on Sunday is thickly construed, not a cliche, a real conversation about what it is we are up to in God's world.

And I journal. I carry with me a moleskine nearly everywhere I go and I take notes. Writing, composing, observing, is so important in developing a voice. And voice is the most powerful part of the sermon from the point of view of the preacher. Voice is the place of authenticity and conviction. Voice is more than style. Voice is embodiment. I want to hear a preacher's voice, not their artistic productions.

Next time, a hermeneutics of thickness.